Marcus Caius  to
Lucian Septimus
 

Greetings,
 

For once that old quack knew what he was talking about--the sea air here has really been good for me.  "Go to Africa," he said, and I was sure he was after either my daughter or one of my slave girls, but he talked me into it, and I haven't felt better in ages.  Yesterday I even caught myself ogling the girls in the market, and the thoughts I was thinking then I hadn't thought in years.

But another kind of sensation will take up most of my time in this letter, Lucian.  They grow a kind of fruit down here that I'd never seen or heard of before, and I would rate that discovery second only to that of my newfound health.  They call the fruit citrus, and so far I've seen three varieties:  an orange one, a green one and a yellow one.  The colors are brilliant enough to measure other colors by, and except for the color, they all have pretty much the same appearance, inside and out.

Picture a globe the size of a child's fist, and then imagine that you can take it at two opposite points and pull outward until those points are points, and until the globe is halfway from oval to round.  If you can do that, you have a good idea of the shape of the fruit.

The skin is about a quarter of an inch thick, and made up of two layers, neither of which is eaten.  The outer layer is shiny, and textured as if its smooth surface had been punctured by hundreds of pin pricks.  The inner layer of the skin is off-white and pithy.

The edible part of the fruit is divided into approximately ten even sections, as if you had cut it in half five times along the same axis (the one between the ends of the oval).  Each one of the sections has a thin, strong wall around it, and each section can be eaten whole.

The orange fruit has a delicious flavor, but is a little too sweet.  The green one is nothing spectacular.  But the yellow one--the yellow one is something else again.  Walk through a grove of them when the fruit are ripe and you would swear paradise could smell no better.  (Or that the smell could cover that of the sewers.)  I have never smelled anything fresher.

And the taste!  It is sour--deeply sour and delicately sour.  Take a section and chew it, or cut a fruit in half across the sections and squeeze the juice into your mouth--the sensation is unbelievable.  You feel as if your mouth will never unpucker.

The natives here sweeten the juice, and make a beverage more delicious than the emperor's wines.  They also use the juice to flavor fish and other foods.  But most of all I like them plain.  I'll send you a crate of them in a couple of days--use them with a little imagination and you can be the talk of Rome.
 

Marcus