Ill] ON VARIOUS KINDS OF VILLAS 251 



lighten me, lest I err through ignorance, for I am 

 intending to buy one near Ostia, from M. Seius. 

 But if buildings are not villas unless they contain 

 your £s20 ass that you showed me at your place, 

 then I am afraid I may be buying a Seian ^ house 

 (a white elephant) on the shore instead of a villa. 



8 Now my friend here, Lucius Merula, made me 

 eager to acquire this building by saying, after a 

 visit of a few days to Seius, that he had never been 

 entertained in a villa he liked so well, though he 

 saw there no picture, nor a single bronze or marble 

 statue, nor yet the apparatus for wine-pressing, nor 



9 oil-jars or olive-presses. Why, replied Axius, look- 

 ing at Merula, what kind of a villa is that which 

 has neither the decorations of a suburban villa nor 

 the implements to be found in a farm-house? Well, 

 said Merula, is not your house,^ situated at a bend 

 of the river Velinus, though neither painter nor 



lasterer ever set eyes on it, to be considered just 

 s much a villa as the other at Rosea which is 

 Jorned with plaster-work in the best taste, and is 

 wned by you in common with your ass? Axius 



' Aedes Seianas. Unless there be an allusion here — which 

 no one seems to have noticed — to the celebrated Seian horse 

 which, like the gold of Tolosa, invariably brought disaster to 

 the possessor of it, Varro's words seem pointless. The equus 

 Seianus belonged successively to Cn. Seius, Dolabella, Cassius, 

 and Antony, all of whom perished miserably. Hinc proverbium 

 de hominilms calamitosis ortuttif dicique solitum *' Ille homo habet 

 equum Seianum " (Gellius, iii, 9). 



' Villa ad angulum Velini. This was the villa at which 

 Cicero stayed in 54 B.C. Cf. § 3 of this chapter, with note. 



