Where could Davus be?  Ah, there he came, half-running already as if he knew his master wanted him.

“Davus,” he called out, “make haste.  I have had a visit from the shades, and it has been as unpleasant as those cold baths the doctor makes me take.”  Then, as he saw the look of fright on the wrinkled face of the old slave who had been with his father when he died, he broke into a laugh and put his hand on his shoulder.  “Calm yourself, my good fellow,” he said, “we shall all be shades some day, and to-day I feel nearer than usual to that charming state.  But in the meantime there is a chance for Bacchus and the Muses.  Tell them to get out a jar of Falernian to-night, and do you unroll Menander.  The counsels of the divine Plato are too eternal for my little mind.  And, Davus,” he added thoughtfully, as he rose and leaned on the slave’s willing arm, “as soon as we get to the house, write down, ’Greece took her captors captive.’  That has the making of a good phrase in it—­a good phrase.  I shall polish it up and use it some day.”

A ROMAN CITIZEN

I

“Look at him—­a subject for his own verses—­a grandfather metamorphosed into an infant Bacchus!  Will he be a Mercury in swaddling clothes by next year?  O, father, father, the gods certainly laid their own youth in your cradle fifty-two years ago!”

The speaker, a young matron, smiled into her father’s eyes, which were as brilliant and tender as her own.  Ovid and his daughter were singularly alike in a certain blitheness of demeanour, and in Fabia’s eyes they made a charming picture now, both of them in festal white against the March green of the slender poplars.  Perilla’s little boy had climbed into his grandfather’s lap and laid carefully upon his hair, still thick and black, a wreath of grape leaves picked from early vines in a sunny corner.  Fabia and Perilla’s husband, Fidus Cornelius, smiled at each other in mutual appreciation of a youth shared equally, it seemed to them, by the other three with the new-born spring.

It was Ovid’s birthday and they were celebrating it in their country place at the juncture of the Flaminian and Clodian roads.  The poet had a special liking for his gardens here, and he had preferred to hold his fete away from the city, in family seclusion, because Fidus was about to take Perilla off to Africa, where he was to be proconsul.  The shadow of the parting had thrown into high relief the happiness of the day.  Perilla had always said that it was worth while to pay attention to her father’s birthday, because he could accept family incense without strutting like a god and was never so charming as when he was being spoiled.  To-day they had spared no pains, and his manner in return had fused with the tenderness kept for them alone the gallantry, at once that of worldling and of poet, which made him the most popular man in Roman society.  Now, as the afternoon grew older and his grandson curled comfortably into his arms, the conversation turned naturally to personal things.  Perilla’s jest led her father to talk of his years, and to wonder whether he was to have as long a life as his father, who had died only two or three years before at ninety.