Meanwhile Actæon was waiting in the library. He had visited great palaces in his travels about the world, he had seen—two years before the earthquake which ruined it—the celebrated Colossus of Rhodes; he was familiar with the Serapeum and the tomb of the great conqueror in Alexandria; he was accustomed to elegance and splendor; yet he could not conceal surprise at this Grecian house in a barbarian land, more luxurious and artistic than those of opulent citizens of Athens.
Guided by a slave, and leaving the garden with its whispering foliage and its cries of exotic birds, he had passed along the colonnade which gave entrance to the villa. First the vestibule with its plinth of mosaic, on which were painted ferocious black dogs with fiery eyes, their fierce and foaming mouths agape, their fangs erect.
Above the door, fastened to a lamp, hung a branch of laurel in honor of the tutelary gods of the house. Next to the somewhat gloomy vestibule, beneath the open sky, like a lung of the house, was the atrium with its four rows of columns supporting the roof and forming an equal number of cloisters, upon which opened the doors of the rooms, their three panels decorated with large-headed nails.
In the centre of the atrium was the impluvium, a rectangular marble tank to catch and hold the waters from the roof. Great terra cotta urns covered with flowers stood upon pedestals between the columns; four marble tables sustained by winged lions surrounded the impluvium, and near it rose a statuette of Love which on festive days threw a spray of water.
Actæon admired the graceful strength of the columns wrought in blue marble to match the socles of the galleries, which imparted to the light of the atrium a diffused radiance, as if the dwelling were submerged in the sea.
Afterward the attendant turned him over to Odacis, the favorite slave, and she ushered him into the peristyle, an inner courtyard much larger than the atrium, which astonished the Greek with its polychrome decoration. The columns were painted red at their bases, and the color changed above into blue and gold on the fluting and capitals, and was dispersed over the trellis-work covering the porticos. In the unroofed part of the peristyle was a deep piscina of transparent water in which fish darted like flashes of golden lightning. Around it were marble benches supported by Hermæ; tables held by dolphins with knotted tails; clumps of roses, between the foliage of which peeped white or terra cotta statuettes in voluptuous positions, and covering the walls of the peristyle, between the doors of the rooms, were great paintings by Grecian artists—Orpheus with his heavy lyre, nude and wearing his Phrygian cap, surrounded by lions and panthers who listened to his songs with humbled heads, stifling their growls; Venus springing from the waves; Adonis allowing himself to be cured of his wounds by the Mother of Love; and other scenes eulogizing the influence of art and beauty.
Actæon was conducted to the bath by two young slaves, and as he emerged from this he again met Odacis, who bade him enter the library beyond the peristyle.
It was a great room paved with mosaic representing the triumph of Bacchus. The young god, beautiful as a woman, nude, and crowned with vines and roses, was riding on a panther, waving his thyrsus. The pictures on the walls illustrated famous passages from the Iliad. The more voluminous books were ranged on shelves, and the smaller ones formed bundles placed in narrow willow baskets lined with wool.
Actæon admired the richness of the library, where he counted more than a hundred volumes. They represented a veritable fortune. The navigators received from Sónnica commissions to bring her whatever notable works they found on their voyages, and the booksellers in Athens remitted to her famous books of entertainment which enjoyed vogue in their city. They were all of papyrus, consisting of strips rolled upon cylinders of wood or bone, each end wrought into an artistically carved umbilicus. The sheets, written only on one side, were impregnated on the other with cedar oil to protect them from moths, and the title of the book, the name of the author, and the index, gleamed in letters of minium and gold on the purple outer wrapping. The copying of these books represented the life work of many men, productions to be acquired only at the cost of great sums of money, and the Greek, with the respect characteristic of his race for art and wisdom, recognized that he was surrounded in the silence of the library by the august shades of many great men, and with veneration he turned from the Homer in its old, time-worn papyrus, and the works of Thales and Pythagoras, to the contemporary poets, Theocritus and Callimachus, whose volumes were unrolled, denoting recent reading.
Actæon's ear caught a faint rustling of sandals in the peristyle, and the square of pale gold thrown on the floor by the light entering the doorway from the courtyard was darkened by a form. It was Sónnica arrayed in a gauzy white tunic. The light behind her marked the artistic lines of her body in the diaphanous cloud of her garment.