an
divinities, celebrating the festival of the mills, are crowning with
flowers the patient ass who is turning the wheel. Flowers on all
sides--that was the fantasy of antique times. Flowers at their wild
banquets, at their august ceremonies, at their sacrifices, and at their
festivals; flowers on the necks of their victims and their guests, and
on the brows of their women and their gods. But the greatest number of
these paintings appear destined for banquetting-halls; dead nature
predominates in them; you see nothing but pullets, geese, ducks,
partridges, fowls, and game of all kinds, fruits, and eggs, amphorae,
loaves of bread and cakes, hams, and I know not what all else. In the
shops attached to this palace belong all sorts of precious
articles--vases, lamps, statuettes, jewels, a handsome alabaster cup;
besides, there have been found five hundred and fifty small bottles,
without counting the goblets, and, in vases of glass, raisins, figs,
chestnuts, lentils, and near them scales and bakers' and pastry-cooks'
moulds. Could the Pantheon, then, have been a tavern, a free inn
(_hospitium_) where strangers were received under the protection of the
gods? In that case the supposed butcher-shop must have been a sort of
office, and the _triclinium_ a dormitory. However that may be, the
table and the altar, the kitchen and religion, elbow each other in this
strange palace. Our austerity revolts and our frivolity is amused at the
circumstance; but Catholics of the south are not at all surprised at it.
Their mode of worship has retained something of the antique gaiety. For
the common people of Naples, Christmas is a festival of eels, Easter a
revel of _casatelli_; they eat _zeppole_ to honor Saint Joseph; and the
greatest proof of affliction that can be given to the dying Saviour is
not to eat meat. Beneath the sky of Italy dogmas may change, but the
religion will always be the same--sensual and vivid, impassioned and
prone to excess, essentially and eternally Pagan, above all adoring
woman, Venus or Mary, and the _bambino_, that mystic Cupid whom the
poets called the first love. Catholicism and Paganism, theories and
mysteries; if there be two religions, they are that of the south and
that of the north.

You have just explored the whole eastern part of the Forum. Pass now in
front of the temple of Jupiter and reach the western part. In descending
from north to south, the first monument that strikes your attention is a
rather