vows a thousand trees to his
protector. It is too bad that we do not know how the vow was to be
paid--not by cutting down the trees, we feel sure. One line of Victor's
little poem is worth quoting in the original. He thanks Silvanus for
conducting him in safety "through the mountain heights, and through Tuique
luci suave olentis hospites." Who are the _hospites_? The wild beasts of
the forests, we suppose. Now _hospites_ may, of course, mean either
"guests" or "hosts," and it is a pretty conceit of Victor's to think of
the wolves and bears as the guests of the forest-god, as we have ventured
to render the phrase in the translation given above. Or, are they Victor's
hosts, whose characters have been so changed by Silvanus that Victor has
had friendly help rather than fierce attacks from them?

A very modern practice is revealed by a stone found near the famous temple
of AEsculapius, the god of healing, at Epidaurus in Argolis, upon which
two ears are shown in relief, and below them the Latin couplet:[64] "Long
ago Cutius Gallus had vowed these ears to thee, scion of Phoebus, and now
he has put them here, for thou hast healed his ears." It is an ancient
ex-voto, and calls to mind on the one hand the cult of AEsculapius, which
Walter Pater has so charmingly portrayed in Marius the Epicurean, and on
the other hand it shows us that the practice of setting up ex-votos, of
which one sees so many at shrines and in churches across the water to-day,
has been borrowed from the pagans. A pretty bit of sentiment is suggested
by an inscription[65] found near the ancient village of Ucetia in Southern
France: "This shrine to the Nymphs have I built, because many times and
oft have I used this spring when an old man as well as a youth."

All of the verses which we have been considering up to this point have
come down to us more or less carefully engraved upon stone, in honor of
some god, to record some achievement of importance, or in memory of a
departed friend. But besides these formal records of the past, we find a
great many hastily scratched or painted sentiments or notices, which have
a peculiar interest for us because they are the careless effusions or
unstudied productions of the moment, and give us the atmosphere of
antiquity as nothing else can do. The stuccoed walls of the houses, and
the sharp-pointed stylus which was used in writing on wax tablets offered
too strong a temptation for the lounger or passer-by to resist. To pe