81. Romans Fond of the Table. Gourmandizing. The Famous Apicius.—Seldom can there be another age when the importance of good eating and drinking occupies the place that it does in Rome. Vast numbers of coarse-grained people devoid of the least ability to criticize fine bronzes or to comprehend Homer or Virgil can go into ecstasies over superior oysters. Epicurean philosophers can argue that “the true, the beautiful and the good” are to be as genuinely apprehended by the enjoyment of ravishing tastes as by ravishing music. Gastronomy has become a kind of supreme science and art, and no slaves sell for better prices than truly expert cooks.

Repeatedly huge fortunes have been ruined merely because their possessors wished to surpass all rivals with the extravagant refinements of gluttony. Since 69 A.D. and the coming to power of the simpler Flavian Cæsars there has been a fortunate decline in many absurdities, but there are still plenty of people who admire and envy the fame of Apicius, the true example for the gourmand.

Marcus Apicius flourished in Tiberius’s age; and he developed a positive genius for inventing new sources of culinary delight. Every quarter of the Roman world was ransacked to find strange objects whereon to whet his appetite. In Hadrian’s day people continue to eat Apician cakes and Apician sauces, such as are described in his encyclopædic cook books. But although he inherited a hundred million sesterces ($4,000,000), at last his steward reported glumly, “You have only ten million ($400,000) left.” How was it possible for a true gourmand to exist in such poverty?—Apicius, therefore, committed suicide rather than live on commonplace fare! Many will tell you that he showed the right spirit and that his busts stand as a kind of inspiration for dozens of rich epicures in their marble triclinia.

82. Vitellius, the Imperial Glutton.—One of Apicius’s disciples, Vitellius, rose to Empire. In his brief reign (April-December 69 A.D.) before Vespasian’s troops killed him, he taught his subjects how truly a man can live to eat. He had trained himself by the constant use of emetics to devour four heavy meals per day.[45] His senatorial friends, obliged to invite him to their houses, never dared to offer him a dinner costing less than 400,000 sesterces ($16,000). His brother gave him a banquet at which were served “2000 choice fishes and 7000 birds”; but he returned the favor by giving a feast at the imperial palace in which he served his favorites with “The Shield of Minerva”—a kind of salad-supreme made of “the livers of charfish, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingoes, and the entrails of lampreys.” Warships had been sent as far as the Ægean or Spain to round up some of these viands. It was lucky for the treasury that his reign was a very short one.

83. Simple Diet of the Early Romans.—And yet these worthies gorged and guzzled in a city whose founders had been famous for their abstemiousness. For many a generation even prosperous Romans had lived very largely on coarse bread or even on a coarser wheat porridge (puls). Wheat porridge was what supplied the brawn and courage to the legionaries who brought to ruin Pyrrhus, Hannibal, Philip of Macedon, and Antiochus. They were fortunate if their meal was not made of barley, later counted as being barely fit for inferior slaves.

Even senators, we are told, were glad to pick a few green vegetables in their gardens to help out the porridge. On feast days there would be a little pork or bacon from the hanging rack, and if there was a public sacrifice the worshipers might each take home a lump of beef. Such was the dietary of the men who originally made possible the fortunes of an Apicius, and as late as 174 B.C. there were no professional cooks in Rome. Now, however, there are plenty of purple-fringed exquisites who “can tell at first bite whether an oyster comes from Circeii, or the Lucerine rocks or clear from Britain; or at one glance discover the native shore of a sea-urchin.”

84. Bread and Vegetables.—However, there are still multitudes who have to be content with very simple fare, and for them bread in some form is (as with all the Mediterranean peoples) very literally “the staff of life.” In the great mansions there is, of course, a bakehouse for the huge familia, but the bulk of people frequent the numerous public bakeries, near which the mills driven by patient donkeys or by less patient slaves are incessantly grinding flour.

The standard loaves are made very flat, of moderate size, and about two inches thick, their backs often marked with six or eight notches. There is a cheap bread of coarse grain (panis sordidus) for the humblest; a second quality (panis secundus) for better class purchasers, and also the very white and sweet siligineus. You ask for “Picenian bread” if you want fine biscuit, and for libæ if you desire smaller rolls. At feasts there will be wonderful structures of pastry, and by use of honey and chopped fruits sweet “cake” truly delectable comes out of many ovens.

Vegetables and fruits can hardly play the part that they will in later gastronomy: potatoes, tomatoes, oranges, lemons—all these are grievously wanting. But there are admirable cabbages, “the finest vegetable in the world,” declared Cato the Elder, and turnips, the favorite dish of tough old Manius Curius, conqueror of the Samnites. Around Rome, for many miles, are long stretches of profitable truck gardens, which send an incessant supply of artichokes, asparagus, beans, beets, cucumbers, lentils, melons, onions, peas, and pumpkins into the city. A visitor to Rome should promptly accustom himself to garlic; and there is a certain fashionable rusticity about garlic eaters, as if they were trying to bring back the flavor and odor of “the good old times.”

85. Fruits, Olives, Grapes, and Spices.—Italy, of course, is an excellent fruit country. In the markets are apples, pears, plums, and quinces, besides an abundance of very fine nuts, such as walnuts, filberts, and almonds. Peaches, apricots, cherries, and pomegranates are familiar, although some of these are rather late introductions to the peninsula from the East. Of course, in season there never fail magnificent olives and grapes which have abounded in Italy since time immemorial.

A great demand exists, too, for all kinds of salad greens; cresses and fine lettuce, also edible mallows. Poppy-seed mixed with honey is a standard dish for desserts, and such seasonings as anise, fennel, mint, and mustard can be bought in all the innumerable little grocery shops scattered over Rome. In the larger foodshops can be had likewise those Oriental spices in heavy demand by the epicures; and also very costly imported fruits, often preserved with great ingenuity in an age that knows not the use of canning processes, refrigerating plants, or sugar.

86. Meat and Poultry.—The demand for meat has been steadily increasing with the growth of luxury and economic prosperity. Butchers’ shops abound. Poor people buy goats’ flesh, which, however, is completely disdained by the finical. Many citizens nevertheless never taste beef or mutton except when it is distributed in the form of a sacrifice at some of the great public festivals; and even for the rich beef is not in extraordinary favor.

Pork, however, is always popular. The despised Jews never seem to the Romans to show their national folly more clearly than in refusing to eat thereof. Pork in all forms, especially bacon and pork sausages figure in every important banquet; and up in the Apennines in the vast acorn forests, uncounted herds of swine are always fattening to satisfy the incessant demands of the great capital. Poultry is on the whole in greater demand than meat.[46] Squawking coops of common fowl, ducks, and geese are on sale at almost every street corner. There is also good money in raising upon country preserves quantities of partridges, thrushes, and grouse, and even of cranes. In Cicero’s day peacocks made a very fashionable dish, and they are still in request, although losing their old popularity. Hares, rabbits, venison are comparatively cheap, and everybody with a price can buy wild boar at the better purveyors’ shops.

87. Fish in Great Demand.—Rome, however, somewhat resembles Athens in one particular; the butcher shops are less important than the fish dealers’ stalls.[47] Poor people eat salt fish or pickled fish, from little sardines to slices of the big cybium, as forming frequently the only break in an otherwise vegetarian diet. They also make up salt fish with various vegetables and cheese into a kind of fishballs. A man of income, however, is unhappy without his fresh fish daily. This creates a serious and expensive problem for Rome. There are a few eels and pike of good flavor caught right in the Tiber between the bridges, but the great fish supply must be brought from a distance—often in warm weather without aid of refrigerating plants. Frequently along the road from Ostia, and very often down the Via Appia clear from Puteoli can be seen large wagons tearing in hot haste. They bring not government dispatches but fresh fish that will frequently command absurd prices in the city.

Often all kinds of sea-food are transported still alive in small tanks; and sometimes the distance whence they can be imported is astonishing. The best turbots (large flat fish) come from Ravenna on the Adriatic. Eels can be brought in good flavor from Sicily and even from Spain. Gourmands go into ecstasies over oysters from Circeii or Baiæ, but of late people wishing to astonish their fashionable friends have actually claimed to import such shellfish from Britain. The real fish for the epicure, notwithstanding, is by common confession the noble mullet. The flavor of the best specimens is ravishing, and, for a truly large and perfect mullet, the prices paid are astonishing. It is a common story that a certain Crispinus, a satellite of Domitian’s, once gave 6000 sesterces ($240) for a single six-pound mullet; “More than the cost of the slave-fisherman!” indignantly exclaimed the outraged Juvenal.

Many great nobles, however, disdain having to depend on the public markets. At their seaside villas they have huge salt-water tanks and artificial fishponds; therein mullet, turbot, carp, and eels can be bred, fattened, and brought to perfection, and on the day of a feast a slave will hurry them up to Rome still gasping.

88. Olive Oil and Wine: Their Universal Use.—Supplementing the salt fish and bread, the poor of the capital, like all genuine Mediterranean folk, seldom fail to get their oil and wine. Olives are gladly eaten green, ripened, or preserved in great quantities with salt or pickle, but their greatest value comes from their oil. To Rome as to Athens olive oil is not merely food; it largely takes the place of toilet soap, and it supplies also the most common illuminant (see “A Day in Old Athens,” p. 177). It is a complete substitute for butter in the average dietary, often making dry or moldy bread palatable, and as earlier stated (p. 98), it is the basis for most of the ointments and perfumery wherein the average citizen delights.

As for drink, practically every Roman has his wine. There are, indeed, beverages made from wheat and barley, and also from fermented quince juice, but for daily purposes beer and distilled liquors never appear at Italian banquets. Cider is sometimes drunk, and a little so-called “wine” made from mulberries; but the enormous vineyards existing in every part of the country testify to the importance of ordinary grape wine.

Vintners’ stalls are almost as common along the streets as bakeries. The drink they sell in jars, skins, or small flagons is sometimes decidedly resinous after the Greek fashion, and in any case is extremely sour, so that a large admixture of honey is often required to make the favorite sweet mulsum. In any case only sheer barbarians will drink their wine undiluted, and really good wine can stand as much as eight parts of water to one of itself without losing too much flavor.

89. Vintages and Varieties of Wine.—There are as many varieties of wine as there are regions around the Mediterranean. Each produces a vintage that is tolerable, and some are highly select. Your average poor plebeian can get a large jug of palatable stuff for a sesterce (4 cents). The wealthy will think nothing of paying heavily for amphoræ (tall jars) of choice old Setinian (the best wine in Italy), or for Falernian, Albanian, or Massic which count next among the native vintages. If, however, you are giving a formal dinner party, etiquette dictates that at least one imported drink should be served. It makes an excellent impression to bring in Chian, Thasian, or Lesbian from the Ægean, or even Mareotian from Egypt and the splendid Chalybonium from Damascus, the delight of Oriental kings.

In summer time wines, of course, are drunk cold, and at luxurious banquets they are even chilled with snow water. In winter, however, you will often see a kind of bronze samovar, heated by charcoal, used for preparing calda, warm water and wine, heavily charged with spices; and at the cheap eating houses the calda counter is often thronged, especially on chilly afternoons. Common soldiers, slaves, and plebeians of the lowest class have a special beverage all their own, namely posca, which is simply vinegar mixed with enough water to make it palatable. It probably forms a really refreshing drink, if one can acquire the taste for it.[48]

Time fails to tell of various rare vintages which are treasured by the epicures as if worth their weight in gold. In 121 B.C. there was a wonderful yield of wine called Vina Opimia from the then Consul Opimius. By Hadrian’s day the last drops of this precious liquor have long since disappeared, but men still discuss the traditions of its nectarous flavor. In every great house the wine cellar retains a number of web-covered and dirty glass jars carefully sealed with gypsum, and with labels showing that they were laid away perhaps a hundred years ago. As for the undesirability of wine-drinking, that idea has hardly crossed any man’s head; and Horace in Augustus’s day voiced a universal thought when he sang that good wine, “Made the wise confess their secret lore; brought hope to anxious souls, and gave the poor strength to lift up his horn.”

90. Kitchens and the Niceties of Cookery.—With such attention to good eating and drinking a Roman kitchen necessarily requires an elaborate equipment. Cook stoves there are none; but there are extensive masonry or brick hearths. The charcoal fire heats the stones until a broad surface is glowing and ready for remarkable culinary achievements. The head cook in Calvus’s house rejoices in a great battery of copper utensils often of truly elegant shape; and copper ware (more expensive than tin, but far more durable) appears in every Roman kitchen. There are pastry molds, dippers, ladles, great spoons, little spoons, baking pans for small cakes, in short, everything to delight the heart of the housewife of another age.

Nobody expects us to investigate rudely the peculiar dishes evolved in the kitchen of a genuine gourmand. Cookery, the disciples of Apicius aver, is not a common handicraft, but the noblest of sciences. Only a thrice-initiated epicure, a man who has carefully trained his tongue to discriminate the least shades of taste, and his fingers to endure hot viands so that he may pluck out the morsels at precisely the proper temperature, can appreciate many of the refinements.

Calvus laughs, indeed, at a friend of his who lately insisted on serving “a wild boar from Lucania caught when the South wind was blowing,” with “honey apples picked under a waning moon,” and “lampreys caught just before spawning.” Such people will also explain dogmatically that “eggs of oblong shape have better flavor than round ones;” and that “after drinking wine the appetite is better stimulated by dried ham than by boiled sausage,” or that “it spoils the flavor of Massic wine to strain it through linen; but you can clear it by mixing with the lees of Falernian and then adding the yolk of a pigeon’s egg.”[49] A new dish coming loyally into favor is that to which Hadrian is personally so partial—a huge meat pie wherein pheasant, peacock, sow’s udder, and wild-boar flesh are all baked up together.

Needless to say many coarse fellows who boast themselves “epicures” really are merely gluttons. Their appetites have become simply animal. Rome has plenty of twin-brothers to that Santra derided by Martial, who at a banquet “asked three times for boar’s neck, four times for the loin, then for hare, thrushes, and oysters.” After that he bolted sweet cakes, and finally devoid of all decency hid some fruit and a cooked dove in the folds of his gown and sneaked home with a small jar of wine!

91. A Roman Gentleman’s Morning: Breakfast (jentaculum) and the Visit to the Forum.—However, even gluttons like Santra spend all the earlier part of the day under conditions of relative abstemiousness. Romans never eat three hearty meals a day; they merely stay their stomachs until dinner, the event they ordinarily look forward to from early morning. In Calvus’s house everybody is supposed to rise at gray dawn. Just as the first bars of light are making darkness visible a decuria (squad of ten) of slaves under a chamberlain (atriensis) brushes down the atrium and peristylium before the master and mistress rise and are dressed by their body servants. As promptly as possible these noble folk are served, often in their chambers, with their breakfast, the jentaculum—merely a few pieces of fine bread, sprinkled with salt or dipped in wine, and with a few raisins and olives, and a little cheese added. If Calvus is now expecting to go on a journey or to put in a hard day debating in the Senate, he may however call for some eggs and a cup of heartening mulsum.

After that, the clients are let into the atrium, greet their patron with their aves, receive his counter greetings, and get their money doles for service (see p. 150). Next, upon an ordinary day, Calvus calls for one of his second-best togas, and issues forth. If the Senate is convening, he, of course, seeks the Curia. If not, he will often visit his banker upon the Via Sacra to talk over investments, will call at the mansion of a sick friend, will go to witness a will for another friend (a very familiar ceremony), or will go to one of the Basilicas, where still another friend is arguing a case, and expects all his best acquaintance—the more distinguished the better—to sit near him and applaud as he makes his points. During all these rounds Calvus is, of course, followed by some two dozen clients and freedmen as well as by at least as many slaves.

92. The Afternoon and Dinner-Time. Importance of the Dinner (cena).—After that it is near the sixth hour (12 M.). All over Rome work ceases almost automatically; the poorer classes make for the cook shops or itinerant food venders; while people of rank either go home or accept the hospitality of friends for the mid-day lunch, the prandium. This is a real meal, although taken as informally as possible. The food is mostly cold,—bread, salads, olives, cheeses, and meats remaining from last night’s dinner; although sometimes there are hot dishes, such as hams and pigs’ heads, and a good deal of common wine is drunk.

During the next hour everybody who can possibly spare the time takes a short siesta. Rome, in fact, in summer seems to have gone to sleep under the glaring sun. Then for the humbler folk toil resumes; while the fortunate classes make for the great baths where, indeed, under the guise of sociability a great deal of real business can be transacted. By the ninth hour (3. P.M.) Calvus and Gratia alike have usually finished all the formal duties for the day and are being escorted homeward preparatory to the standard climax of every four-and-twenty hours—the dinner.

The dinner (cena) is always eaten at home or at the house of some friend. It is so strictly personal an affair that there are almost no first-class, handsomely appointed, public restaurants in Rome, although there is a superabundance of cheaper eating houses, yet many of these close up during the afternoon. There are almost no other evening entertainments—no receptions, no balls, no theaters, no concerts.[50] But Italians in every age have been a sociable, talk-loving, gregarious people, and the dinner seems to many of them apparently the “be all and end all” of existence.

93. Dinner Hunters and Parasites (“Shadows”).—Wealthy and popular personages never have to bother about the dinner problem; every night they can invite whom they desire, or be sure of a summons to a congenial board. Plenty of substantial citizens are willing and happy to join in a simple family meal in the good old style, the master reclining on a couch, with his wife in a somewhat more conventional attitude beside him, the younger children sitting on a lower couch, the freedmen and more important slaves arranged on benches at a respectful distance.

The city nevertheless abounds in shabby-genteel individuals or social climbers who are miserable every afternoon because some senator or an eques does not tell them, “Come home to dinner!” For example, there is a certain ubiquitous Selius. He hangs about the law courts, and if a pleader is rich and noble, is always interrupting with a loud “Excellent!” or “How clever!” Some afternoons, however, he is seen dragging about, “the picture of misery.” Has his wife just died or his steward embezzled? Not so. He “must dine alone at home.” Thus there develops a type of high-class parasites, “shadows,” men of thick hide and nimble wit who snap at every possible excuse for thrusting into a dinner party, and who are willing to pay for the least honored place on the couches by becoming the butts of the jests, or by bringing laughter on themselves by such feats as swallowing whole cheese cakes at a mouthful.

94. The Standard Dinner Party—Nine Guests.—In Athens in other days a delightful informality prevailed at banquets. The number of guests was seldom fixed, and it was quite proper to intrude two or three more at the last minute. Romans are more grave, methodical, and, be it said, more commonplace. The standard size for a dinner party is determined by an almost inflexible custom—nine. Three couches, three guests to a couch;—that number can concentrate around a single set of serving tables, and let everybody mingle easily in the conversation.

Of course, you can get along with fewer guests, but it is the height of meanness to have more than three to a couch. For a larger affair one must therefore have two or three or more triclinia,—eighteen or twenty-seven guests, etc. Unlike Athens, however, it is perfectly proper to invite high-born ladies to mixed dinner parties, although not to the free and easy drinking bouts that sometimes follow; and the women apparently recline on the couches with perfect decorum and modesty. Nevertheless, “stag” parties are extremely common, and one such, of a very conventional nature, Calvus gave recently in honor of a friend, Manlius, who was just departing as proquæstor (assistant governor) of Africa.

95. Preparing the Dinner and Mustering the Guests.—The guests were invited by personal greetings at the Forum or Baths of Trajan except one who had to be summoned by slave messenger at his home. However two places on the couches have been left vacant deliberately to let Manlius invite any two acquaintances he desired—a frequent prerogative of the guest of honor. The dinner was to be a strictly decorous affair, and, therefore, it did not begin before the tenth hour (4 P.M.). If Calvus had desired a carouse, he might have begun at 3 P.M. in order to get plenty of leeway for a long riotous evening; but “early dinners” are ordinarily as great a reproach in Rome as “late dinners” will be later.

During the morning while the master-cook was tyrannizing over his scullions in the kitchen, and evolving various triumphs in pastry, the chamberlain, an upper-slave, was standing whip in hand over a whole platoon of lower slaves, giving orders like a centurion: “Sweep and scrub the pavement!” “Polish up those pillars!” “Down with all those spider webs!” “One of you clean the plain silver ware, and another the embossed dishes!” The whole mansion, therefore, was furbished up thoroughly, for a few signs of dirt before dinner guests is the most disgraceful of shortcomings.

By the tenth hour the triclinium was in perfect order. The three elegant sofas with purple cushions embroidered with gold thread were arranged around the finest citrus-wood table. Small pillows were laid upon the cushions to mark the positions of the feasters and for them to thrust under their elbows as they lay and ate. Presently the street before the vestibule became jammed with the retinues of the eight guests as each swung up in his litter. Calvus greeted each of the invited friends in the atrium, while the bulk of their escorts turned back home to return again with torches when the party should be over; but each guest was followed into the house by his own special valet, who took off his shoes as soon as he stretched himself out upon the couch, and then stood by to help Calvus’s servants serve his own master. The triclinium was thus a decidedly crowded place, with eight strange slaves present, besides a mobilization of all the handsomest and most efficient of the house servants.

96. Arrangement of the Couches: Placing the Guests.—The guests were each in the gay synthesis or other gala costume, and quite in the mood to obey the grave nomenclater, a handsome and experienced slave of the host who pointed out to each his place on the couches. This location of feasters, however, was an extremely solemn business. How many social feuds have been created by blunders concerning it! Nay, if the guest chances to be a public character, a certain position is really a matter of legal right to many dignitaries and its refusal possibly can give matter for a lawsuit.[51] The three couches were set around three sides of the table, the fourth being left open for the service. Approaching from the open side that couch to the right was reckoned the first (summus), then the middle one opposite (medius), then the one on the left (imus).

The best place of all was reckoned to be the third position on the middle couch “The Consul’s Post,”[52] and here, of course, Manlius was consigned. Calvus by custom took the host’s place, on the third couch, but nearest the guest of honor. The distribution of the other places was a matter for great discrimination, but peace was kept by placing the two African gentlemen whom Manlius brought, upon the middle couch beside him, and setting the young eques Nepos (the junior of the company) at the outer end of the third couch. All nine, therefore, spread themselves out unconventionally and chattered about the newest jockeys in the circus, while a troupe of slave-boys, half-stripped but pomaded and curled, passed around silver bowls of water and fine towels for washing and wiping the hands.[53] This ceremony happily accomplished, a tall upper slave magnificently arrayed nodded from the doorway to Calvus that the cook had declared himself ready, and Calvus nodded back his approval. The dinner could begin.

97. Serving the Dinner.—The giver of this feast only desired a grave and conventional dinner for sedate people, and a strictly normal order was followed without epicurean niceties or a low revel as a climax. No tablecloths; the serving boys running to and from the kitchen set on the beautiful polished surface of the table before the guests first a preliminary course, the gustatio, supposed to stimulate the appetite. On silver dishes were served some choice crabs, salads, mushrooms, and also eggs. The guests ate these without forks, dexterously picking up the food in their fingers. The handsomely embossed silver cups were handed about filled with sweet mulsum properly diluted in order not to befuddle the intellect; after that followed the formal dinner itself.

At really elaborate feasts there would be six or even seven courses, but Calvus had merely ordered the orthodox number of three—a succession of daintily cooked meats and fish tastily garnished with vegetables, but with no rarities such as heathcock from Phrygia or sturgeon from Rhodes. The honor of the house, however, required that every viand should be arranged carefully on its dish, and every dish upon its tray by a special slave, the structor, a true artist, who also acted as master carver, cutting up a roast of boar with his knife keeping time to a flute-player. The mere fact, however, that one man was allowed both to arrange the dishes and then to do the carving was a sign that Calvus was among the less ostentatious senators.

Between each course water and towels were again passed about, and the guests washed their hands. Finally for dessert there was brought on a great quantity of curious pastry—artificial oysters and thrushes filled with dried grapes and almonds; and a great dish whereon stood an image, made of baked dough, of the orchard god Vertumnus, holding a pastry apron full of fruits, while heaped around his feet were sweet quinces stuck full of almonds, and melons cut into fantastic shapes.[54]

98. The Drinking Bout (Comissatio) after the Dinner.—This concluded the regular dinner, but Calvus had invited his friends (since Manlius had much to talk about) to stay to a comissatio, a social drinking spell afterwards. The nine guests rose and adjourned to the host’s private baths, whence, after they had refreshed themselves and taken a turn around the colonnades in the peristylium, they returned to the triclinium to find that the slaves had changed all the couch covers and pillows, had swept the floor, and had actually brought in new tables. It was now quite dark, beautiful silver lamps gleamed on high against the fretwork of the ceiling and on the tall inlaid sideboard stood two great silver tankards; one was filled with snow;[55] the other had a charcoal brazier beneath it and steamed with hot water.

If Calvus’s party had now been composed of younger merrymakers, some one would have called out, “Let’s drink in the ‘Greek style’ and elect a king”; and everybody would have joined in throwing dice to select the rex, or lord of the revels. That potentate would have been obligated to decide how much water was to be mixed with the wine, and how many cups must be drunk to the health of each feaster’s lady love, and to arrange the forfeits, riddles, and practical jokes inseparable from a jolly evening. If the party had been still more uproarious, Spanish dancing girls might have been provided by the host, or a corps of pantomimes, acrobats, or farce players, and the whole scene could have ended in a very coarse orgy.

In the present case Calvus had decided to let his friends merely drink enough to loosen their tongues and to exchange their best wit and wisdom. The slaves, therefore, brought in with decent solemnity the little images of the family lares, and a small smoking brazier, and Calvus cast a trifle of meal and salt and a few drops of wine upon the fire. “The gods are propitious!” announced a slave in loud voice, after which the guests preserved a reverent silence for an instant, to be followed by vigorous conversation the moment the divine images were carried out.

99. Distribution of Garlands and Perfumes. Social Conversation.—While one corps of slaves was passing about the wine, asking each guest whether “Hot?” or “Cold?” others were distributing wreaths of fragrant flowers, to put on the forehead and even around the neck (by their odor supposedly preventing drunkenness) and also little alabaster vials of choice perfumes which the guests immediately broke and poured upon their hands and hair. Then followed long conversations, grave or gay according to the mood. Calvus had not provided any professional entertainers, but all through the drinking a good flute-player and a good harpist hid behind a curtain kept up a soft pleasing melody.

While Manlius and the older guests discussed the control of the Moorish tribes of Numidia, young Nepos and one or two others found much to say about a new “Thracian” who had just fought at the Flavian Amphitheater, and presently all the others pressed the host (knowing him to be a little vain on the subject) to show some new moves in “robbers” (latrunculi, a board game with men extremely like checkers) which he had evolved with peculiar pride. It would have been good form also to have played at making impromptu verses, or at matching riddles, but for a Roman gentleman to indulge in anything like singing a song, even before a group of friends, would have been undignified; Nero possibly shocked public opinion even more by appearing openly as a common theater performer than he did by killing his mother!

At last the evening ended. It was only 8 o’clock by later reckoning; but everybody had to be up again by gray dawn. The streets were already dark and deserted save by prowlers and the police-watch. “My shoes, boy,” called Manlius to his valet. All the other guests imitated him, and already their retinues with slaves and torches were crowding in the vestibule. The eight diners departed after thanking Calvus. The slaves cleared out the triclinium, and quenched the lights. Soon the whole domus was asleep.

100. Elaborate and Vulgar Banquets. Simple Home Dinners.—Such was a very decorous and ordinary dinner. It could easily have run off to greater follies and vastly greater magnificence, useless to describe. Space lacks, also, to describe the magnificent imperial banquets at the palace when all the gold, glitter, and luxury of the capital is on display. Calvus is no great philosopher, or he might have followed the mode and insisted upon his guests conversing solely about the “Stoic Conception of Duty”; or the “Immortality of the Soul.”

A host of another type might have imitated certain very mean patrons who would invite poor clients to fill up the triclinium and then deliberately serve them with cheap wine and coarse scrappy food, while the best was being set before himself and the guests of honor. Such great men were also equal to pettiness of stationing special slaves behind each less-favored guest to watch lest the latter should with his finger nails pick out the gems set in the drinking cups. Pliny the Younger has already recorded his emphatic opinion of noblemen who will not serve dependents with as good fare as they get themselves,—declaring that if the host must economize, he should eat and drink nothing better that night than what he gives his clients and freedmen.

Of course, many an evening meal is far simpler than the one just described. If the triclinium is not full, Calvus and Gratia may sometimes offer their near acquaintances merely “some lettuce, three snails, two eggs, spelt mixed with honey and snow, olives from Spain, cucumbers, onions, and a few like delicacies.” Old Roman simplicity still—but every dish will be perfect of its kind, and the cookery excellent; and even the modest Calvi are none too fond of this diet praised by the philosophers. Rome is not merely the mistress of the world, she is the citadel of the gourmands.