The Procurator of Judea

Aelius Lamia, born in Italy of illustrious parents, had not yet put off the patrician's white toga with the purple stripe when he went to Athens to study philosophy there in the schools. He afterwards set up in Rome and, in his house in the Exquiliae, led the life of a voluptuary amid debauched youths. But, after having been accused of being in an illegitimate relationship with Lepida, the wife of a consul, Sulpicius Quirinus, and when he was found guilty, he was exiled by Tiberius Caesar. He was then in his twenty-fourth year. For the eighteen years his exile lasted he wandered over Syria, Palestine, Cappadocia and Armenia, staying for long periods in Antioch, Caesarea Maritima and Jerusalem. When, after the death of Tiberius, Caius Julius was raised to the imperial purple, Lamia was allowed to return to Rome. He even recovered a part of his wealth. His woes had made him wise. He avoided all dealings with free-born women, did not intrigue for public office, kept away from marks of favour and lived hidden in his house in the Exquiliae. Putting into writing the noteworthy things he had seen in his far-off travels, he was creating, he said, from his past sufferings, a diversion for the hours he had these days at his disposal. In the midst of these serene labours, and while he was assiduously thinking on the works of Epicurus, he saw, with a modicum of surprise and a certain amount of sadness, old age creeping up on him. In his sixty-second year, tormented by a quite inconvenient cold, he went to take the waters at Baiae. This shore, formerly dear to common kingfishers, was at that time frequented by wealthy, pleasure-seeking Romans. For a week Lamia had been living alone and friendless in their brilliant company, when, one day, after dinner, feeling fit, he took it into his head to climb the hills which, covered with vines like devotees of Bacchus, overlook the waves of the sea. Having reached the summit, he sat down at the side of a path beneath a terebinth, and allowed his gaze to wander over the beautiful landscape. On his left the Phlegraean Fields, pallid and bare, stretched out as far as the ruins of Cumae. On his right Cape Misenus dug its sharp spur into the Tyrrhenian Sea. At his feet, to the west, the rich town of Baiae, hugging the shoreline's graceful curve, displayed its gardens, its villas peopled with statues, its porticos and its marble terraces on the edge of the blue sea in which dolphins played. In front of him, on the other side of the gulf, on the Campanian coast, gilded by the sun that was already low in the sky, shone the temples, crowned by the bay trees of the Pausilipon, and, on the far horizon, Vesuvius spluttered and laughed. Lamia pulled from a fold of his toga a roll containing the Treatise on Nature of Epicurus, stretched out on the ground and started to read. But the cries of a slave warned him to get up to make way for a litter that was coming up the narrow path through the vines. As the open litter came nearer, Lamia saw, stretched out on the cushions, a hugely fat old man who, head in hand, looked out with an eye both sombre and proud. His aquiline nose came down to his lips, made tight by a prominent chin and powerful jaws.