“Grandes virgines proborum colonorum”—­

marching along with their wicker-baskets filled with curds and fresh-plucked thrushes, until there comes over me a confusion of times and places.

—­The sound of the battle of to-day dies; the fresh blood-stains fade; and I seem to wake upon the heights of Tusculum, in the days of Tiberius.  The farm-flat below is a miniature Campagna, along which I see stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of the Via Tusculana.  The spires yonder melt into mist, and in place of them I see the marble house-walls of which Augustus boasted.  As yet the grander monuments of the Empire are not built; but there is a blotch of cliff which may be the Tarpeian Rock, and beside it a huge hulk of building on the Capitoline Hill, where sat the Roman Senate.  A little hitherward are the gay turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the princely houses on the Palatine Hill, and in the foreground the stately tomb of Cecilia Metella.  I see the barriers of a hippodrome, (where now howling jockeys make the twilight hideous); a gestatio, with its lines of cherry-trees, is before me, and the velvety lavender-green of olive-orchards covers the hills behind.  Vines grow upon the slope eastward,—­

  “Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem,”—­

twining around, and flinging off a great wealth of tendrils from their supporting-poles (pedamenta).  The figs begin to show the purple bloom of fruitage, and the villicus, who has just now come in from the atriolum, reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to apply a few loads of marl (tofacea) to the summer fallow, which Cato is just now breaking up with the Campanian steers, for barley.

Scipio, a stanch Numidian, has gone to market with three asses loaded with cabbages and asparagus.  Villicus tells me that the poultry in the fattening-coops (as close-shut as the Strasburg geese)[F] are doing well, and he has added a soupcon of sweetening to their barley-gruel.  The young doves have their legs faithfully broken, ("obteras crura”) and are placidly fattening on their stumps.  The thrush-house is properly darkened, only enough light entering to show the food to some three or four thousand birds, which are in course of cramming for the market.  The cochlearium has a good stock of snails and mussels; and the little dormice are growing into fine condition for an approaching Imperial banquet.

[Footnote F:  “Locus ad hanc rem desideratur maxime calidus, et minimi luminis, in quo singulae caveis angustioribus vel sportis inclusae pendeant aves, sed ita coarctatae, ne versari posslnt.”—­Columella, Lib.  VIII. cap. vii.]

Villicus reports the clip of the Tarentine sheep unusually fine, and free from burrs.  The new must is all a-foam in the vinaria; and around the inner cellar (gaudendem est!) there is a tier of urns, as large as school-boys, brimming with ripe Falernian.