Study the Jewish faith and discover what this hope is founded upon." Then he turned quickly and went away.
This "little matter" counted much with the shrewd emperor.

Kings were his puppets, and if there were to be a new one he must, indeed, consider what to do with him.

Yet he had shame of his interest in "that foolish gossip" of an alien race.

Therefore he put it only as a trifling after-thought.

But he had a way of talking with his eyes, and the alert youth read them well.
That elation of the young lover now had its boundary of thoughtfulness.
Going down the Palatine, he was also descending his hill of happiness.
Below him, in the Forum, he could see the golden mile-stone of Augustus, now like a pillar of fire in the sunlight; he could see the beginning of those many roads radiating from it to far peripheries of the empire.