“Ho, Titus! Is it thus in a strange land that you pass by your oldest friend?” He who was thus addressed started, looked up, and, recognizing the speaker, dropped as if by magic his melancholy air, and advanced with smiling face and extended hand. “By the gods, ’tis Crispus,” he cried in a tone of genuine delight. “Now doth Fortune favor me. To think of meeting you in this barbarian province, a thousand miles from our Sabine farms! Whither are you bound? For Cæsarea? Then will I return with you.” Titus Flavius, destined in course of time to attain the imperial purple, was the senior of Crispus by one year: keen of eye, and with an aquiline nose, he looked every inch the soldier that he was, in spite of his perfumed and fashionable garb. A certain ruddiness of features showed him to be likewise a sort of “Antony, that revels long o’ nights.” “What do _you_ in this Jewish land?” asked Crispus. “Rejoice at my presence here, for ’tis proof that I am restored to Nero’s favor.” “I did not know that you had lost it.” “What? Have you not heard that when Nero--what a delightful buffoon he is, to be sure!--was singing on the stage at Corinth, my sire Vespasian was so little appreciative of good music as actually to yawn, and even to fall asleep and snore, with the result that not only _Pater nocens_ but even _Filius innocens_ was forbidden to appear in the imperial presence.” “I marvel that you did not both lose your heads.” “So do I. Though banished, however, I did not lose heart, but in the spirit of a true courtier I sacrificed every day to Nero’s heavenly voice; and, on learning this (for I took good care it should reach his ears!), he recalled me to court, and marked his approval of my piety by sending me on a mission to Cæsarea.” “A mission? Of what nature?” “Why, you doubtless know that yon fair city of Cæsarea is peopled both with Greeks and Jews, each claiming precedency of the other. Let procurator Florus post up an edict beginning, ‘To the Greeks and Jews of Cæsarea,’ and the Jewish mob will tear it down. Let him word it, ‘To the Jews and Greeks,’ and the Greeks will not suffer it to remain up. The Greek high priest of Jupiter demands that on state occasions he shall sit upon the right hand of the procurator; the high priest of the Jews, when he comes to Cæsarea, claims the same privilege. The Greeks wish their language to be used in the law-courts to the exclusion of our own stately Latin--there’s taste for you! the Jews clamor for their own tongue. This feud is productive of continual rioting and bloodshed. Therefore Nero, appealed to by deputies from both factions, hath pronounced his decree, dispatching it from Greece by my hand.” “And in whose favor hath Cæsar decided?”