How beautifully painted is that parting of Achilles and Briseis!--what a
style!--what heads!--what a-hem!'
'Praise from Pansa is indeed valuable on such subjects,' said Clodius,
gravely. 'Why, the paintings on his walls!--Ah! there is, indeed, the
hand of a Zeuxis!'
'You flatter me, my Clodius; indeed you do,' quoth the aedile, who was
celebrated through Pompeii for having the worst paintings in the world;
for he was patriotic, and patronized none but Pompeians. 'You flatter
me; but there is something pretty--AEdepol, yes--in the colors, to say
nothing of the design--and then for the kitchen, my friends--ah! that
was all my fancy.'
'What is the design?' said Glaucus. 'I have not yet seen your kitchen,
though I have often witnessed the excellence of its cheer.'
'A cook, my Athenian--a cook sacrificing the trophies of his skill on
the altar of Vesta, with a beautiful muraena (taken from the life) on a
spit at a distance--there is some invention there!'
At that instant the slaves appeared, bearing a tray covered with the
first preparative initia of the feast. Amidst delicious figs, fresh
herbs strewed with snow, anchovies, and eggs, were ranged small cups of
diluted wine sparingly mixed with honey. As these were placed on the
table, young slaves bore round to each of the five guests (for there
were no more) the silver basin of perfumed water, and napkins edged with
a purple fringe. But the aedile ostentatiously drew forth his own
napkin, which was not, indeed, of so fine a linen, but in which the
fringe was twice as broad, and wiped his hands with the parade of a man
who felt he was calling for admiration.
'A splendid nappa that of yours,' said Clodius; 'why, the fringe is as
broad as a girdle!'
'A trifle, my Clodius: a trifle! They tell me this stripe is the latest
fashion at Rome; but Glaucus attends to these things more than I.'
'Be propitious, O Bacchus!' said Glaucus, inclining reverentially to a
beautiful image of the god placed in the centre of the table, at the
corners of which stood the Lares and the salt-holders. The guests
followed the prayer, and then, sprinkling the wine on the table, they
performed the wonted libation.
This over, the convivialists reclined themselves on the couches, and the
business of the hour commenced.
'May this cup be my last!' said the young Sallust, as the table, cleared
of its first stimulants, was now loaded with the substantial part of the
entertainment, and the ministering slave poured forth to him a brimming
cyathus--'May this cup be my last, but it is the best wine I have drunk
at Pompeii!'
'Bring hither the amphora,' said Glaucus, 'and read its date and its
character.'
The slave hastened to inform the party that the scroll fastened to the
cork betokened its birth from Chios, and its age a ripe fifty years.
'How deliciously the snow has cooled it!' said Pansa. 'It is just
enough.'
'It is like the experience of a man who has cooled his pleasures
sufficiently to give them a double zest,' exclaimed Sallust.
'It is like a woman's "No",' added Glaucus: 'it cools, but to inflame
the more.'
'When is our next wild-beast fight?' said Clodius to Pansa.
'It stands fixed for the ninth ide of August,' answered Pansa: 'on the
day after the Vulcanalia--we have a most lovely young lion for the
occasion.'
'Whom shall we get for him to eat?' asked Clodius. 'Alas! there is a
great scarcity of criminals. You must positively find some innocent or
other to condemn to the lion, Pansa!'
'Indeed I have thought very seriously about it of late,' replied the
aedile, gravely. 'It was a most infamous law that which forbade us to
send our own slaves to the wild beasts. Not to let us do what we like
with our own, that's what I call an infringement on property itself.'
'Not so in the good old days of the Republic,' sighed Sallust.
'And then this pretended mercy to the slaves is such a disappointment to
the poor people. How they do love to see a good tough battle between a
man and a lion; and all this innocent pleasure they may lose (if the
gods don't send us a good criminal soon) from this cursed law!'
'What can be worse policy,' said Clodius, sententiously, 'than to
interfere with the manly amusements of the people?'
'Well thank Jupiter and the Fates! we have no Nero at present,' said
Sallust.
'He was, indeed, a tyrant; he shut up our amphitheatre for ten years.'
'I wonder it did not create a rebellion,' said Sallust.
'It very nearly did,' returned Pansa, with his mouth full of wild boar.
Here the conversation was interrupted for a moment by a flourish of
flutes, and two slaves entered with a single dish.
'Ah, what delicacy hast thou in store for us now, my Glaucus?' cried the
young Sallust, with sparkling eyes.
Sallust was only twenty-four, but he had no pleasure in life like
eating--perhaps he had exhausted all the others: yet had he some talent,
and an excellent heart--as far as it went.
'I know its face, by Pollux!' cried Pansa. 'It is an Ambracian Kid. Ho
(snapping his fingers, a usual signal to the slaves) we must prepare a
new libation in honour to the new-comer.'
'I had hoped said Glaucus, in a melancholy tone, 'to have procured you
some oysters from Britain; but the winds that were so cruel to Caesar
have forbid us the oysters.'
'Are they in truth so delicious?' asked Lepidus, loosening to a yet more
luxurious ease his ungirdled tunic.
'Why, in truth, I suspect it is the distance that gives the flavor; they
want the richness of the Brundusium oyster. But, at Rome, no supper is
complete without them.'
'The poor Britons! There is some good in them after all,' said Sallust.
'They produce an oyster.'
'I wish they would produce us a gladiator,' said the aedile, whose
provident mind was musing over the wants of the amphitheatre.
'By Pallas!' cried Glaucus, as his favorite slave crowned his streaming
locks with a new chaplet, 'I love these wild spectacles well enough when
beast fights beast; but when a man, one with bones and blood like ours,
is coldly put on the arena, and torn limb from limb, the interest is too
horrid: I sicken--I gasp for breath--I long to rush and defend him. The
yells of the populace seem to me more dire than the voices of the Furies
chasing Orestes. I rejoice that there is so little chance of that
bloody exhibition for our next show!'
The aedile shrugged his shoulders. The young Sallust, who was thought
the best-natured man in Pompeii, stared in surprise. The graceful
Lepidus, who rarely spoke for fear of disturbing his features,
ejaculated 'Hercle!' The parasite Clodius muttered 'AEdepol!' and the
sixth banqueter, who was the umbra of Clodius, and whose duty it was to
echo his richer friend, when he could not praise him--the parasite of a
parasite--muttered also 'AEdepol!'
'Well, you Italians are used to these spectacles; we Greeks are more
merciful. Ah, shade of Pindar!--the rapture of a true Grecian game--the
emulation of man against man--the generous strife--the half-mournful
triumph--so proud to contend with a noble foe, so sad to see him
overcome! But ye understand me not.'
'The kid is excellent,' said Sallust. The slave, whose duty it was to
carve, and who valued himself on his science, had just performed that
office on the kid to the sound of music, his knife keeping time,
beginning with a low tenor and accomplishing the arduous feat amidst a
magnificent diapason.
'Your cook is, of course, from Sicily?' said Pansa.
'Yes, of Syracuse.'
'I will play you for him,' said Clodius. 'We will have a game between
the courses.'
'Better that sort of game, certainly, than a beast fight; but I cannot
stake my Sicilian--you have nothing so precious to stake me in return.'
'My Phillida--my beautiful dancing-girl!'
'I never buy women,' said the Greek, carelessly rearranging his chaplet.
The musicians, who were stationed in the portico without, had commenced
their office with the kid; they now directed the melody into a more
soft, a more gay, yet it may be a more intellectual strain; and they
chanted that song of Horace beginning 'Persicos odi', etc., so
impossible to translate, and which they imagined applicable to a feast
that, effeminate as it seems to us, was simple enough for the gorgeous
revelry of the time. We are witnessing the domestic, and not the
princely feast--the entertainment of a gentleman, not an emperor or a
senator.
'Ah, good old Horace!' said Sallust, compassionately; 'he sang well of
feasts and girls, but not like our modern poets.'
'The immortal Fulvius, for instance,' said Clodius.
'Ah, Fulvius, the immortal!' said the umbra.
'And Spuraena; and Caius Mutius, who wrote three epics in a year--could
Horace do that, or Virgil either said Lepidus. 'Those old poets all
fell into the mistake of copying sculpture instead of painting.
Simplicity and repose--that was their notion; but we moderns have fire,
and passion, and energy--we never sleep, we imitate the colors of
painting, its life, and its action. Immortal Fulvius!'
'By the way,' said Sallust, 'have you seen the new ode by Spuraena, in
honour of our Egyptian Isis? It is magnificent--the true religious
fervor.'
'Isis seems a favorite divinity at Pompeii,' said Glaucus.
'Yes!' said Pansa, 'she is exceedingly in repute just at this moment;
her statue has been uttering the most remarkable oracles. I am not
superstitious, but I must confess that she has more than once assisted
me materially in my magistracy with her advice. Her priests are so
pious, too! none of your gay, none of your proud, ministers of Jupiter
and Fortune: they walk barefoot, eat no meat, and pass the greater part
of the night in solitary devotion!'
'An example to our other priesthoods, indeed!--Jupiter's temple wants
reforming sadly,' said Lepidus, who was a great reformer for all but
himself.
'They say that Arbaces the Egyptian has imparted some most solemn
mysteries to the priests of Isis,' observed Sallust. 'He boasts his
descent from the race of Rameses, and declares that in his family the
secrets of remotest antiquity are treasured.'
'He certainly possesses the gift of the evil eye,' said Clodius. 'If I
ever come upon that Medusa front without the previous charm, I am sure
to lose a favorite horse, or throw the canes nine times running.'
'The last would be indeed a miracle!' said Sallust, gravely.
'How mean you, Sallust?' returned the gamester, with a flushed brow.
'I mean, what you would leave me if I played often with you; and that
is--nothing.'
Clodius answered only by a smile of disdain.
'If Arbaces were not so rich,' said Pansa, with a stately air, 'I should
stretch my authority a little, and inquire into the truth of the report
which calls him an astrologer and a sorcerer. Agrippa, when aedile of
Rome, banished all such terrible citizens. But a rich man--it is the
duty of an aedile to protect the rich!'
'What think you of this new sect, which I am told has even a few
proselytes in Pompeii, these followers of the Hebrew God--Christus?'
'Oh, mere speculative visionaries,' said Clodius; 'they have not a
single gentleman amongst them; their proselytes are poor, insignificant,
ignorant people!'
'Who ought, however, to be crucified for their blasphemy,' said Pansa,
with vehemence; 'they deny Venus and Jove! Nazarene is but another name
for atheist. Let me catch them--that's all.'
The second course was gone--the feasters fell back on their
couches--there was a pause while they listened to the soft voices of the
South, and the music of the Arcadian reed. Glaucus was the most rapt
and the least inclined to break the silence, but Clodius began already
to think that they wasted time.
'Bene vobis! (Your health!) my Glaucus,' said he, quaffing a cup to each
letter of the Greek's name, with the ease of the practised drinker.
'Will you not be avenged on your ill-fortune of yesterday? See, the dice
court us.'
'As you will,' said Glaucus.
'The dice in summer, and I an aedile!' said Pansa, magisterially; 'it is
against all law.'
'Not in your presence, grave Pansa,' returned Clodius, rattling the dice
in a long box; 'your presence restrains all license: it is not the
thing, but the excess of the thing, that hurts.'
'What wisdom!' muttered the umbra.
'Well, I will look another way,' said the aedile.
'Not yet, good Pansa; let us wait till we have supped,' said Glaucus.
Clodius reluctantly yielded, concealing his vexation with a yawn.
'He gapes to devour the gold,' whispered Lepidus to Sallust, in a
quotation from the Aulularia of Plautus.
'Ah! how well I know these polypi, who hold all they touch,' answered
Sallust, in the same tone, and out of the same play.
The third course, consisting of a variety of fruits, pistachio nuts,
sweetmeats, tarts, and confectionery tortured into a thousand fantastic
and airy shapes, was now placed upon the table; and the ministri, or
attendants, also set there the wine (which had hitherto been handed
round to the guests) in large jugs of glass, each bearing upon it the
schedule of its age and quality.
'Taste this Lesbian, my Pansa,' said Sallust; 'it is excellent.'
