resting his foot on the breast of his opponent, crossed his gigantic
arms on his breast, and cast the eyes of a victor around the hall.

Next appeared men who mimicked beasts and their voices, ball-players and
buffoons. Only a few persons looked at them, however, since wine had
darkened the eyes of the audience. The feast passed by degrees into a
drunken revel and a dissolute orgy. The Syrian damsels, who appeared at
first in the bacchic dance, mingled now with the guests. The music
changed into a disordered and wild outburst of citharas, lutes, Armenian
cymbals, Egyptian sistra, trumpets, and horns. As some of the guests
wished to talk, they shouted at the musicians to disappear. The air,
filled with the odor of flowers and the perfume of oils with which
beautiful boys had sprinkled the feet of the guests during the feast,
permeated with saffron and the exhalations of people, became stifling;
lamps burned with a dim flame; the wreaths dropped side-wise on the
heads of guests; faces grew pale and were covered with sweat. Vitelius
rolled under the table. Nigidia, stripping herself to the waist,
dropped her drunken childlike head on the breast of Lucan, who, drunk in
like degree, fell to blowing the golden powder from her hair, and
raising his eyes with immense delight. Vestinius, with the stubbornness
of intoxication, repeated for the tenth time the answer of Mopsus to the
sealed letter of the proconsul. Tullius, who reviled the gods, said,
with a drawling voice broken by hiccoughs,--"If the spheros of
Xenophanes is round, then consider, such a god might be pushed along
before one with the foot, like a barrel."

But Domitius Afer, a hardened criminal and informer, was indignant at
the discourse, and through indignation spilled Falernian over his whole
tunic. He had always believed in the gods. People say that Rome will
perish, and there are some even who contend that it is perishing