The crowd gradually melted away, innumerable, curious of itself and watching its own movements. The noise of footsteps and voices drowned even the sound of the sea. Sailors hauled their boats upon the quay with bowed shoulders. Fruit-sellers passed to and fro with teeming baskets upon their arms. Beggars begged for alms with trembling hand. Asses, laden with leathern bottles, trotted in front of the goads of their drivers. But it was the hour of sunset; and the crowd of idlers, more numerous than the crowd bent on affairs, covered the quay. Groups formed in places, and women wandered amongst them. The names of well-known characters passed from mouth to mouth. The young men looked at the philosophers, and the philosophers looked at the courtesans.
The latter were of every kind and condition, from the most celebrated, dressed in fine silks and wearing shoes of gilded leather, to the most miserable, who walked barefooted. The poor ones were no less beautiful than the others, but less fortunate only, and the attention of the sages was fixed by preference upon those whose natural grace was not disfigured by the artifice of girdles and weighty jewels. As it was the day before the Aphrodisiæ, these women had every license to choose the dress which suited them the best, and some of the youngest had even ventured to wear nothing at all. But their nudity shocked nobody, for they would not thus have exposed all the details of their bodies to the sun if they had possessed the slightest defect which might have rendered them the laughing-stock of the married women.
“Tryphera! Tryphera!”
And a young courtesan of joyful mien elbowed her way through the crowd to join a friend of whom she had just caught sight.
“Tryphera! are you invited?”
“Where, Seso?”
“To Bacchis’s.”
“Not yet. She is giving a dinner?”
“A dinner? A banquet, my dear. She is to liberate her most beautiful slave, Aphrodisia, on the second day of the feast.”
“At last! She has perceived at last that people came to see her only for the sake of her slave.”