In a richly decorated ancient Roman courtyard lies a bearded figure of an old Patrician. He is dressed in a fawn-coloured toga and rests upon a mauve pillow on a bronze triclinium bench covered with a tiger skin. He is sipping wine impassively from a silver tassa (dish). To the lower right is a marble pool into which a jet of water is spouted from the mouth of a bronze head mounted to a marble pedestal at left, mounted with a lighted lamp, like those of the lararium. Before him is a table sprinkled with rose-petals, and a silver serving dish with boiled eggs and bread-sticks. Also on the table is an archaic votive bronze of a crouching Silenus figure with his legs pulled-up to his body, seen also in, A Garden Altar (Opus CCV, 1879, oil), An Oleander (Fig. 1), and A Dedication to Bacchus, (Fig. 2).
The back wall of the enclosure is an impressive marble bas-relief sculpted frieze after the Farnese Visit of Dionysus and companions to the house of the mortal Ikarios (Fig. 3) at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples.
Alma Tadema visited this museum often during his trip to Rome and Naples in March-June 1878 and undoubtedly saw it there.
A critic for the Illustrated London News aptly commented about this picture:
The objects introduced are archaeologically correct individually, but as some would be found separated more or less widely in a Roman house, there is in their collocation a disregard of Roman usage.
Indeed, the picture seems to be a collection of different antique elements rather than a pictorially accurate view of ancient life. Other pictures by Alma-Tadema employ this same Horatian gentlemen as a model, see Greek Wine (1872, oil), The Siesta (1873, oil), and The Dinner (Greek) (Opus CXI, 1873, oil), all of which feature the same silver serving dish of delicacies as the watercolor An Old Bachelor, as well as Between Hope and Fear (Fig. 4), and The First Course (Opus CCXII, 1880).
