"Bertrand, you are plundering me."
"Oh, monseigneur," replied the conjurer, "you do not understand our resources; say the word, and these fifty hams which confound you—I will put them all into a glass bottle no bigger than your thumb!"
To be sure, the accounts given by Petronius Arbiter, Juvenal, Martial, and other satirists must be taken with some limitation. Yet, making all due allowance for exaggeration, it is hardly to be wondered at that many of the olden rulers and opulent personages, armed with unbounded power and possessed of unlimited riches, should have yielded so abjectly to luxury and vice as to have fully warranted the stricture of Juvenal:
"The baffled sons must feel the same desires,
And act the same mad follies as their sires.
Vice has attained its zenith...."
These accounts, moreover, attested as they are by serious annalists, may not be dismissed as largely imaginative or grossly exaggerated. The strictures on the besetting vices that occur in the contemporary works of historians, moralists, philosophers, and poets are far too vehement and voluminous to leave any doubt of the inordinate abuse of the table among the ancients, particularly among the Romans, when their wealthy capital, as Propertius records, "was beset all round in its own victories." It was the period of insatiable voracity and the peacock's plume. Even Martial was careful to state that it was vices, not personages, to which his scourge was applied. His caustic and highly seasoned epigrams deal largely with the dinner-table, and from these one may derive a most realistic idea of the bill of fare of his contemporaries, as well as of the varied and luxurious character of the presents made to the guests at feasts. The excesses of eating and drinking are roundly denounced by him at every turn, while his picture of the crapulous Santra in the Seventh Book is only equalled by the "Portrait of a Gourmand" of Carle Vernet, or Spenser's etching of "Gluttony" in the "Faerie Queene."
Horace in particular, a scholar, poet, and man of the world, the friend of Mæcenas, and an onlooker and frequenter of society, may be accepted as a competent authority on the table manners and customs of the times. No one more than he was aware of the gross extravagance and intemperance of the age. Nor has any writer depicted his own and the everyday life of the Romans more vividly. To peruse him attentively in the "Satires," "Epistles," "Epodes," and "Odes," is to take part in the feasts, be admitted to the inner circle of the optimates, knock at the door of Lydia, and join in the pageant of the Sacra Via. The table of Mæcenas, the rich voluptuary and dilettante, who had a palace on the Esquiline Hill, where Horace was often a guest, was widely celebrated. As the poet was a visitor also at the palace of Augustus, and numbered among his friends the most eminent men of Rome, he had unusual opportunities to become acquainted both with the vie intime and haute cuisine of his day. While not a gastronomer, he was far from averse to good living, though, from his digestion not being of the soundest, he had frequent cause to rue the sumptuous banquets, borrowed from the Asiatic Greeks, which were in vogue at the time. And while he was a frequent attendant at the entertainments of the wealthy, we nevertheless find him constantly censuring their intemperance and extravagance at table. For himself, he would have "simple dinners, richly dressed," and "let the strong toil give relish to the feast." Rare old Cæcuban, Falernian, and Massic, Mæcenas might pour out at home from his well-filled amphoræ into chased crystal cups and vessels of gold—at the Sabine farm the common Sabine wine in modest goblets would alone be tendered him.
If we may regard the elaborate repast of Nasidienus as a typical one, we may readily conceive the nightmares that must have ensued from such a plenitude of viands and wines and such copious libations. The student of Horace will remember the menu. First a Lucanian boar, surrounded by excitants to the appetite—
"Rapes, Lettuce, Radishes, Anchovy-Brine