The Roman Traitor, Vol. 2

by Henry William Herbert

It was the house of Decius Brutus, unworthy bearer of a time-honored name, the husband of the infamous Sempronia.

At an earlier hour of the evening, a great crowd had been gathered round the doors, eager to gaze on the ambassadors of the Highland Gauls, who, their mission to Rome ended unsuccessfully, feasted there for the last time previous to their departure.

As it grew dark, however, tired of waiting in the hope of seeing the plaided warriors depart, the throng had dispersed, and with exception of the city watches and the cohorts, which from hour to hour perambulated them, the streets were unusually silent, and almost deserted.

There was no glare of lights from the windows of Brutus' house, as there would be in these days, and in modern mansions, to indicate the scene of festivity; for it was in the inmost chamber, of the most secluded suite of apartments, that the boards had been spread for the comissatio, or nocturnal revel.

The cæna, or dinner, had been partaken by all the guests previous to their arrival at their entertainer's, and the tables were laid only with light dainties and provocatives to thirst, such as salted meats and fishes, the roe of the sturgeon highly seasoned, with herbs and fruits, and pastry and confections, of all kinds.

Rich urns, with heaters, containing hot spiced wines, prepared with honey, smoked on the boards of costly citrean wood, intermixed with crystal vases filled with the rarest vintages of the Falernian hills, cooled and diluted with snow-water.

And around the circular tables, on the tapestried couches, reclined the banqueters of both sexes, quaffing the rich wines to strange toasts, jesting, and laughing wildly, singing at times themselves as the myrtle branch and the lute went round, at times listening to the licentious chaunts of the unveiled and almost unrobed dancing girls, or the obscene and scurrilous buffoonery of the mimes and clowns, who played so conspicuous a part in the Roman entertainments of a later period.

Among these banqueters there was not a single person not privy to the conspiracy, and few who have not been introduced already to the acquaintance of the reader, but among these few was Sempronia—Sempronia, who could be all things, at all times, and to all persons—who with all the softness and grace and beauty of the most feminine of her sex, possessed all the daring, energy, vigor, wisdom of the bravest and most intriguing man—accomplished to the utmost in all the liberal arts, a poetess and minstrel unrivalled by professional performers, a dancer more finished and voluptuous than beseemed a Roman matron, a scholar in both tongues, the Greek as well as her own, and priding herself on her ability to charm the gravest and most learned sages by the modesty of her bearing and the wealth of her intellect, as easily as the most profligate debauchees by her facetious levity, her loose wit, and her abandonment of all restraint to the wildest license.

On this evening she had strained every nerve to fascinate, to dazzle, to astonish.

She had danced as a bacchanal, with her luxuriant hair dishevelled beneath a crown of vine leaves, with her bright shoulders and superb bust displayed at every motion by[pg 90] the displacement of the panther's skin, which alone covered them, timing her graceful steps to the clang of the silver cymbals which she waved and clashed with her bare arms above her stately head, and showing off the beauties of her form in attitudes more classically graceful, more studiously indelicate, than the most reckless figurante of our days.