Glaucus sighed.

They were now in a street less crowded than the rest, at the end of
which they beheld that broad and most lovely sea, which upon those
delicious coasts seems to have renounced its prerogative of terror--so
soft are the crisping winds that hover around its bosom, so glowing and
so various are the hues which it takes from the rosy clouds, so fragrant
are the perfumes which the breezes from the land scatter over its
depths. From such a sea might you well believe that Aphrodite rose to
take the empire of the earth.

'It is still early for the bath,' said the Greek, who was the creature
of every poetical impulse; 'let us wander from the crowded city, and
look upon the sea while the noon yet laughs along its billows.'

'With all my heart,' said Clodius; 'and the bay, too, is always the most
animated part of the city.'

Pompeii was the miniature of the civilization of that age. Within the
narrow compass of its walls was contained, as it were, a specimen of
every gift which luxury offered to power. In its minute but glittering
shops, its tiny palaces, its baths, its forum, its theatre, its
circus--in the energy yet corruption, in the refinement yet the vice, of
its people, you beheld a model of the whole empire. It was a toy, a
plaything, a showbox, in which the gods seemed pleased to keep the
representation of the great monarchy of earth, and which they afterwards
hid from time, to give to the wonder of posterity--the moral of the
maxim, that under the sun there is nothing new.