And at that word “fire,” Berenice looked at Crispus and trembled. CHAPTER X THE VENGEANCE OF FLORUS Florus was in Jerusalem, and--sinister omen!--an armed legion with him. Following fast upon the dispatch of his letter demanding the seventeen talents, he had taken up his abode in the old palace erected by Herod the Great upon Mount Zion. This, as being the usual residence of the procurators while at Jerusalem, had received the Roman name of Prætorium. Its two colossal wings of white marble, the Cæsareum and the Agrippeum, named respectively after Augustus and his great minister, were united by a long terrace, which, from its tesselated flooring, was called by the Romans the Pavement, but by the Jews Gabbatha, or the Elevation. On the morning after the arrival of Florus, a vast concourse of Jewish citizens assembled in front of this terrace when it became known that the procurator had summoned the members of the Sanhedrim thither for the purpose of interrogating them as to the riot that had taken place three days previously. Among those who came was the crafty Sadducean priest Ananias, who hoped, by reason of his private friendship with Florus, to dispose that tyrant to pacific measures. Beside him, glooming within himself, was his eldest son, the fierce, dark-browed Eleazar, captain of the temple, whose wrath was scarcely to be restrained by the whispered admonitions of his more politic father. Florus, disposed for reasons of his own to receive the Sanhedrim in the open air, had given orders for his curule chair to be brought forth, and set down upon the Pavement midway between the two wings. In the rear of this elevated tribunal and along its whole length glittered the brazen bucklers and crested helmets of the legionaries; they flanked the walls of the two wings likewise, so that the whole military force formed the three sides of a rectangle, the fourth being open to the view of the public. These troops were the Twentieth Legion, a force drawn, not like Rufus’ Italic Cohort, from native Romans, but from the dregs of the Syrian populace who were forced to a military service from which the Jew, by reason of his religion, was exempt. Hence the feeling of these troops towards the Jewish nation was one of fierce hatred, a hatred that had often shown itself in deeds of blood. Let Florus give but the word and they would not hesitate to massacre every man, woman, and child before the tribunal. On this particular morning, as they stood awaiting the coming of the procurator, there was in their manner something so sinister and expectant that a secret misgiving, a sense as of tragedy to come, seized upon many of the Sanhedrim. Florus appeared at last, and contemptuously ignoring the fawning smiles of Ananias stalked to the curule chair, dark, haughty, frowning.