WITH LUCULLUS AND APICIUS
"Whether woodcock or partridge, what does it signify, if the taste is the same? But the partridge is dearer, and therefore thought preferable."—Martial, Epigrams, xiii. 76.
Passing from Greece to Italy, we find frugality to have been a prominent trait of the early Romans, and porridge to have been the national dish until wheaten bread was introduced from Athens. Like the Greeks, who received their initial lessons from the Persians, the Romans derived their knowledge of cookery from Attica, whence they imported their first masters. The Romans proved apt scholars, and soon outrivalled their instructors in the pleasures of the table, where the pomp, luxury, and licentiousness of the times were carried to their furthest limit. It is indeed well nigh impossible to conceive the splendour, prodigality, and sensuality that prevailed during the Republic and the Empire, when fabulous revenues were squandered at a single feast, and gluttony and intemperance were the gods of the hour.
PORTRAIT DU GOURMAND
After Carle Vernet
It was towards the decline of the Republic, during the period of Pompey the Great, Cæsar, and Lucullus, that, dispensing with the culinary preceptors of Greece, the Roman cuisine attained its greatest celebrity.
For it was at this period that the great ravagers of the world, who were to carry the name and arms of Rome into distant lands, brought their cooks with them, who vied with one another in contributing the most appetising dishes of various countries. It was then when Antony, intoxicated with the spoils of conquest and more than usually pleased with the artist of his kitchen, sent for him at the dessert and presented him with a city of thirty-five thousand inhabitants—an example followed in a minor way by Henry VIII of England, who rewarded his cook for having composed a pudding of especial merit by the gift of a manor. It was then that the Sybarites bestowed public recompense and marks of distinction upon those who gave the most magnificent banquets, and especially upon those who invented new dishes.[2] It was then that the practised epicure professed to distinguish by the taste from what locality of Italy a wild boar had been procured, or whether a pike had been caught in the lower or upper Tiber. Thus Horace, in one of the "Satires":