sounds in the ceiling, and a quaking of the whole apartment. As they raised their eyes, the ceiling suddenly opened, and a great circular tray descended, with a figure of Priapus, bearing all sorts of fruit and bon-bons.(776) It may be readily assumed that in such a scene the wine was not stinted. Huge flagons, coated with gypsum, were brought in shoulder high, each with a label attesting that it was the great Falernian vintage of Opimius, one hundred years old.(777) As the wine appeared, the genial host remarked with admirable frankness, “I did not give as good wine yesterday, although I had a more distinguished company!” The amusements of the banquet were as various, and some of them as coarse or fantastic, as the dishes. They are gross and tasteless exaggerations of the prevailing fashion. In a literary age, a man of Trimalchio’s position must affect some knowledge of letters and art. He is a ludicrous example of the dogmatism of pretentious ignorance in all ages. He has a Greek and Latin library,(778) and pretends to have once read Homer, although his recollections are rather confused. He makes, for instance, Daedalus shut Niobe into the Trojan horse; Iphigenia becomes the wife of Achilles; Helen is the sister of Diomede and Ganymede.(779) One of the more refined entertainments which are provided is the performance of scenes from the Homeric poems, which Trimalchio accompanied by reading in a sonorous voice from a Latin version.(780) He is himself an author, and has his poems recited by a boy personating the Bacchic god.(781) As a connoisseur of plate he will yield to no one,(782) although he slyly confesses that his “real Corinthian” got their name from the dealer Corinthus. The metal came from the fused bronze and gold and silver which Hannibal flung into the flames of captured Troy. But Trimalchio’s most genuine taste, as he naïvely confesses, is for acrobatic feats and loud horn-blowing. And so, a company of rope-dancers bore the guests with their monotonous performances.(783) Blood-curdling tales of the wer-wolf, and corpses carried off by witches, are provided for another kind of taste.(784) A base product of Alexandria imitates the notes of the nightingale, and another, apparently of Jewish race, equally base, in torturing dissonant tones spouted passages from the _Aeneid_, profaned to scholarly ears by a mixture of Atellan verses.(785) Trimalchio, who was anxious that his wife should display her old powers of dancing a _cancan_, is also going to give an exhibition of his own gifts in the pantomimic line,(786) when the shrewd lady in a whisper warned him to maintain his dignity. How far she preserved her own we shall see presently.