The Last Days of Pompeii Part 3

This over, the convivialists reclined themselves on the couches, and the business of the hour commenced.

'May this cup be my last!' said the young Sall.u.s.t, as the table, cleared of its first stimulants, was now loaded with the substantial part of the entertainment, and the ministering slave poured forth to him a br.i.m.m.i.n.g cyathus--'May this cup be my last, but it is the best wine I have drunk at Pompeii!'

'Bring hither the amphora,' said Glaucus, 'and read its date and its character.'

The slave hastened to inform the party that the scroll fastened to the cork betokened its birth from Chios, and its age a ripe fifty years.

'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 Sall.u.s.t.

'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 Vulca.n.a.lia--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 Sall.u.s.t.

'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 G.o.ds 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 amus.e.m.e.nts of the people?'

'Well thank Jupiter and the Fates! we have no Nero at present,' said Sall.u.s.t.

'He was, indeed, a tyrant; he shut up our amphitheatre for ten years.'

'I wonder it did not create a rebellion,' said Sall.u.s.t.

'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 Sall.u.s.t, with sparkling eyes.

Sall.u.s.t 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 Sall.u.s.t.

'They produce an oyster.'

'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 b.l.o.o.d.y exhibition for our next show!'

The aedile shrugged his shoulders. The young Sall.u.s.t, who was thought the best-natured man in Pompeii, stared in surprise. The graceful Lepidus, who rarely spoke for fear of disturbing his features, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed '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 n.o.ble foe, so sad to see him overcome! But ye understand me not.'

'The kid is excellent,' said Sall.u.s.t. 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 Sall.u.s.t, compa.s.sionately; 'he sang well of feasts and girls, but not like our modern poets.'

'The immortal Fulvius, for instance,' said Clodius.

'Ah, Fulvius, the immortal!' said the umbra.

'And Spuraena; and Caius Mutius, who wrote three epics in a year--could Horace do that, or Virgil either said Lepidus. 'Those old poets all fell into the mistake of copying sculpture instead of painting.

Simplicity and repose--that was their notion; but we moderns have fire, and pa.s.sion, and energy--we never sleep, we imitate the colors of painting, its life, and its action. Immortal Fulvius!'

'By the way,' said Sall.u.s.t, 'have you seen the new ode by Spuraena, in honour of our Egyptian Isis? It is magnificent--the true religious fervor.'

'Isis seems a favorite divinity at Pompeii,' said Glaucus.

'Yes!' said Pansa, 'she is exceedingly in repute just at this moment; her statue has been uttering the most remarkable oracles. I am not superst.i.tious, but I must confess that she has more than once a.s.sisted me materially in my magistracy with her advice. Her priests are so pious, too! none of your gay, none of your proud, ministers of Jupiter and Fortune: they walk barefoot, eat no meat, and pa.s.s the greater part of the night in solitary devotion!'

'An example to our other priesthoods, indeed!--Jupiter's temple wants reforming sadly,' said Lepidus, who was a great reformer for all but himself.

'They say that Arbaces the Egyptian has imparted some most solemn mysteries to the priests of Isis,' observed Sall.u.s.t. 'He boasts his descent from the race of Rameses, and declares that in his family the secrets of remotest antiquity are treasured.'

'He certainly possesses the gift of the evil eye,' said Clodius. 'If I ever come upon that Medusa front without the previous charm, I am sure to lose a favorite horse, or throw the canes nine times running.'

'The last would be indeed a miracle!' said Sall.u.s.t, gravely.