‘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.’