[
53]
But a clerk quite interrupted his passion for the
dance by reading as though from the gazette: “July the 26th. Thirty boys and
forty girls were born on Trimalchio's estate at Cumae. Five hundred thousand
pecks of wheat were taken up from the threshing-floor into the barn. Five
hundred oxen were broken in. On the same date: the slave Mithridates was led to
crucifixion for having damned the soul of our lord Gaius. On the same date: ten
million sesterces which could not be invested were returned to the reserve. On
the same day: there was a fire in our gardens at Pompeii, which broke out in the
house of Nasta the bailiff.”
“Stop,” said Trimalchio, “When did I buy any gardens at Pompeii?”
“Last year,” said the clerk, “so that they are not entered in
your accounts yet.” Trimalchio glowed with passion, and said, “I
will not have any property which is bought in my name entered in my accounts
[p. 95] unless I hear of it within six months.” We now had a
further recitation of police notices, and some foresters' wills, in which Trimalchio
was cut out in a codicil; then the names of bailiffs, and of a freed-woman who had
been caught with a bathman and divorced by her husband, a night watchman; the name
of a porter who had been banished to Baiae; the name of a steward who was being
prosecuted, and details of an action between some valets.
But at last the acrobats came in. A very dull fool stood there with a ladder and made
a boy dance from rung to rung and on the very top to the music of popular airs, and
then made him hop through burning hoops, and pick up a wine jar with his teeth. No
one was excited by this but Trimalchio, who kept saying that it was a thankless
profession. There were only two things in the world that he could watch with real
pleasure, acrobats and trumpeters; all other shows were silly nonsense.
“Why,” said he, “I once bought a Greek comedy company, but I
preferred them to do Atellane plays,1 and I told my flute-player to have Latin
songs.”
