WHAT EVER SERVANT GOES FORTH WITHOUT HIS MASTER'S COMMAND, HE SHALL RECEIVE AN HUNDRED STRIPES.
In the porch stood the porter in a green livery, girt about with a cherry-coloured girdle, garbling of pease in a silver charger; and over head hung a golden cage with a magpye in it, which gave us an All Hail as we entred: But while I was gaping at these things, I had like to have broken my neck backward, for on the left hand, not far from the porter's lodge, there was a great dog in a chain painted on the wall, and over him written in capital letters, BEWARE THE DOG. My companions could not forbear laughing; bur I recollecting my spirits, pursued my design of going to the end of the wall; it was the draught of a market-place where slaves were bought and sold with bills over them: There was also Trimalchio with a white staff in his hand, and Minerva with a train after her entring Rome: Then having learnt how to cast accompt, he was made auditor; all exquisitely painted with their proper titles; and at the end of the gallery Mercury lifting him by the chin, and placing him on a judgment-seat. Fortune stood by him with a cornucopia, and the three fatal sisters winding a golden thread.
I observed also in the same place a troop of light-horsemen, with their commander exercising them, as also a large armory, in one of the angles of which stood a shrine with the gods of the house in silver, a marble statue of Venus, and a large golden box, in which it was said he kept the first shavings of his beard. Then asking the servant that had the charge of these things, what pictures those were in the middle? The Iliads and the Odysses, said he, and on the left-hand two spectacles of sword-playing. We could not bestow much time on it, for by this time we were coming to the dining-room, in the entry of which sate his steward, taking every one's account: But what I most admir'd, were those bundles of rods, with their axes, that were fastned to the sides of the door, and stood, as it were, on the brazen prow of a ship, on which was written,
TO CAIUS POMPEIUS TRIMALCHIO OF PRÆTORIAN DIGNITY; CINNAMUS THE STEWARD.
Under the same title also, hung a lamp of two lights from the roof of the room, and two tablets on either side of the door; of which one, if I well remember, had this inscription,