Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

regard the sight of a person unclothed as ridiculous – just as you, Modestus, laugh at a person who cannot sign his own name – as many a noble Goth cannot do, I among them.’
    Modestus, in spite of his crotchets, is a good-humoured man and does not want to pick a quarrel with a guest. He assures Bessas that he is surprised that a man with so noble a name cannot record it on paper or parchment.
    â€˜For what were Greek secretaries created?’ laughs Bessas, ready to be appeased.
    Next, Modestus tells his Thracian guests how proud he is, though a Roman of exalted rank, to be resident in Thrace, once the home ofgreat Orpheus, the musician, and the cradle of the noble cult of Bacchus. ‘Those naked women, Simeon, are your own ancestresses, the Thracian women who piously tore King Pentheus in pieces because he spurned the God’s gift of wine.’
    â€˜My ancestresses all wore long, thick, decent gowns!’ Simeon exclaims; and his indignation raises a general laugh.
    While the appetizers are being cleared away, the dancing-girl gives a clever performance of acrobatic dancing. As a climax to her hops and skips, she walks about on her hands and then, curving her body into a bow and arching her legs right over her head, picks up an apple from the floor with her feet. Continuing to walk on her hands, and even slapping the floor with them in time to the apple-song she is singing, she pretends to debate with herself as to who shall be awarded the fruit. But her mind has long been made up: she lays the apple on the table beside young Belisarius, who blushes and hides it away in the bosom of his tunic.
    Simeon quotes a text from Genesis, how Adam says: ‘The woman gave me the apple and I did eat’; and Modestus a text from the poet Horace: ‘Galatea, wanton girl, Aim an apple at me,’ and everyone is surprised at the unanimity of sacred and profane literature. But the dancing-girl (who was my mistress Antonina) surprises herself by the sudden liking she feels for this tall, handsome youth, who looks at her with such fresh admiration as Adam is credited with having felt at the first sight of Eve.
    Now, this liking came, I think, very close to love, an emotion of which my mistress’s mother had always warned her to beware, as a hindrance to her profession. Antonina was nearly fifteen years old then, a year older than Belisarius, and had already lived a promiscuous life for three years, as public entertainers cannot avoid doing. Being a healthy, vivacious girl, she had thoroughly enjoyed herself and suffered no ill-effects. But amusement with men is an altogether different thing from love for a man, and the result of the look that Belisarius gave her was to make her feel not exactly penitent for the life she had been living – penitence is a declaration of having been in the wrong, and that was never Antonina’s way – but suddenly modest, as if to match Belisarius’s modesty, and at the same time proud of herself.
    I was squatting on the floor in the background all this time, in attendance on my mistress; providing her, when she clapped her hands, with garments or objects from her property-bag.
    Modestus resumed his painfully fanciful description of the meaning of the frieze… ‘There, you will observe, captive to the jolly Deity of Wine, goes the river-god Ganges with green watery looks and cheeks bedewed with tears that mightily swell his heat-shrunk stream, and behind him a company of inky prisoners carrying trays loaded with varied treasure of ivory and ebony and gold and glittering gems (sapphire, beryl, sardonyx) snatched from jet-black bosoms….’ So my mistress Antonina earned the gratitude of all present by calling for her lute.
    She sang a love-song, the work of the Syrian poet Meleager, to a slow, solemn-ringing accompaniment. At the close, not having turned once in Belisarius’s direction, she looked sharply towards him and quickly away; and