Volume I Part 31 (1/2)
”Ha, victory!” laughed Marcus Licinius, Lucius's younger brother, who amused himself with the then fas.h.i.+onable 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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.”