Character: Priscus

This is the man: if you can't be first, he is willing to be content with what he last.

It is even surprising how passionately some individuals, allegedly alien to everything, eager to enlist the support of those in power. Under the feigned contempt for authority they conceal a desire to be closer to those who it is clothed.

We, the residents of Athens, still proud to see things for what they really are. If we show the stone, we see the stone, not the Universe.

Poor Julian, like many of our contemporaries, wanted to believe that human life is so incomparably more than it really means. The disease is extremely characteristic of our epoch: we do not want to accept the finiteness of our existence that we are ready to go at all, believe any magic tricks, if only to delay the realization of the bitter secret truth that in the end we are waiting for oblivion.