Seba’s Invitor was at last announced to the two consuls of the year, Lecanius Bassus and Licinius Crassus, who accepted with tender gratitude the distinguished honour which the enfranchised slave deigned to confer upon them.
After them the same favour was received with the same gratitude by the Agrippas, the Ancuses, the Cossuses, the Drususes, and all those who were the most noble, powerful, and proud in Rome.
The next day, about two o’clock in the afternoon (the repast was to begin at six o’clock), an unusual movement reigned in the Palatine baths, and those of Daphnis, near the Sacred Way. The mediastini kept up a steady fire under the coppers; the capsarii folded with care the clothes of the bathers; the unguentarii sold their oils and unguents; and the fricatores, armed with the strigil—a sort of wooden, iron, or horn spoon—rubbed and scraped the skin before the tractatores came gently to manipulate the joints, and skilfully shampoo the body, which gained by this operation more elasticity and suppleness.[XXXV_3]
The upper classes of the Romans never sat down to table until they had undergone all these preliminaries of minute cleanliness.[XXXV_4]
The future guests return home, after the bath, to employ the skill of the barbers (tonsores), who are in waiting to give more grace to the hair, and remove, with the aid of tweezers and pumice, the first silvery indications of the lapse of years, which, though incessantly effaced, still re-appeared.[XXXV_5]
A more serious occupation succeeded. Epicureans should never neglect their teeth—particularly at the approach of a banquet. Nor did the ingenious gastronomy of the first century of our era neglect to invent tooth-powder, which cleaned the enamel without injuring it, and fortified the gums—those fortresses of mastication. Some persons made use of substances which no one would adopt in the present day, because our delicacy revolts against them.[XXXV_6] But preparations less offensive were employed, and men of good taste, as well as fashionable ladies, extolled ox-gall, goats’ milk, the ash of stags’ horns, of pigs’ hoofs, and of egg-shells.[XXXV_7]
Thus were the teeth equipped, as the comic Plautus has it;[XXXV_8] or, rather, thus were they prepared to undergo the labour required of them.
Those who had had the misfortune to lose some of those powerful gastrophagic auxiliaries substituted false ones of ivory, which art found means to render absolutely similar to their neighbours. The eye was deceived: what more could be required?[XXXV_9]
But the clepsydræ[XXXV_10] and the celebrated clock of the field of Mars[XXXV_11] announce that it is time to put on the white, light robe, a little longer than the pallium of the Greeks, and to which the Latins have given the names of vestis cœnatoria, vestis triclinaria, vestis convivalis.[XXXV_12] This last part of their toilet finished, the guests set out for the magnificent abode of their host, preceded by a few slaves, and followed by their shadows—those hungry hangers-on of whom mention has already been made, and who strive to obtain, on the road, a smile or a word by dint of cringing obsequiousness.
Arrived at the atrium, the crowd of Roman nobles are conducted into the interior of the house by the parasites of Seba. The proud freed-man disturbed himself for nobody; but, like the opulent Greeks, whom he aped, he left to these ignoble familiars the care of replacing him in the honours of his palace.[XXXV_13]