nd, entering
Rome, led by the hand of Minerva. Then again the painstaking artist had
depicted him casting up accounts, and still again, being appointed
steward; everything being explained by inscriptions. Where the walls
gave way to the portico, Mercury was shown lifting him up by the chin,
to a tribunal placed on high. Near by stood Fortune with her horn of
plenty, and the three Fates, spinning golden flax. I also took note of a
group of runners, in the portico, taking their exercise under the eye of
an instructor, and in one corner was a large cabinet, in which was a very
small shrine containing silver Lares, a marble Venus, and a golden casket
by no means small, which held, so they told us, the first shavings of
Trimalchio's beard. I asked the hall-porter what pictures were in the
middle hall. "The Iliad and the Odyssey," he replied, "and the
gladiatorial games given under Laenas." There was no time in which to
examine them all.

CHAPTER THE THIRTIETH.

We had now come to the dining-room, at the entrance to which sat a
factor, receiving accounts, and, what gave me cause for astonishment,
rods and axes were fixed to the door-posts, superimposed, as it were,
upon the bronze beak of a ship, whereon was inscribed:

TO GAIUS POMPEIUS TRIMALCHIO
AUGUSTAL, SEVIR
FROM CINNAMUS HIS
STEWARD.

A double lamp, suspended from the ceiling, hung beneath the inscription,
and a tablet was fixed to each door-post; one, if my memory serves me,
was inscribed,

ON DECEMBER THIRTIETH AND
THIRTY FIRST
OUR
GAIUS DINES OUT

the other bore a painting of the moon in her phases, and the seven
planets, and the days which were lucky and those which were unlucky,
distinguished by distinctive studs. We had had enough of these novelties
and started to enter the dining-room when a slave, detailed to this duty,
cried out, "Right foot first." Naturally, we were afraid that some of us
might break some rule of conduct and cross the threshold the wrong way;
nevertheless, we started out, stepping off together with the right foot,
when all of a sudden, a slave who had been stripped, threw himself at our
feet, and commenced begging us to save him from punishment, as it was no
serious offense for which he was in jeopar