The people have not yet learned not to be astonished; they are perpetually in amazement.

When I go out driving--" "Your runners ought to fly before you with roses in their hair and wings on their shoulders like Cupids." "In honor of the Alexandrian ladies ?" "As if the Roman ladies in Rome, and the fair Greeks at Athens," interrupted Balbilla.
"The praetor's runners go faster than Parthian horses," cried the Empress's chamberlain.

"He has named them after the winds." "As they deserve," added Verus "Come, Titianus." He laid his hand in a confidential manner on the arm of the prefect, to whom he was related; and as they went towards Sabina he whispered in his ear: "I can keep her waiting as if I were the Emperor." Favorinus who had been engaged in talk with Ptolemaeus, the astronomer, Apollonius, and the philosopher and poet Pancrates in another part of the hall, looked after the two men and said: "A handsome couple.

One the personification of imperial and dignified Rome; the other with his Hermes-like figure." "The other"-- interrupted the philologist with stern displeasure, "the other is the very incarnation of the haughtiness, the luxury pushed to insanity, and the infamous depravity of the metropolis.

That dissipated ladies-man." "I will not defend his character," said Favorinus in his pleasant voice, and with an elegance in his pronunciation of Greek which delighted even the grammarian.