Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/163

 looks down upon the company, borne aloft in the hands of that tall attendant! Before you is placed on a tiny plate a crab hemmed in by half an egg—a fit banquet for the dead. The host souses his fish in Venafran oil; the sickly greens offered to you, poor devil, will smell of the lamp; for the stuff contained in your cruets was brought up the Tiber in a sharp-prowed Numidian canoe—stuff which prevents anyone at Rome sharing a bath with Bocchar, and which will even protect you from a black serpent's bite.

My lord will have a mullet dispatched from Corsica or the Rocks of Tauromenium; for in the rage for gluttony our own seas have given out; the nets of the fish-market are for ever raking our home waters, and prevent Tyrrhenian fish from attaining their full size. And so the Provinces supply our kitchens; from the Provinces come the fish for the legacy-hunter Laenas to buy, and for Aurelia to send to market.

Virro is served with a lamprey, the finest that the Straits of Sicily can purvey; for so long as the South wind stays at home, and sits in his prison-house drying his dank wings, Charybdis has no terrors for the daring fisherman. For you is reserved an eel, first cousin to a water-snake, or perchance a pike mottled with ice-spots; he too was bred on Tiber's banks and was wont to find his way into the inmost recesses of the Subura, battening himself amid its flowing sewers.

And now one word with the great man himself, if he will lend his ear. "No one asks of you such 77