_Lucullus._ After our dinner and sleep, we will spend the remainder of the day on the subject of your visit. _Caesar._ Those Ethiopian slaves of yours shiver with cold upon the mountain here; and truly I myself was not insensible to the change of climate, in the way from Mutina. What white bread! I never found such even at Naples or Capua. This Formian wine (which I prefer to the Chian), how exquisite! _Lucullus._ Such is the urbanity of Caesar, even while he bites his lip with displeasure. How! surely it bleeds! Permit me to examine the cup. _Caesar._ I believe a jewel has fallen out of the rim in the carriage: the gold is rough there. _Lucullus._ Marcipor, let me never see that cup again! No answer, I desire. My guest pardons heavier faults. Mind that dinner be prepared for us shortly. _Caesar._ In the meantime, Lucullus, if your health permits it, shall we walk a few paces round the villa? for I have not seen anything of the kind before. _Lucullus._ The walls are double; the space between them two feet: the materials for the most part earth and straw. Two hundred slaves, and about as many mules and oxen, brought the beams and rafters up the mountain; my architects fixed them at once in their places: every part was ready, even the wooden nails. The roof is thatched, you see. _Caesar._ Is there no danger that so light a material should be carried off by the winds, on such an eminence? _Lucullus._ None resists them equally well. _Caesar._ On this immensely high mountain, I should be apprehensive of the lightning, which the poets, and I think the philosophers too, have told us strikes the highest. _Lucullus._ The poets are right; for whatever is received as truth is truth in poetry; and a fable may illustrate like a fact. But the philosophers are wrong, as they generally are, even in the commonest things; because they seldom look beyond their own tenets, unless through captiousness, and because they argue more than they meditate, and display more than they examine. Archimedes and Euclid are, in my opinion, after our Epicurus, the worthiest of the name, having kept apart to the demonstrable, the practical, and the useful. Many of the rest are good writers and good disputants; but unfaithful suitors of simple science, boasters of their acquaintance with gods and goddesses, plagiarists and impostors. I had forgotten my roof, although it is composed of much the same materials as the philosophers'. Let the lightning fall: one handful of silver, or less, repairs the damage. _Caesar._ Impossible! nor indeed one thousand, nor twenty, if those tapestries and pictures are consumed.