'Talking of that, Diomed gives a grand feast next week,' said Sallust:
'are you invited, Glaucus?'

'Yes, I received an invitation this morning.'

'And I, too,' said Sallust, drawing a square piece of papyrus from his
girdle: 'I see that he asks us an hour earlier than usual: an earnest of
something sumptuous.'

'Oh! he is rich as Croesus,' said Clodius; 'and his bill of fare is as
long as an epic.'

'Well, let us to the baths,' said Glaucus: 'this is the time when all
the world is there; and Fulvius, whom you admire so much, is going to
read us his last ode.'

The young men assented readily to the proposal, and they strolled to the
baths.

Although the public thermae, or baths, were instituted rather for the
poorer citizens than the wealthy (for the last had baths in their own
houses), yet, to the crowds of all ranks who resorted to them, it was a
favorite place for conversation, and for that indolent lounging so dear
to a gay and thoughtless people. The baths at Pompeii differed, of
course, in plan and construction from the vast and complicated thermae
of Rome; and, indeed, it seems that in each city of the empire there was
always some slight modification of arrangement in the general
architecture of the public baths. This mightily puzzles the learned--as
if architects and fashion were not capricious before the nineteenth
century! Our party entered by the principal porch in the Street of
Fortune. At the wing of the portico sat the keeper of the baths, with
his two boxes before him, one for the money he received, one for the
tickets he dispensed. Round the walls of the portico were seats crowded
with persons of all ranks; while others, as the regimen of the
physicians prescribed, were walking briskly to and fro the portico,
stopping every now and then to gaze on the innumerable notices of shows,
games, sales, exhibitions, which were painted or inscribed upon the
walls. The general subject of conversation was, however, the spectacle
announced in the amphitheatre; and each new-comer was fastened upon by a
group eager to know if Pompeii had been so fortunate as to produce some
monstrous criminal, some happy case of sacrilege or of murder, which
would allow the aediles to provide a man for the jaws of the lion: all
other more common exhibitions seemed dull and tame, when compared with
the possibility of this fortunate occurrence.

'For my part,' said one jolly-looking man, who was a goldsmith, 'I think
the