Toward sunset a group of empty curricles and chariots came and stood before a certain house, the last in the Jewish district, facing the Gentile environs of the water-front. Had any cared to remark, it might have been observed that this house could be reached from the alabarch's by abandoned passages and private walks, a series of Jewish courts and stable-yards, without exposing any who went that way to the Gentile eye. After a while, a body of Roman guards emerged from nowhere and arrayed themselves alongside the vehicles. Presently, groups of slaves bearing burdens, followed by a party of high-class Egyptians, mounted the chariots and without hesitation the procession took up movement toward the harbor. But an angle in the streets brought them upon the Gymnasium. It was built in a square of sufficient size to receive the crowds that usually attended the contests of the athletae, and there thousands were assembled to do Alexandrian honor to a Jew. The daylight was still on the streets, and Marsyas, in the guise of a charioteer, driving the horses of the foremost car, observed that each of the mass was busy with his own noise, and apparently unsuspecting the coming of Agrippa. So he signed to the centurion in charge of the praetorian squad to make way with as little ostentation as possible. At the porch before the Gymnasium, the crowd was most packed, loudest and most entertained. A naked, deformed, apish figure stood on a pedestal from which a statue had fallen and had not been replaced. A wreath of rushes had been twisted about the degenerate forehead, a strip of matting had been bound with a tow-cord about his middle; in his hand was a stalk of papyrus with the head broken and hanging down. On their knees about the base of the plinth were half a score of youths from the Gymnasium, groaning in tragic chorus, the single Syriac word: "_Maris_! _Maris_! Lord! Lord!" Loudly the crowd roared its part, with voices raucous and hoarse from much abuse: "Hail, Agrippa! King of the Jews!" Agrippa's chariot, following the way the centurion had quietly opened through the crowd, attracted little attention and the half-light of the twilight did not reveal his features, which he had been led further to conceal by an Egyptian cowl. A long white kamis covered his dress. But his eyes fell upon the idiot; he caught the mockery and its meaning from the crowd. A quiver of rage ran through his frame. Laying hold of the Egyptian smock, he tore it off and threw it fairly into the faces of those nearest him; the white cowl followed, and he stood forth like a new-risen sun in a tissue of silver, mantled with purple, his fillet replaced by a tarboosh sewn with immense gems. Defiance and insult and daring could not have been embodied in a more effective act. The continuous tumult burst into a yell of fury. In a twinkling his chariot was hemmed in and blocked and the raving rabble reached out to lay hands on him.