Great Lion of God by Taylor Caldwell

much to ask to be comprehended, even if one disagreed with him. Saul, Saul, thought Aristo the Greek, the world will not edify you nor will it receive you kindly.
    Men like Saul might evoke a holocaust, but they were usually devoured with it. Aristo hoped this would not happen to Saul, though he had his fears. Therefore, he tried to temper that vociferous disposition, to quiet the rushing assaults of speech when they became too bursting, to instill in Saul that golden mien which was the mark of a cultivated man. The world was full of timid men; they did not like boldness in others, for it seemed to threaten them. In particular they hated and feared men who demanded that they pursue an argument logically to its conclusion, and use reason.
    It was into this world, thought Aristo with unusual sorrow, that this Jewish Hector had been born, all passion but no baseness, all honor but no malevolence, all duty—alas—but no frivolity. The world would not love him, therefore the gods must, and that is more dangerous.
    “The figs are very ripe and sweet, Aristo,” said Saul, noticing, with that sharp clarity of eye for which he was distinguished, the mournful expression on his tutor’s antic face. “Eat this, which is the largest and is covered with its own honey.” He put the fig into Aristo’s fingers, and Aristo ate it abstractedly.
    “Pigs,” said a laughing voice near them as they ate under the striped awnings. They looked up to see the young girl who had stood on the bridge. She smiled at them teasingly and threw back the mass of her golden hair, in which the sunlight danced. Her eyes, almost as golden, mocked their male gorging of the fruit. Her exceedingly pretty face, fair as a lily, and as translucent, was rosy from the heat of the day, and her pert nose was burned. Her eyes were hardly less golden than her hair and her pretty mouth was always smiling, or, if a grave thought flitted across her mind, the expression of her lips might change to seriousness, which, however, appeared to be instantly about to depart. A year younger than her brother, Saul, and only thirteen, she was taller and her breasts were delicately nubile under the thin stuff of her short green tunic. While Saul was as restless as a young bull, Sephorah was as restless as a flower in a summer breeze.
    She was already espoused to her cousin, Ezekiel, in Jerusalem, and would marry him on her fourteenth birthday, for she had reached puberty six months ago.
    “That tunic,” said Saul, “is lewd and shameless, for one of your age, an espoused woman, a modest Jewish maiden.”
    The girl glanced down at her long fair legs below the hem of the tunic. “Bah,” she said. “Who is concerned with modesty in this garden? The day is hot, too hot even for a chiton.” Her legs gleamed like marble touched by the sun. She bounced under the awning and seized a citron and tore off its skin and sank her white teeth into the pulp. Her merry eyes surveyed them. The juice of the fruit ran down her chin and she licked at it with her red tongue.
    “I am thinking of not marrying Ezekiel,” she said, and thrust her hand again between Aristo and Saul and took a plum. She pretended to study it. Her Greek accent was pure and sweet, for Aristo had taught her, himself, whereas her father had taught her Aramaic, and enough Hebrew as was prudent to teach a girl.
    It was only when looking at Sephorah that Saul’s eyes lost their metallic gleam and became almost soft. But he spoke disapprovingly. “It is not fitting for a maiden your age to display herself in a boy’s tunic. Where is our mother, that she permits this?”
    “It is not a boy’s tunic,” said Sephorah. “It is mine, of a year ago. My legs became longer.” She spat out the seed of the plum. Her feet moved to inaudible music. “I think I am really a nymph,” she said.
    While Saul had been taught much of the Greek gods by Aristo, during their classical studies, he did not consider it proper that his sister