A Struggle For Rome Volume I Part 31

"Ha, victory!" laughed Marcus Licinius, Lucius's younger brother, who amused himself with the then fashionable pastime of modelling in wax.

"There! you see my art, Kallistratos! The Prefect thinks that my waxen apples, which I gave you yesterday, are real."

"Ah, indeed!" cried Cethegus, as if astonished, although he had long since noticed the smell of the wax with dislike. "Yes, art deceives the most acute. With whom did you learn? I should like to put similar ornaments in my Kyzikenian hall."

"I am an autodidact," said Marcus proudly, "and to-morrow I will send you my new Persian apples--for you honour art."

"But is the sitting at an end?" asked the Prefect, resting his left arm on the cushions of the triclinium.

"No," cried the host, "I will confess the truth. As I could not reckon upon the king of our feast until the dessert, I have prepared a little after-feast to be taken with the wine."

"Oh, you sinner!" cried Balbus, wiping his greasy lips upon the rough purple Turkish table-cover, "and I have eaten such a terrible quant.i.ty of your _becca-ficchi_!"

"It is against the agreement!" cried Marcus Licinius.

"It will spoil my manners," said the merry Piso gravely.

"Say, is that h.e.l.lenic simplicity?" asked Lucius Licinius.

"Peace, friends!" and Cethegus comforted them with a quotation: "'E'en unexpected hurt, a Roman bears unmoved.'"

"The h.e.l.lenic host must adjust himself according to his guests," said Kallistratos, excusing himself. "I feared you would not come again if I offered you Marathonian fare."

"Well, at least confess with what you menace us," cried Cethegus.

"Thou, Nomenclator! read the bill of fare. I will then decide upon the suitable wines."

The slave--a handsome Lydian boy, dressed in a garment of blue Pelusian linen, slit up to the knee--came close to Cethegus at the cypress-wood table, and read from a little tablet which he carried fastened to a golden chain about his neck:

"Fresh oysters from Britannia, in tunny-sauce, with lettuce."

"With this dish, Falernian from Fundi," said Cethegus at once. "But where is the sideboard with the cups? Good wine deserves handsome goblets."

"There is the sideboard!" And at a sign from the host, a curtain, which had concealed a corner of the room opposite the guests, dropped.

A cry of astonishment ran round the table.

The richness of the service displayed, and the taste with which it was arranged, surprised even these fastidious feasters.

Upon the marble slab of a side-table stood a roomy silver carriage, with golden wheels and bronze horses. It was a model of a booty-wagon, such as were used in Roman triumphal processions, and, like a costly booty, within it was piled, in seeming disorder, but with an artistic hand, a quant.i.ty of goblets, gla.s.ses, and salvers, of every shape and material.

"By Mars the Victor!" laughed the Prefect, "the first Roman triumph for two hundred years! A rare sight! Dare I destroy it?"

"You are the man to set it up again," said Lucius, with fire.

"Do you think so? Let us try! First, we will have that goblet of pistachio-wood for the Falernian."

"Wind-thrushes from the Tagus, with asparagus from Tarento," continued the Lydian, reading the bill of fare.

"With that, red Ma.s.sikian from Sinuessa, to be drunk out of that amethyst goblet."

"Young lobsters from Trapezunt, with flamingo-tongues."

"Stop! By holy Bacchus!" cried Balbus, "it is the torture of Tantalus. It is all the same to me out of what I drink, whether from pistachio-wood or amethyst; but to listen to this list of divine dainties with a dry throat, is more than I can stand. Down with Cethegus, the tyrant! Let him die, if he lets us thirst!"

"I feel as if I were Emperor, and heard the roar of the faithful Roman populace! I will save my life and yield. Serve the dishes, slaves."

At this the sound of flutes was heard from an outer room, and six slaves entered, marching in time to the music, with ivy in their shining, anointed locks, and dressed in red mantles and white tunics.

They gave to each guest a snowy cloth of finest Sidonian linen, with purple fringes.

"Oh," cried Ma.s.surius, a young merchant who traded princ.i.p.ally with beautiful slaves of both s.e.xes, and enjoyed the rather doubtful reputation of being a great critic in such wares, "the best cloth is beautiful hair," and he pa.s.sed his hands through the locks of a Ganymede who was kneeling near him.

"But, Kallistratos, I hope those flutes are of the female s.e.x. Up with the curtain; let the girls in."

"Not yet," ordered Cethegus. "First drink, then kiss. Without Bacchus and Ceres, you know----"

"Venus freezes, but not Ma.s.surius!"

All at once lyres and citharas sounded from the side room, and there entered a procession of eight youths in shining silken garments of a gold-green colour. Foremost the "dresser" and the "carver." The other six bore dishes upon their heads. They pa.s.sed the guests with measured steps, and halted at the sideboard of citron-wood. While they were busy there, castanets and cymbals were heard from another part of the house; the large double doors turned upon their shining bronze hinges, and a swarm of slaves in the becoming costume of Corinthian youths streamed into the room.

Some handed bread in ornamentally-perforated baskets; others whisked the flies away with fans of ostrich feathers and palm-leaves; some gracefully poured oil into the wall-lamps from double-handled vases; whilst others swept the crumbs from the mosaic pavement with besoms of Egyptian reeds, or helped Ganymede to fill the cups, which now were circling merrily.

The conversation grew more rapid and animated, and Cethegus, who, although he remained cool and collected, seemed to be quite lost in the enjoyment of the moment, charmed the young guests by his youthful gaiety.

"What do you say?" asked the host, "shall we play dice between the dishes? There stands the dice-box, near Piso."

"Well, Ma.s.surius," observed Cethegus, with a sarcastic look at the slave-dealer, "will you try your luck with me once more? Will you bet against me? Give him the dice-box, Syphax," he said to the Moor.

"Mercury forbid!" answered Ma.s.surius, with comical fright. "Have nothing to do with the Prefect he has inherited the luck of his ancestor, Julius Caesar."

"Omen accipio!" laughed Cethegus. "I accept the omen, with the dagger of Brutus into the bargain."

"I tell you, he is a magician! Only lately he won an unwinnable bet against me about this black demon," and the speaker threw a cactus-fig at the slave's face, but Syphax caught it cleverly with his shining white teeth, and quietly ate it up.

"Well done, Syphax!" said Cethegus. "Roses from the thorns of the enemy! Thou canst become a conjurer as soon as I let thee free."

"Syphax does not wish to be free: he will always be your Syphax, and save your life as you saved his."

"What is that--thy life?" asked Lucius Licinius.

"Did you pardon him?" asked Marcus.

"More than that, I bought him off."

"Yes, with my money!" grumbled Ma.s.surius.

"You know that I immediately gave him the money I won from you as his private possession," answered Cethegus.

"What about this bet? Let us hear. Perhaps it will afford a subject for my epigrams," said Piso.

"Retire, Syphax. There! the cook is bringing us his masterpiece, it seems."