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Actæon was conducted to the bath by two young slaves, and as he emerged from this he again met Odacis, who bade him enter the library beyond the peristyle. It was a great room paved with mosaic representing the triumph of Bacchus. The young god, beautiful as a woman, nude, and crowned with vines and roses, was riding on a panther, waving his thyrsus.
Large electrum flagons, blue glass amphoras, tortoise-shell spoons, and small round loaves were crowded between the double row of pearl-bordered plates; bunches of grapes with their leaves had been rolled round ivory vine-stocks after the fashion of the thyrsus; blocks of snow were melting on ebony trays, and lemons, pomegranates, gourds, and watermelons formed hillocks beneath the lofty silver plate; boars with open jaws were wallowing in the dust of spices; hares, covered with their fur, appeared to be bounding amid the flowers; there were shells filled with forcemeat; the pastry had symbolic shapes; when the covers of the dishes were removed doves flew out.
Here the floriated thyrsus, there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now and then a few cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and every style of art, Moorish, Greek, Gothic, friezes, ovules, paintings, vases, guardian-angels, temples, together with innumerable immortelles, and dead rose-bushes. It is a forlorn comedy!
The next event was that Caesar took Pelusium, pretendedly by storm, but really betrayed by Cleopatra. She saw that no one came to her aid and perceived that Caesar was not to be withstood; most important of all, she heard the message sent to her by Thyrsus, and believed that she was really the object of affection.
Instantly the player who personated Agave seized the bloody trophy, and placing it on his thyrsus instead of the one he was carrying, paraded it before the delighted spectators, while he chanted the well-known lines: From the mountain to the hall New-cut tendril, see, we bring Blessed prey!
The actor playing the part of Agave, who in her Dionysiac frenzy has torn in pieces her son and returns from Cithaeron carrying his head on the thyrsus, exchanged this for the bloody head of Crassus, and to the infinite delight of his audience of half-Hellenized barbarians began afresh the well-known song: pheromin ex oreos elika neotomon epi melathra makarian theiran .
The Brownea, which the inhabitants call rosa del monte, or palo de cruz, bears four or five hundred purple flowers together in one thyrsus; each flower has invariably eleven stamina, and this majestic plant, the trunk of which grows to the height of fifty or sixty feet, is becoming rare, because its wood yields a highly valued charcoal.
The soldiers parted the throng as the wind chases the clouds, and the young Israelite pressed forward with his heavy thyrsus fought and pushed his way so valiantly and resolutely through the panic-stricken mob, that he reached the door of his father's house but a few moments later than the soldiers.
Yet so great was Gawtrey's vigour of health, that, after draining wine and spirits enough to have despatched a company of fox-hunters, and after betraying, sometimes in uproarious glee, sometimes in maudlin self-bewailings, that he himself was not quite invulnerable to the thyrsus of the god, he would on any call on his energies, or especially before departing on those mysterious expeditions which kept him from home half, and sometimes all, the night plunge his head into cold water drink as much of the lymph as a groom would have shuddered to bestow on a horse close his eyes in a doze for half an hour, and wake, cool, sober, and collected, as if he had lived according to the precepts of Socrates or Cornaro!
He sent back with the ambassadors his own freedman Thyrsus, a man of understanding, and not at all ill-qualified for conveying the messages of a youthful general to a woman so proud of her charms and possessed with the opinion of the power of her beauty.
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