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 city towards the Pincian Hill. Many of them died on
the way; many los