I also took note of a group of runners, in the portico, taking their exercise under the eye of an instructor, and in one corner was a large cabinet, in which was a very small shrine containing silver Lares, a marble Venus, and a golden casket by no means small, which held, so they told us, the first shavings of Trimalchio's beard.

I asked the hall-porter what pictures were in the middle hall.

"The Iliad and the Odyssey," he replied, "and the gladiatorial games given under Laenas." There was no time in which to examine them all..