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L'ENVOI 575
fine presence, of dignified yet winning demeanour, endowed
with great personal strength and tenacious memory, eloquent,
poetic, accomplished, a splendid rider, a fine swordsman, a
patient and skilful general, a soldier of unflinching personal
bravery. Josephus is constantly telling us of his firmness, his
pity, his stern discipline, his splendid bravery. Again and
again he exposed his person as freely as the commonest soldier
in his ranks. Again and again he extricated himself from
personal peril, and his legions from imminent defeat, with a
strength which was unequalled, and a prowess which was
contagious. At the siege of Jerusalem he constantly rode
near the walls, and on one occasion shot down twelve of its
defenders with twelve consecutive arrows. Amid all his heroic
labours and anxious responsibilities he lost none of the fascination
of his youth. When he left the Province to visit his
father, the soldiers, who had already saluted him Emperor,
demanded with supplications, and almost with threats, that he
would either stay or take them with him. Unjustly suspected
of a disloyal intention to found for himself an Eastern kingdom,
he hurried to Rhegium, and thence to Puteoli with the
utmost possible speed and when he reached
;
Rome, bursting
into his father's presence, as though to confute the calumny, he
'
embraced him with the touching cry, / have come, myfather,
I have come ! He '
did not escape the sins and temptations of
his youth, and his passionate love for Berenice, which she as
passionately returned, involved him in discredit. But while
he was still the support of his father's throne, he gave proofs
of his faithfulness and self-control, and if he had been guilty
of the faults which scandal charges upon him, the change
which came over him when he was summoned to the purple
was greater than the traditional change of our own hero-king,
Henry V. As an Emperor, no vice was visible in him, but
many supreme virtues. Deeply as he was attached to Berenice,
he dismissed her from the city because Rome condemned
an amour which would have been held venial and almost innocent
in a Nero or a Domitian. He became chaste and selfcontrolled,
full of munificence, entirely free from avarice.
Gracious and generous to all, he acted on the rule ' that no one
should leave the Emperor's presence with a gloomy brow.' His
'
famous sayiug, Friends, I have lost a day,' was spoken when,
at supper-time, he was unable to recall a favour conferred on