"Yes," she continued implacably; "you are sick, you are all too weak for your wisdom! That is your penalty, Hellenists of too late a day. You have strength neither for good nor for evil. You are neither day nor night, nor life nor death; your heart wavers, here and there. You have left one bank, and cannot reach the other. You believe, and you do not believe. You betray yourselves, you hesitate; you will, and you do not will, because you do not know on what to set your will. They alone are strong who, seeing one truth, are blind to all other. They will conquer us--us who are wise and weak!" Julian raised his head with an effort, as if waking from some evil dream, and said-- "You are unjust, Arsinoë. My soul does not know fear, nor my will weakness. The forces of destiny are leading me. If it is written that I shall die too soon--and I know it is so--my death shall not be unworthy of the sight of the gods. Farewell. I bear you no anger, because now to me you are as one dead!" IX Above the marble portico of the guest-house of Apollo, built for the poor, for pilgrims and the disabled, ran these letters in Homeric Greek along the pediment: "_Strangers and beggars are all sent by Zeus, And dear to them is the little we give._"[11] [11] _Odyssey_, xiv. 57, 58. The Emperor went into the inner court. A graceful Ionic colonnade ran round it. The hospice had formerly been a palæstra or wrestling-ground. It was a soft and sunny afternoon, before sunset, but a heavy atmosphere came to the portico from the inner rooms. There, massed together, children and old men were crawling about, Christians and Pagans, the sound and the sick; folk disabled, deformed, enfeebled, dropsical, consumptive; folk bearing on their faces the stamp of every vice and every form of suffering. A half-naked old woman, with a tanned skin like the colour of dead leaves, was rubbing her sore, pockmarked back against the pure marble of a pillar. In the middle of the court stood a statue of the Pythian Apollo, bow in hand, quiver on shoulder. At the foot of the statue was seated a wrinkled monster who seemed neither young nor old. His arms were huddled round his knees, his head rested on one side; and swinging himself from right to left with a stupid air, he kept declaiming in a monotone-- "Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have mercy upon us, the lost, lost, lost!" At last the principal inspector, Marcus Ausonius, appeared, pale and trembling-- "Most wise and merciful Cæsar, will you not deign to come into my house? The atmosphere is hurtful here ... there are contagious maladies...." "No, I am not afraid. Are you the inspector?" Ausonius, keeping in his breath in order not to breathe the vitiated air, bowed low. "Are bread and wine distributed every day?" "Yes, as you have ordered, divine Augustus...." "What filth!" "They are Galileans. To wash, is for them a sin. It's impossible to make them take baths."