Flavian indeed was a creature who changed much with the changes of the passing light and shade about him, and was brilliant enough under the early sunshine in [50] school next morning.
Of all that little world of more or less gifted youth, surely the centre was this lad of servile birth.

Prince of the school, he had gained an easy dominion over the old Greek master by the fascination of his parts, and over his fellow-scholars by the figure he bore.

He wore already the manly dress; and standing there in class, as he displayed his wonderful quickness in reckoning, or his taste in declaiming Homer, he was like a carved figure in motion, thought Marius, but with that indescribable gleam upon it which the words of Homer actually suggested, as perceptible on the visible forms of the gods--hoia theous epenenothen aien eontas.+ A story hung by him, a story which his comrades acutely connected with his habitual air of somewhat peevish pride.

Two points were held to be clear amid its general vagueness--a rich stranger paid his schooling, and he was himself very poor, though there was an attractive piquancy in the poverty of Flavian which in a scholar of another figure might have been despised.

Over Marius too his dominion was entire.