all the streets with their Oriental dances and tinkling tambourines.  The visitor to the ruins of Pompeii may still see in her temple the statue of Isis, through whose open lips the gaping worshippers heard the murmured answers they came to seek.  No doubt they believed as firmly that the image spoke, as our forefathers believed that their miraculous Madonnas nodded and winked.  But time has exposed the cheat.  By the ruined shrine the worshipper may now see the secret steps by which the priest got to the back of the statue, and the pipe entering the back of its head through which he whispered the answers of the oracle.

[Footnote 16:  JUV. Sat. ii. 149.  Cf.  Sen. Ep. xxiv.  “Nemo tam puer est at Cerberum timeat, et tenebras,” &c.]

[Footnote 17:  Fragm. xxxiv.]

[Footnote 18:  Lactantius, Divin.  Inst. i. 4.]

III.  It was an age of boundless luxury,—­an age in which women recklessly vied with one another in the race of splendour and extravagance, and in which men plunged headlong, without a single scruple of conscience, and with every possible resource at their command, into the pursuit of pleasure.  There was no form of luxury, there was no refinement of vice invented by any foreign nation, which had not been eagerly adopted by the Roman patricians.  “The softness of Sybaris, the manners of Rhodes and Antioch, and of perfumed, drunken, flower-crowned Miletus,” were all to be found at Rome.  There was no more of the ancient Roman severity and dignity and self-respect.  The descendants of Aemilius and Gracchus—­even generals and consuls and praetors—­mixed familiarly with the lowest canaille of Rome in their vilest and most squalid purlieus of shameless vice.  They fought as amateur gladiators in the arena.  They drove as competing charioteers on the race-course.  They even condescended to appear as actors on the stage.  They devoted themselves with such frantic eagerness to the excitement of gambling, that we read of their staking hundreds of pounds on a single throw of the dice, when they could not even restore the pawned tunics to their shivering slaves.  Under the cold marble statues, or amid the waxen likenesses of their famous stately ancestors, they turned night into day with long and foolish orgies, and exhausted land and sea with the demands of their gluttony.  “Woe to that city,” says an ancient proverb, “in which a fish costs more than an ox;” and this exactly describes the state of Rome.  A banquet would sometimes cost the price of an estate; shell-fish were brought from remote and unknown shores, birds from Parthia and the banks of the Phasis; single dishes were made of the brains of the peacocks and the tongues of nightingales and flamingoes.  Apicius, after squandering nearly a million of money in the pleasures of the table, committed suicide, Seneca tells us, because he found that he had only 80,000_l_. left.  Cowley speaks of—­

     “Vitellius’ table, which did hold
      As many creatures as the ark of old.”