"Well, you Italians are used to these spectacles; we Greeks are more merciful. Ah, shade of Pindar!--the rapture of a true Grecian game--the emulation of man against man--the generous strife--the half-mournful triumph--so proud to contend with a noble foe, so sad to see him overcome! But ye understand me not." "The kid is excellent," said Sallust. The slave whose duty it was to carve, and who valued himself on his science, had just performed that office on the kid to the sound of music, his knife keeping time, beginning with a low tenor, and accomplishing the arduous feat amid a magnificent diapason. "Your cook is of course from Sicily?" said Pansa. "Yes, of Syracuse." "I will play you for him," said Clodius; "we will have a game between the courses." "Better that sort of game, certainly, than a beast-fight; but I cannot stake my Sicilian--you have nothing so precious to stake me in return." "My Phillida--my beautiful dancing girl!" "I never buy women," said the Greek, carelessly rearranging his chaplet. The musicians, who were stationed in the portico without, had commenced their office with the kid; they now directed the melody into a more soft, a more gay, yet it may be a more intellectual, strain; and they chanted that song of Horace beginning "Persicos odi," &c. so impossible to translate, and which they imagined applicable to a feast that, effeminate as it seems to us, was simple enough for the gorgeous revelry of the time. We are witnessing the domestic and not the princely feast--the entertainment of a gentleman, not of an emperor or a senator. "Ah, good old Horace," said Sallust, compassionately; "he sang well of feasts and girls, but not like our modern poets." "The immortal Fulvius, for instance," said Clodius. "Ah, Fulvius the immortal!" said the umbra. "And Spuræna, and Caius Mutius, who wrote three epics in a year--could Horace do that, or Virgil either?" said Lepidus. "Those old poets all fell into the mistake of copying sculpture instead of painting. Simplicity and repose--that was their notion: but we moderns have fire, and passions, and energy--we never sleep, we imitate the colors of painting, its life and its action. Immortal Fulvius!" "By-the-way," said Sallust, "have you seen the new ode by Spuræna, in honor of our Egyptian Isis?--it is magnificent--the true religious fervor." "Isis seems a favorite divinity at Pompeii," said Glaucus. "Yes!" said Pansa, "she is exceedingly in repute just at this moment; her statue has been uttering the most remarkable oracles. I am not superstitious, but I must confess that she has more than once assisted me materially in my magistracy with her advice. Her priests are so pious too! none of your gay, none of your proud ministers of Jupiter and Fortune; they walk barefoot, eat no meat, and pass the greater part of the night in solitary devotion!"