I am not so uncharitable as to assume that all the seven deadly sins found refuge in the mansion of Pomponius Cotta, but it is certain that it was a very fortalice and citadel for one of them--namely, gluttony. There never were such noble Romans (out of Guildhall) as the Pomponii for guzzling and guttling, banqueting, junketing, feasting, and carousing. It was well that plate glass was not invented in those times, for the house was turned out of windows regularly every day, and the major part of the Pomponian revenues would have been expended in glaziers’ bills. But there were dinners and suppers and after-suppers. The guests ate till they couldn’t move, and drank till they couldn’t see. Of course they crowned themselves with flowers, and lolled upon soft couches, and had little boys to titillate their noses with rare perfumes, and pledged each other to the sounds of dulcet music; but they were an emerited set of gormandisers for all that, and richly deserved the visitation of the stern Nemesis that sate ever in the gate in the shape of the fair-haired barbarian, with the brand to burn, the sword to slay, and the hands to pillage. Or, like the Philistine lords, they caroused and made merry, unwotting of that stern, moody, blind Samson, sitting apart, yonder, with his hair all a-growing, and soon to arise in his might and pull the house down on their gluttonous heads. Or, like Belshazzar’s feasters, they were drunk in vessels of gold and silver, while the fingers of a man’s hand were writing on the wall, and the Medes and Persians were at the gate. It may easily be imagined that in such a belly-god temple--such a house of feasting and wassail--the cook was a personage of great power and importance. Pomponius Cotta had simply the best cook not only in Genoa, but in Magna Græcia--not only in Magna Græcia, but in the whole Italian peninsula. But no man-cook had he--no haughty, stately, magister coquinæ, no pedant in Apicius or bigoted believer in Lucullus. Yet Pomponius was proud and happy in the possession of a culinary treasure--a real cordon-bleu, a Mrs. Glasse of the dark ages, a Miss Acton of antiquity, a Mrs. Rumball of Romanity; and this was no other than a little slave girl whom they called Zita.