Tiberius, like his predecessor, treated his soldiers occasionally like schoolboys, and when they displeased him, he used to put them on a regimen of barley. Tiberius himself was not a profuse eater; he was rather moderate than otherwise, and when gastronomic extravagancy had reached a high pitch in Rome, he used to dine in public, like the kings of France, but, unlike them, upon cold meat, as a reproof to the luxury of the times. He was not, however, at all moderate in his cups, and the Roman wits, who, like those of Paris, used to make merry epigrams on the worst of their woes, punningly transformed his names of Tiberius Claudius Nero, into Biberius Caldius Mero. He had a reverence too for great draughts, and he once raised a common fellow to the office of quæstor, simply because he could drink off a measure of three pints of wine without drawing breath. Most of the Cæsars must have been very unsatisfactory people to dine with, but none more so than Tiberius, who loved discussion, but if he found himself worsted in it, he invariably ordered his opponent to retire—and commit suicide. A hot bath and a vein or two opened soon disposed of an inconvenient adversary. He used to puzzle his guests with all sorts of strange questions, such as would puzzle even the editor of Notes and Queries to answer. One of these interrogatory puzzles was “the name of the song chanted by the Syrens.” He would not speak the fashionable Greek at table, but conversed in Latin; and his favourite feat at dessert was to run his forefinger through a hard green apple.
Caligula must have been a most unpleasant person to dine with. He entertained himself and his guests with the sight of men tortured on the rack, and he got up little private executions on those occasions to enliven the scene. We read of Her Majesty’s private concerts, and how “Mrs. Anderson” presided at the piano. But the Romans only heard of their Emperor’s killing fun to frighten his guests with, and how his Divinity’s private headsman, Niger Barbatus, performed, as usual, with his well-known dexterity. His frolics were really of a frightful character. It was after a banquet, when the capital jest of slaying had failed to make him as merry as usual, that he rushed to the sacrificial altar, attired in the dress of a victim-killer, that is, with a linen apron for his sole costume. He seized the mallet as though he were about to slay the appointed victim, but he turned suddenly round on the resident official and butchered him instead. And thereat, all who had witnessed the frolicsome deed of their master, declared that “’Fore Jove, ’twas a more capital joke than the last!” His answer to the Consuls who ventured to ask the cause of a sudden burst of laughter in which he indulged at a crowded feast, is well known; “I laugh to think,” said the amiable creature, “that with one wave of my hand I can sweep all your stupid heads off!” His method of loving was equally characteristic. He would fling his terrible arm round the fair neck he professed to admire, and express his delight that he could cut it off when he pleased. There was the brilliant Cesonia; “I cannot tell,” said her imperial lover at a feast, “why it is that I am so fond of that girl. I’ll have her put on the rack for a quarter of an hour, that she may be compelled to tell me the reason.” Blue Beard was the mildest of Quaker gentlemen compared with this Caligula. A lady might as well have been wooed by a boa constrictor.
Claudius Cæsar has hardly had justice done him, as regards his general character, but as my office is only to show how he looked at table, I must be satisfied with making the remark, and pass on to Cæsar at meat. He was no hero, undoubtedly, for he contemplated suicide, for no better reason than having a pain in his stomach after a repast. In this, however, he did not show less courage than Zeno, the father of the Stoics, who having bruised his finger by a fall, went home and hung himself.
He was largely hospitable, and sometimes entertained six hundred guests at a time. He liked on these occasions to see his own children and those of the nobility seated, according to the ancient fashion, at the lower end of the table. It is to be hoped that they were out of ear-shot of what was being said at the upper end. The jokes were sometimes pleasant enough in their way. Thus a Roman nobleman having carried home with him a gold plate from the imperial table, was gently reminded of his theft when, on the next occasion of dining with Claudius, he saw a reproachfully vulgar earthenware platter put down before him.
He was a man of infinite capacity, was the divine Claudius,—that is, in gastronomic matters. He was ever ready to devour, and always did so greedily. He has been known to have suddenly jumped down from his seat in the forum, allured by the smell of roast meat issuing from the priest’s table, in the adjacent temple of Mars. And he would sit down with the reverend gentleman, without waiting for an invitation. It must have surely made the common-place spectators of the feat broadly smile, just as if the twelve judges in Westminster Hall were to leap from their benches, and racing across the churchyard, pour into the first house in the cloisters where the dinner-bell was ringing loudest, and the prandial odour was most savoury.
He ate like Baal, and drank like the beast in Fortunatus. He did both to repletion; but his attendants would then tickle his throat with a feather, and so, by exonerating his stomach, enable the imperial animal to eat and drink again. He contemplated making a decree for the benefit of guests at table, which was of a Rabelaisian indelicacy, and which probably never presented itself to the minds of any other men but Claudius and the Curé of Meudon.
Caligula had more affection for his horse than for anything human. He fed him on gilded oats, and the animal was not a more beastly consul than many who were appointed to that high office. The emperor’s dinner parties must have presented a strange aspect, when the obsequious senators stood, napkin in hand, to wait upon the guests. Fancy the peers of all politics, and the commons of every shade of opinion, all ranged behind the dinner-table at Windsor Castle, in the professional uniform of dingy white waistcoats and napless black coats, with their thumbs duly doubled up in napkins, and all offering anxious service, and “dindon à la daube” to our Sovereign Lady and her guests,—fancy this, I say, and you will have the very remotest idea possible of what the sight was like when the senators changed the plates of Cæsar. The personages and their qualities are all different, but the strangeness of one spectacle could only be matched by that of the other.
Nero (who found sport in sitting in an upper gallery at the theatre, and flinging down nuts upon the bald head of the prætor below) was a very common-place individual at table, but he assembled guests about him who were ever ready to consume his good things and applaud his good sayings. Galba, his successor, was at once gouty and gluttonous. He commenced eating at early dawn, and darkness came over him still with appetite unsatiated. He was as mean, however, as he was voracious. He did once so far whip up his liberal spirit as to compel himself to give a dinner party; but when he read the bill of fare, he fairly burst into tears at the idea of the extravagance and the expense. And yet the most costly dish he could reprovingly point to, when his steward challenged him, was a dish of boiled peas;—but perhaps they were out of season, and Galba knew he should be asked for them at least a guinea a quart! He would never have been guilty of the prodigality of the Emperor Otho, who daily wasted more bread and milk in making cosmetic poultices to lay on his own face than would have served to keep body and soul together in half-a-dozen families. The father of Vitellius more gallantly, when he wished to look well at the centre of his table, was wont to besmear himself with a mixture made up of honey and his mistress’s saliva. He of course deemed it impossible to say which was the sweeter of the two ingredients. This was even worse than Galba, who was, however, essentially greedy; the latter emperor could not eat with pleasure unless he had more before him than he could digest. When his stomach cried, “Hold, enough!” he used it as the Somersetshire lad did his. “Ah!” exclaimed the lad of Wincanton, to certain monitions,—“ye may ake, but, ’vor I ha’ done, I’ll make ye ake worser.” Galba, when no longer able to eat, lay and gazed at what he hoped to attack more successfully after digestion had been accomplished.
Otho is remembered as being the complaisant gentleman who, when Nero had determined to murder his mother, gave an exquisite little supper to both parties by way of a pleasant preliminary. But Otho could at least behave with outward decency, and of this Vitellius was incapable. If he walked through the market-place, he snatched the meat roasting at the cooks’ stalls, and greedily devoured it. He was not more reverent even in the temple; where, taking advantage of his vicinity to the altar, he would sweep the latter of the barley that was on it, consecrated to the god, and swallow the same, like the sacrilegious heathen that he was. When about to fly from the enemies who had overturned his throne, he selected only his cook and his butler to be the companions of his flight, and he took the former dear associate with him, in his own covered chair.
The chief table trait which I can call to mind as connected with Vespasian is, that once a month he went without dinner for a day. Such an observance, he said, saved at once his health and his purse. He had so much the less to pay to his purveyor; and in consequence of the fast, less also perhaps than if he had feasted, to his physician. Both the sons of Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, were modest at the banquet. The former had ceased to be a free liver before he put on the imperial mantle; and as for Domitian, he could wash down his Malian apple with a draught of water, and then address himself to sleep, as though he were a virtuous anchorite, and not the most thirsty drinker of human blood that ever disgraced his race.