"Well, my friend, for me there is a gastronomic poesy in foie gras; in fact I am prepared to crown Dædalus with laurels for this dish, just as I would crown an Olympic ode of Pindar!"
Two new guests appeared on the threshold; they were Julian and the poet Publius. Hortensius yielded the place of honour to Julian, while Publius devoured the innumerable dishes with his eyes. To judge by his new chlamys the rich widow must have departed this life, and the happy heirs paid for the epitaph in no niggardly fashion.
The general conversation went on. Lampridius told a story of how one day, moved by curiosity, he had been to hear a Christian preacher thundering against pagan grammarians. "The grammarians," assevered the preacher, "do not rank men for their worth, but for their literary style, thinking it less criminal to kill a man than to pronounce the word homo with a wrong aspiration!" Lampridius suspected that if these Christian preachers hated the style of the rhetoricians to such a degree, it was because, conscious that they themselves could write and speak only like barbarians, they made ignorance the badge of moral worth, so that for them a good speaker became a suspicious character.
"The day on which eloquence perishes will see the end of Hellas, the end of Rome! People will turn into dumb animals, and it is to make them so that Christian preachers use their barbarous jargon."
"Who knows," murmured Mamertinus pensively, "perhaps style is more important than virtue, since slaves, barbarians, and nincompoops can all be virtuous!"
Hephæstion meanwhile was explaining to his neighbour the exact meaning of Cicero's advice—"Causam mendaciunculis adspergere."
"Mendaciunculis, that's to say, little lies. Cicero, in fact, advises you to sow little inventions all over your speech; he admits falsehood if decorative."
Then followed a general discussion on the methods of beginning a speech: should the beginning be anapæstic or dactylic?
Julian became bored.
He confessed heartily that he had never considered the matter, and that in his opinion the speaker ought rather to preoccupy himself with the fundamental idea of his speech than with the making style out of a mosaic of peccadilloes.