The five succeeding emperors,—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines,—Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius,—governed the world during the eighty years which are said, but questionably I think, to have been the happiest years of the human race. There is little on record as to how these potentates disported themselves at table. Trajan, indeed, is known to have been a fearful drinker; but he loved a quiet, unceremonious dinner at the house of a friend of modest degree,—for there he tippled and talked to his heart’s content, and willingly forgot that he was Cæsar. Hadrian is remembered as the first Roman emperor who wore a beard. He had warts on his throat, and he did not like that these should be seen by his guests at table. He once gave an entertainment which cost upwards of two millions sterling, (when Verus was made Cæsar,) and he was sorry for it through the remainder of his life. Many a man of far humbler degree has committed the same kind of extravagance, and experienced the same enduring repentance. Antoninus kept the table of a country gentleman; and Marcus Aurelius dined alone, while Commodus, his son, played at his knee. The board of that son resembled that of Vitellius, and he fell from it one day, full of drugged wine administered to him by a concubine, and was strangled as he lay beneath the table, drunk, and deserving of his fate.
The modest Pertinax was less happy as emperor than when, as a simple official, he had charge of the provisions of Rome. Didius Julianus was deep in the luxuries of the table, and not nearly so deep in wisdom, when he made a bid for the diadem, a few uneasy dinners in the palace, and death. Septimius Severus, cared less for the splendour of his table than the consolidation of his power, but his banquets were choice things, nevertheless. His sons, Caracalla and Geta, exemplified their fraternal unanimity by keeping different tables. They never sat down together at the same board; and there were two factions in the court, something like that of George the Second, at St. James’s, and the son whom he hated, Frederick, Prince of Wales, in Leicester Square. Macrinus was a coarse feeder, and in everything he presented a remarkable contrast with his successor Heliogabalus.
Heliogabalus lay on couches stuffed with hare’s down, or partridge feathers. Ælius Verus reclined on cushions of lily and rose-leaves. The first-named monster had his funny moments; and sometimes he would invite a certain number of bald men, or of gouty men, or grey-headed men, and he was particularly amused at a company of fat men, so crowded together that they could find room only to perspire. “One of his favourite diversions consisted in filling a leathern table-couch with air instead of wool; and while the guests were engaged in drinking, a tap, concealed under the carpet, was opened, unknown to them,—the couch sank, and the drinkers rolled pell-mell under the sigma, to the great delight of the beardless emperor.” He was the first Roman emperor who wore garments of pure, unmixed silk. He cared little for poets or philosophers; but he gave liberal premiums to the inventors of new sauces, provided these pleased his palate. If he disliked them, the inventor was condemned to eat of nothing else, until he had discovered a new condiment to win the imperial sanction. Heliogabalus and George I. had this in common, that they both liked fish a trifle stale. Thus, it is known that George never cared for oysters till their shells began spontaneously to gape; and the Oriental master of the Roman empire, who made a barber prefect of the provisions, would never eat sea-fish except at a great distance from the sea, when they acquired the taint he loved. His delight then was to distribute vast quantities of the rarest sorts, brought at an immense expense, to the peasants of the inland country. The table of his successor, Alexander Severus, was that of a gentleman. Its master was the first Roman emperor to whom that title can be incontestably given; and he loved to have around him accomplished guests of all varieties of opinion; and this is much more than can be said for that huge and hungry Goth, Maximin. The Gordians brought back some of the elegances of social life, which the uncleanness and severity of Maximin had banished; but at both the private and public, the humble and the imperial, tables of Rome, there must have been small ceremony and permanent fear during the brief and troubled reigns of the foolish men who purchased the right of dining in an imperial mantle by being speedily enveloped in a bloody shroud. Gallienus, alone, shines out upon the list as the very prince of cooks; and if Carême had possessed half the enthusiasm which he so warmly affected, he would have named his son and heir after this imperial inventor of ragoûts,—who was also the accelerator of the ruin of Rome. All the temperance of the Gothic Claudius could not restore the remnant of ancient moderation, which had been destroyed by that imperial maker of stews, the ever hungry and cruel Gallienus. Aurelian failed, like Claudius, but the emperor Tacitus was more successful, and the descendant of the great historian, even during his short reign, roused the nobles to a sense of dignity, and honoured science by inviting its disciples to his well-ordered table.
A subsequent emperor, Carus, was perhaps one of the most frugal, by habit and inclination, that ever wore the imperial sword upon his thigh. Carus was at once moderate and mirthful. He was seated on the grass, supping on dry bread and grey peas, when the Persian ambassadors came to him, suing for peace. “The matter just stands thus, gentlemen,” said the emperor, opening his mouth widely, at the same time, to insert a shovel-like spoonful of peas; “if your master does not acknowledge the superiority of Rome, I will render Persia,”—and here he took off the cap which he wore to conceal his entire baldness,—“I will render Persia as destitute of trees as my head is of hair.” Having said which, he resumed swallowing his peas, and left the delegates to digest his remark.
We are accustomed to consider Diocletian dining at Salona, on the cabbages he had reared there, as an emperor in reduced circumstances; but the truth is, that the palace, gardens, and table of the ex-emperor were all of a splendid character, and if his table was adorned by the cabbages he had tended to a prize perfection, he was far too wise an epicure to confine himself to that dish alone.
The great Constantine appears under a double aspect, and the least favourable one is offered to us in his maturer years, when he surrendered himself more unreservedly than before to good living, for which he had peculiar facilities at Byzantium, took to wearing false hair, and became altogether a ridiculous old dandy and bon vivant; the ridicule of whom, by his clever and unscrupulous nephew, Julian, I am not at all surprised at; for what is so eagerly seized upon by affectionate nephews as the foibles of their indulgent uncles? Julian was possessed just of that scampish sort of nepotism which leads the modest young relative to eat an uncle’s dinners and deride the donor. Julian’s own table would have gained the contempt of an editor of the Almanach des Gourmands. Its frugality was frigidly parsimonious in its character. The philosophic emperor was a vegetarian, and even of vegetables he ate sparingly, but swiftly, leaping up, as it were, from dining thereon, to hurry to his books or the public business, which he quitted reluctantly when the hour of supper summoned him even to a more frugal meal than the dinner, which he despatched with a celerity not at all admired by those who dined with him. Nothing disgusted him so much as a gross feeder, and probably nothing ever so greatly surprised him as when, on taking possession of Constantinople, he found one thousand cooks waiting to prepare the imperial dinner! A thousand cooks for a man who could dine on a boiled turnip! The Constantines had been accustomed to dine upon birds from the most distant climates, fish from the most remote seas; to have a dessert of fruits out of their natural seasons, and to drink foreign wines cooled in the summer snows of the lofty hills. All this was as useless to a man who needed but a crust and an apple to calm his appetite, as were the golden basins and the jewelled combs to an emperor like Julian, who seldom washed even his face, and who not only never cleaned his hair, but felt the lively luxury of leaving it undisturbed. Julian in this respect was like Anthony Pasquin, who was said to have died of a cold caught by washing his face. There was a famous Irish member of Parliament, who, unlike Julian, was a glutton at dinner, but who was remarkable for his religious abstinence from all ablution. His son was one day standing in the bow-window of White’s, when the sire was passing down the opposite side of the street. I believe it was the noble lord who, when Mr. Gunter in the hunting-field remarked that his horse was too “hot” to ride comfortably, suggested to the equestrian pastrycook that he should ice him.—I believe it was the same noble lord who, on the first occasion alluded to above, said to “Jack T——,” “Jack! what does make your father’s hands so dirty?” “Well!” said the old Colonel’s affectionate son, “I believe it arises from a bad habit he has of putting them up to his face!” And so of Julian we may say, that if his hands were innocent of water, his famous beard was dirtier than his hands, and that it was not pleasant to lie near the emperor at dinner, unless guardedly ensconced to the leeward of his sacred and dirty person.
If Gratian, who was the first Roman emperor who refused the pontifical robe, had lived but as became the master of an imperial household, his sacrifice would have had more merit; but the emperors of these times had curious ideas as to duties. Thus the second Valentinian delighted in giving splendid dinners, but at these entertainments he always, himself, fasted;—a most discouraging course for the guests,—but he thought there was merit in the work. But Theodosius was at least as good a man, and we know that he enjoyed the sensual and social pleasures of the table without excess; and the same taste was shown by that emperor Maximus, who is said to have espoused Helena, the daughter of a wealthy Caernarvonshire lord, and to have renewed the popularity of boiled leeks in Rome; and this was a better taste than that of Honorius, who took to feeding poultry and eating them, while Stilicho ruled the empire, and the eunuchs lived on the very fat of the land. It was decidedly better too than the taste which led Valentinian the third, after dining with Petronius Maximus and winning his money, to carry off his wife; a Tarquinian insult, which he paid for, however, with his life. Avitus could indulge in such freaks, however, with impunity; and he not only seduced Roman matrons, but invited their husbands to dinner, where the slaves smiled at the imperial raillery directed against them while the courses were changing! His successor, Majorianus, was a man of another stamp, and I would fain believe the pleasant anecdote which says of him that he went to Carthage in the disguise of his own ambassador, and dined with Genseric the king, who was especially chafed when he afterwards discovered that he had entertained, without knowing it, the Emperor of the Romans. Anthemius, if he be famous for little else, is at least famous for the superb wedding-dinner with which he celebrated the nuptials of his daughter with Count Ricimer, a wicked son-in-law who devoured the dinners of his “beau père,” and robbed him of his estate;—no uncommon course for sons-in-law to take. The count placed on the uneasy and vacant throne the epicurean Glycorius, who, having murdered Julius Nepos after a banquet, was made Archbishop of Milan, as one of the recompenses of the act. And then the empire fell into the delicate hands of the weak and beautiful Augustulus, who could not find wherewith in the treasury to maintain a decent table, and who was glad to accept clemency and an annuity from Odoacer, whereby he was enabled, upon six thousand pieces of gold annually, to keep such state in the Castle of Lucullus in Campania, that the surrounding gentry visited him in shoals, and ate his dinners by way of proof that they looked upon him as a man of the highest respectability.
And this was the end of the “twelve vultures,” seen by Romulus, foreshadowing the “twelve centuries,” more or less, that were to mark the duration of the dominion which he founded; a dominion commenced by a hungry adventurer, and which crumbled to nothing in the hand of that Augustulus, who was but too rejoiced to take in exchange for it, the bed, board, and six thousand a year with which he set up as a hospitable country gentleman, in his rustic villa, on the slopes of Campania.