Other friends entered, to whom the twelve dancing girls fell an easy prey. Forty tattered wreaths strewed the ground with flowers. A leathern bottle of Syracusan wine had burst in a corner, and its golden flood flowed under and around the table.
Philodemos was by the side of Faustina.
He had torn her robe and was singing her the verses he had made in her honour.
“O feet,” he said, “O sweet thighs, deep reins, round croup, cloven fig, hips, shoulders, breasts, mobile neck; O all ye things that charm me, warm hands, expert movements, active tongue! You are a Roman, you are a Roman, you are too dark and you do not sing the poems of Sappho; but Perseus was the lover of the Indian Andromeda.” [[1]]
Meanwhile, Seso lay flat upon her belly on the table in a pile of crushed fruit. She was completely overpowered by the fumes of Egyptian wine, and as she lay dipping the nipple of her right breast in a pond of snow-cooled wine, she kept repeating with a comical pathos:
“Drink, my little darling. You are thirsty. Drink, my little darling. Drink. Drink. Drink.”
Aphrodisia, still a slave, triumphed in the midst of a circle of men, and was celebrating her last night of servitude by an extravagant debauch. In obedience to the tradition of all Alexandrian orgies, she had begun by giving herself to three lovers at once; but her task did not end there, and according to the law of slaves who became courtesans, she was expected to prove by an incessant zeal, lasting all night, that she had not usurped her new dignity.
Standing alone behind a curtain, Naukrates and Phrasilas discussed courteously the respective value of Arcesilas and Carneades.
At the end of the hall, Myrtocleia protected Rhodis against the over-zealous enterprises of one of the guests.
