He lived, too, with a magnificence corresponding to his wealth. An example of splendour and luxury had been set to him by the orator Crassus, who inhabited a sumptuous palace in Rome, the hall of which was adorned with four pillars of Hymettian marble, twelve feet high, which he brought to Rome in his ædileship, at a time when there were no pillars of foreign marble even in public buildings(260). The court of this mansion was ornamented by six lotus trees, which Pliny saw in full luxuriance in his youth, but which were afterwards burned in the conflagration in the time of Nero. He had also a number of vases, and two drinking-cups, engraved by the artist Mentor, but which were of such immense value that he was ashamed to use them(261). Hortensius had the same tastes as Crassus, but surpassed him and all his contemporaries in magnificence. His mansion stood on the Palatine Hill, which appears to have been the most fashionable situation in Rome, being at that time covered with the houses of Lutatius Catulus, Æmilius Scaurus, Clodius, Catiline, Cicero, and Cæsar(262). The residence of Hortensius was adjacent to that of Catiline; and though of no great extent, it was splendidly furnished. After the death of the orator, it was inhabited by Octavius Cæsar(263), and formed the centre of the chief imperial palace, which increased from the time of Augustus to that of Nero, till it covered a great part of the Palatine Mount, and branched over other hills. Besides his mansion in the capital, he possessed sumptuous villas at Tusculum, Bauli, and Laurentum, where he was accustomed to give the most elegant and expensive entertainments. He had frequently peacocks at his banquets, which he first served up at a grand augural feast, and which, says Varro, were more commended by the luxurious, than by men of probity and austerity(264). His olive plantations he is said to have regularly moistened and bedewed with wine; and, on one occasion, during the hearing of an important case, in which he was engaged along with Cicero, begged that he would change with him the previously arranged order of pleading, as he was obliged to go to the country to pour wine on a favourite _platanus_, which grew near his Tusculan villa(265). Notwithstanding this profusion, his heir found not less than 10,000 casks of wine in his cellar after his death(266). Besides his taste for wine, and fondness for plantations, he indulged a passion for pictures and fish-ponds. At his Tusculan villa, he built a hall for the reception of a painting of the expedition of the Argonauts, by the painter Cydias, which cost the enormous sum of a hundred and forty-four thousand sesterces(267). At his country-seat, near Bauli, on the sea shore, he vied with Lucullus and Philippus in the extent of his fish-ponds, which were constructed at immense cost, and so formed that the tide flowed into them(268). Under the promontory of Bauli, travellers are yet shown the _Piscina Mirabilis_, a