beasts and their voices, ball-players
and buffoons. Only a few persons looked at them, however, since wine had
darkened the eyes of the audience. The feast passed by degrees into a
drunken revel and a dissolute orgy. The Syrian damsels, who appeared
at first in the bacchic dance, mingled now with the guests. The music
changed into a disordered and wild outburst of citharas, lutes, Armenian
cymbals, Egyptian sistra, trumpets, and horns. As some of the guests
wished to talk, they shouted at the musicians to disappear. The air,
filled with the odor of flowers and the perfume of oils with which
beautiful boys had sprinkled the feet of the guests during the feast,
permeated with saffron and the exhalations of people, became stifling;
lamps burned with a dim flame; the wreaths dropped sidewise on the heads
of guests; faces grew pale and were covered with sweat. Vitelius rolled
under the table. Nigidia, stripping herself to the waist, dropped
her drunken childlike head on the breast of Lucan, who, drunk in like
degree, fell to blowing the golden powder from her hair, and raising
his eyes with immense delight. Vestinius, with the stubbornness of
intoxication, repeated for the tenth time the answer of Mopsus to the
sealed letter of the proconsul. Tullius, who reviled the gods,
said, with a drawling voice broken by hiccoughs,--"If the spheros of
Xenophanes is round, then consider, such a god might be pushed along
before one with the foot, like a barrel."

But Domitius Afer, a hardened criminal and informer, was indignant at
the discourse, and through indignation spilled Falernian over his whole
tunic. He had always believed in the gods. People say that Rome will
perish, and there are some even who contend that it is perishing
already. And surely! But if that should come, it is because the youth
are without faith, and without faith there can be no virtue. People have
abandoned also the strict habits of former days, and it never occurs
to them that Epicureans will not stand against barbarians. As for him,
he--As for him, he was sorry that he had lived to such times, and that
he must seek in pleasures a refuge against griefs which, if not met,
would soon kill him.

When he had said this, he drew toward him a Syrian dancer, and kissed
her neck and shoulders with his toothless mouth. Seeing this, the consul
Memmius Regulus laughed, and, raising his bald head with wreath awry,
exclaimed,--"Who says that Rome is perishing? What folly!