“My child would not leave me?” said Damaris, the mother.
“No, that thou knowest well; but I would go with you, if it were only once, if not to the Circensian games, or the theatre, at least to this house of our kinsman. His wife, moreover, is so grave and sweet; we love her. And he is such an upholder of everything orderly and proper. They say he rules his time by his clypsedra, the water-clock, and lets nothing overstep its right moment—pleasure, and study, and work, and sleep, and banquets. Father says he is like an ancient Roman cut in miniature on a gem, and you would not think it dangerous to dine with an ancient Roman, like Scipio Africanus, or Fabius Maximus, or Numa Pompilius, however dull it might be!” she added, laughing.
“They were heathens, the ancient Romans,” replied the mother, driven to bay.
“I know,” replied Lucia; “and that is another reason for its being preferable to going to dine with our cousin Petronius Maximus. He is not a heathen; and, moreover, Marius said the Emperor Valentinian would probably be there.”
The mother shuddered visibly.
“That is no reason for any good maiden or matron being there,” she said. “God forbid that we should risk our pearl amidst the wickedness of the court of Ravenna.”
“They would not be wicked to us,” replied the girl, with a scornful curl of the beautiful lips. “We are of the Anician house, no new family like these Byzantines!”
“We have seen too many of the ancient Roman names on the roll of the slaves,” replied Damaris. “It is scarcely forty years since from the ruins of this palace, where our noble kinswoman Marcella lived, and where the holy women of the Ecclesia Domestica came and listened to Jerome, she was borne, bruised and beggared, to die in one of the basilicas, during the siege and sack of Alaric the Goth.”
“But, mother, all that is ancient history now. Alaric has been lying forty years in the bed of the river they turned aside to make his tomb. And this old Rome of ours, which he sacked and tried to ruin, lives on.”