Ch. 22 - The Banquet of Famine - Page 2

unimaginable effect produced by the event of the siege of Rome on the
characters of her inhabitants might be drawn from all classes, from the
lowest to the highest, from patrician to plebeian; but to produce them
here would be to admit too long an interruption in the progress of the
present narrative. If we are to enter at all into detail on such a
subject, it must be only in a case clearly connected with the actual
requirements of our story; and such a case may be found, at this
juncture, in the conduct of the senator Vetranio, under the influence of
the worst calamities attending the blockade of Rome by the Goths.

Who, it may be asked, knowing the previous character of this man, his
frivolity of disposition, his voluptuous anxiety for unremitting
enjoyment and ease, his horror of the slightest approaches of affliction
or pain, would have imagined him capable of rejecting in disdain all the
minor chances of present security and future prosperity which his
unbounded power and wealth might have procured for him, even in a
famine-stricken city, and rising suddenly to the sublime of criminal
desperation, in the resolution to abandon life as worthless the moment
it had ceased to run in the easy current of all former years? Yet to
this determination had he now arrived; and, still more extraordinary, in
this determination had he found others, of his own patrician order, to
join him.

The reader will remember his wild announcement of his intended orgie to
the Prefect Pompeianus during the earlier periods of the siege; that
announcement was now to be fulfilled. Vetranio had bidden his guests to
the Banquet of Famine. A chosen number of the senators of the great
city were to vindicate their daring by dying the revellers that they had
lived; by resigning in contempt all prospect of starving, like the
common herd, on a lessening daily pittance of loathsome food; by making
their triumphant exit from a fettered and ungrateful life, drowned in
floods of wine, and lighted by the fires of the wealthiest palace of
Rome!

It had been intended to keep this frantic determination a profound
secret, to let the mighty catastrophe burst upon the remaining
inhabitants of the city like a prodigy from heaven; but the slaves
intrusted with the organisation of the suicide banquet had been bribed
to their tasks with wine, and in the carelessness of intoxication had
revealed to others whatever they heard within the palace walls. The
news passed from mouth to mouth. There was enough in the prospect of
beholding the burning palace and the drunken suicide of its desperate
guests to animate even the stagnant curiosity of a famishing mob.

On the appointed evening the people dragged their weary limbs from all
quarters of the