‘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.