Sitting hard by in a prominent place was Marcus Ausonius, the former inspector of the guest-house. Huddled up, crouching on his heels by the massive side of the merchant, the meagre little man resembled a featherless and shivering chicken.
Julius Mauricus, the scoffer, was there, trying to make his dry nervous body perspire. He was lean as a stick.
Garguillus, too, was stretched on the mosaic floor, still well-fed, soft as gelatine, enormous in bulk as the carcass of a slain boar. A Paphlagonian slave, panting under the protracted effort, was scrubbing the blubber of his back with a piece of damp cloth; while the now wealthy poet, Publius Porphyrius, was staring in a melancholy manner at his own gouty legs.
"Do you know, my friends?" he asked, "about the letter from the white bulls to the Roman Emperor?"
"One line only: 'Conquer Persia, and we are doomed!'"
Undulations of laughter heaved the body of Garguillus.
"By Pallas, it's telling and to the point! If the Emperor comes back in triumph from Persia, he'll offer in sacrifice to the Olympians such masses of white bulls that these animals will get rarer than the bull Apis!... Slave! Rub the small of my back, the small of my back!... harder, harder!"
And, in turning over, his body made the sound, against the mosaic floor, of a great bundle of wet linen flopped on the ground.
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Julius, "they say from the Isle of Taprobane, in the Indies, they're sending great numbers of very rare white birds and big wild swans from Scythia. All that for the gods! The Roman Emperor is fattening the Olympians. It's true they have had time to get hungry since the days of Constantine!"
"The gods guzzle while we starve!" cried Garguillus. "It's now three days since one has been able to get a decent Colchis pheasant in the market, or even a tolerably eatable fish."
"He's a greenhorn and an innocent!" remarked the corn-merchant.
"A greenhorn, I tell you!" resumed Bouzaris. "I say that if you pinched the nose of your Roman Cæsar you'd find nothing but milk in him like a babe of two weeks!... He wanted to lower the price of bread; forbade us to sell it at the price we set on it! And so he brought four hundred thousand measures of wheat from Egypt...."