Again he stopped before the hostelry in the doorway of which he had experienced the torment of hunger. The sailors were in the midst of an orgy. The tavern keeper could barely command respect behind the counter. The slaves, terrified by blows, had taken refuge in the kitchen. Some amphoræ lay broken on the floor letting the wine escape like streams of blood, and the drunken men wallowed in the gurgling liquid as it soaked into the earthen floor, calling for drinks of which they had vaguely heard on distant voyages, or for fantastic dishes conceived by the little tyrants of Asia. One Herculean Egyptian was running on all fours imitating the growl of the jackal, and biting the women who had entered the tavern. Some negroes were disporting with feminine movements, as if hypnotized by the whirling of the umbilical dance. In the corners, on the stone benches, men and women embraced in the crude light of the torches; the smell of bare and sweaty flesh mingled with the aroma of wine; in the atmosphere of viands and of wild-beast odor, seamen, forgetting shame, committed crimes peculiar to the aberration of the epoch.
In the midst of this disorder a few men stood motionless near the counter, arguing with apparent calmness. They were two Roman soldiers, an old Carthaginian mariner, and a Celtiberian. The torpid slowness of their words, which in their anger acquired flute-like tones, their inflamed and blood-shot eyes, and their hawk-like noses, seeming to grow sharper as they talked, revealed that terrible drunkenness, stubborn and quarrelsome, which culminates in murder.
The Roman was telling of his presence in the combat on the Ægates islands, fourteen years before.
"I know you," he said insolently to the Carthaginian. "You are a republic of merchants born for lying and bad faith. If someone who knows how to sell at top prices and cheat the buyer is wanted, I agree that you stand first; but talking of soldiers, of men, we are the best, we sons of Rome, who grasp the plow in one hand and the lance in the other."
He proudly raised his round head with its close-cropped hair and shaven cheeks, on which the chin-straps of his helmet had worn hard calloused lines.
Actæon looked through the window at the Celtiberian, the only one of the group who remained silent, but who had his glittering eyes fastened upon the bare neck showing above the Roman legionary's bronze corselet, as if attracted by the coarse veins outlined beneath the skin. Surely the Greek had seen those eyes before; they were like an old acquaintance whose name one cannot recall. There was something artificial about his person, which the Greek divined with his keen perception.