John William Waterhouse Hylas and the Nymphs paintingJohn William Waterhouse Waterhouse Ophelia paintingLeonardo da Vinci St John in the Wilderness painting
posts in the East, or returning from there, always made a point of turning aside in their course and paying him their respects. But he insisted that he was merely a private citizen and deprecated any public honours paid to him. He usually dispensed with his official escort of yeomen. Only once did he exercise the judicial powers that his Protectorship carried with it: he arrested and summarily condemned to a month in gaol a young Greek who, in a grammatical debate where he was acting as chairman, tried to defy his authority as such. He kept himself in good condition by riding and taking part in the sports at the gymnasium, and was in close touch with affairs at Rome- he had monthly newsletters from Livia. Besides his house in the island capital he owned a small villa some distance from it, built on a lofty promontory overlooking the sea. There was a secret path to it up the cliff, by which a trusted freedman of his, a man of great physical strength, used to conduct the disreputable characters-prostitutes, pathics, fortune-tellers and magicians-with whom he customarily passed his evenings. It is said that very often there creatures, if they had
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