Of the Temple’s admirable pavement.
When I had read those inscriptions, I admired the beauty of the temple, and
particularly the disposition of its pavement, with which no work that is
now, or has been under the cope of heaven, can justly be compared; not that
of the Temple of Fortune at Praeneste in Sylla’s time, or the pavement of
the Greeks, called asarotum, laid by Sosistratus at Pergamus. For this
here was wholly in compartments of precious stones, all in their natural
colours: one of red jasper, most charmingly spotted; another of ophites; a
third of porphyry; a fourth of lycophthalmy, a stone of four different
colours, powdered with sparks of gold as small as atoms; a fifth of agate,
streaked here and there with small milk-coloured waves; a sixth of costly
chalcedony or onyx-stone; and another of green jasper, with certain red and
yellowish veins. And all these were disposed in a diagonal line.
At the portico some small stones were inlaid and evenly joined on the
floor, all in their native colours, to embellish the design of the figures;
and they were ordered in such a manner that you would have thought some
vine-leaves and branches had been carelessly strewed on the pavement; for
in some places they were thick, and thin in others. That inlaying was very
wonderful everywhere. Here were seen, as it were in the shade, some snails
crawling on the grapes; there, little lizards running on the branches. On
this side were grapes that seemed yet greenish; on another, some clusters
that seemed full ripe, so like the true that they could as easily have
deceived starlings and other birds as those which Zeuxis drew.
Nay, we ourselves were deceived; for where the artist seemed to have
strewed the vine-branches thickest, we could not forbear walking with great
strides lest we should entangle our feet, just as people go over an unequal
stony place.
I then cast my eyes on the roof and walls of the temple, that were all
pargetted with porphyry and mosaic work, which from the left side at the
coming in most admirably represented the battle in which the good Bacchus
overthrew the Indians; as followeth.