The currier, a philosophic tippler, sighed—
"Ah! ah! ah! we're all poor creatures! The gods of Olympus play at ball with us! Men weep and the gods laugh!"
The companion of Agamemnon meanwhile had succeeded in joining the conversation, and with nonchalant adroitness acertained the names of the talkers. He had intercepted the news, conveyed by the cobbler to the leather-dresser, about a plot hatched against Cæsar's life by the soldiers of the Pretorian guard. Then, strolling on a few paces, he had written down the names of the talkers with a jewelled stilus on tablets of soft wax, where many other names were inscribed already. At this moment hoarse sounds like the roarings of some subterranean monster came from the market square. They were the notes, now plaintive, now lively, of a hydraulic organ.
At the entrance to a showman's travelling booth, a blind slave, for four obols a day, was pumping up the water which produced this extraordinary harmony.
Agamemnon dragged his companion towards the booth, a great tent with blue awnings sprinkled with silver tinsel. A lantern lighted the black-board on which the order of the programme was chalked up, in Syriac and Greek. An oppressive atmosphere of garlic and lamp-oil prevailed inside, where, beside the organ, there struck up the wailing of two harsh flutes, while a negro, rolling the whites of his eyes, thrummed on an Arab drum. A dancer was skipping to and fro on a tight-rope, keeping time to the music with his hands, and singing the latest street song:
Huc, huc, convenite nunc...
Spatolocinædi!
Pedem tendite
Cursum addite...
This starveling mountebank was old, impudent, and repulsively cheery. Drops of sweat, mixed with paint, were trickling from his shaven face. His wrinkles, plastered with white lead, looked like the cracks in a wall when rain has washed off the lime. When he withdrew, the flutes and the organ ceased, and on the platform a fifteen-year-old girl appeared. She was to perform the Cordax, a celebrated licentious dance adored by the mob. Fathers of the Church might anathematise, and Roman laws interdict this dance, but both did so in vain. Everywhere the Cordax was danced as before by rich and poor, by street-dancers as well as by wives of senators.