"I am not the dedicatee of Horace," interrupted the other; "poor Horace dedicated the art-poetical to my two sons."
"How could he do that?" broke in Pomponius. "You see double. Two sons, indeed! How many sons have you? tell me that. Again, how could one man dedicate a single work to a double person? answer me that. You know nothing whatever about poetry, except in so far as it is fiction; but we don't want fiction in these matters. We want facts; and it is a fact—a solemn fact—that the slave will be devoured."
"I hold it to be merely a pleasant fiction," retorted Piso fiercely.
"Then I appeal to Thrasyllus here," rejoined the other. "O thou Babylonian seer! will not Claudius the slave be devoured in the circus before the assembled people?"
At these words our hero looked at Benigna, and Benigna at him, and she was astounded.
He who was thus questioned—a man of ghastly face, with long, black hair hanging down to his shoulders, and sunken, wistful, melancholy eyes—wore an Asiatic dress. He was not intoxicated, and seemed to have fallen by chance into his present companionship, from which he appeared eager to disengage himself.
Gently shaking off the vague hand of Pomponius Flaccus, he acted as the oracles did.
"You are certainly right," he said; but he glanced at Lucius Piso while speaking, and then stepped quickly into the street, which he crossed.
Each of the disputants naturally deemed the point to have been decided in his own favor.
"You hear?" cried Flaccus; "the horse is to paw him to death, and then to devour him alive."