"Must of Setinum, with honey from Hymettus, was the last. There, try it!" said Piso, the roguish poet, whose epigrams and anacreontics could not be copied quickly enough by the booksellers; and whose finances, notwithstanding, were always in poetical disorder. He handed to the Prefect what we should call a _vexing-cup_, a bronze serpent's-head, which, lifted carelessly to the lips, violently shot a stream of wine into the drinker's throat. But Cethegus knew the trick, drank carefully, and returned the cup. "I like your _dry_ wit better, Piso," he said, laughing; and snatched a wax tablet from a fold in the other's garment. "Oh, give it me back," said Piso; "it is no verses--just the contrary--a list of my debts for wine and horses." "Well," observed Cethegus, "I have taken it--so it and they are mine. To-morrow you may fetch the quittance at my house; but not for nothing--for one of your most spiteful epigrams upon my pious friend Silverius." "Oh, Cethegus!" cried the poet, delighted and flattered, "how spiteful one can be for 40,000 solidi! Woe to the holy man of God!" CHAPTER VIII. "And the dessert--how far have you got there?" asked Cethegus, "already at the apples? are these they?" and he looked, screwing up his eyes, at two heaped-up fruit-baskets, which stood upon a bronze table with ivory legs. "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 quantity 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 Hellenic simplicity?" asked Lucius Licinius. "Peace, friends!" and Cethegus comforted them with a quotation: "'E'en unexpected hurt, a Roman bears unmoved.'" "The Hellenic 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."