"Do you set any store by good name, which we find
Is more welcome than song to the ears of mankind?
Magnificent turbot, plate richly embossed,
Will bring infinite shame with an infinite cost.
Add kinsmen and neighbours all furious, your own
Disgust with yourself, when you find yourself groan
For death, which has shut itself off from your hope,
With not even a sou left to buy you a rope.
"'Most excellent doctrine!' you answer, 'and would,
For people like Trausius, be all very good;
But I have great wealth, and an income that brings
In enough to provide for the wants of three kings.'
But is this any reason you should not apply
Your superfluous wealth to ends nobler, more high?
You so rich, why should any good honest man lack?
Our temples, why should they be tumbling to wrack?
Wretch, of all this great heap have you nothing to spare
For our dear native land? Or why should you dare
To think that misfortune will never o'ertake you?
Oh, then, what a butt would your enemies make you!
Who will best meet reverses? The man who, you find,
Has by luxuries pampered both body and mind?
Or he who, contented with little, and still
Looking on to the future, and fearful of ill,
Long, long ere a murmur is heard from afar,
In peace has laid up the munitions of war?"
Alas for the wisdom, of Ofellus the sage! Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and the spectacle is still before us of the same selfishness, extravagance, and folly, which he rebuked so well and so vainly, but pushed to even greater excess, and more widely diffused, enervating the frames and ruining the fortunes of one great section of society, and helping to inspire another section, and that a dangerous one, with angry disgust at the hideous contrast between the opposite extremes of wretchedness and luxury which everywhere meets the eye in the great cities of the civilised world.
In the fourth Satire of the Second Book, Horace ridicules, in a vein of exquisite irony, the gourmets of his day, who made a philosophy of flavours, with whom sauces were a science, and who had condensed into aphorisms the merits of the poultry, game, or fish of the different and often distant regions from which they were brought to Rome. Catius has been listening to a dissertation by some Brillât-Savarin of this class, and is hurrying home to commit to his tablets the precepts by which he professes himself to have been immensely struck, when he is met by Horace, and prevailed upon to repeat some of them in the very words of this philosopher of the dinner-table. Exceedingly curious they are, throwing no small light both upon the materials of the Roman cuisine and upon the treatment by the Romans of their wines. Being delivered, moreover, with the epigrammatic precision of philosophical axioms, their effect is infinitely amusing. Thus:—
"Honey Aufidius mixed with strong
Falernian; he was very wrong."
"The flesh of kid is rarely fine,
That has been chiefly fed on vine."
"To meadow mushrooms give the prize,
And trust no others, if you're wise."
"Till I had the example shown,
The art was utterly unknown
Of telling, when you taste a dish,
The age and kind of bird or fish."
Horace professes to be enraptured at the depth of sagacity and beauty of expression in what he hears, and exclaims,—
"Oh, learned Catius, prithee, by
Our friendship, by the gods on high,
Take me along with you, to hear
Such wisdom, be it far or near!
For though you tell me all—in fact,
Your memory is most exact—
Still there must be some grace of speech,
Which no interpreter can reach.
The look, too, of the man, the mien!
Which you, what fortune! having seen,
May for that very reason deem
Of no account; but to the stream,
Even at its very fountain-head,
I fain would have my footsteps led,
That, stooping, I may drink my fill,
Where such life-giving saws distil."
Manifestly the poet was no gastronome, or he would not have dealt thus sarcastically with matters so solemn and serious as the gusts, and flavours, and "sacred rage" of a highly-educated appetite. At the same time, there is no reason to suppose him to have been insensible to the attractions of the "haute cuisine," as developed by the genius of the Vattel or Francatelli of Maecenas, and others of his wealthy friends. Indeed, he appears to have been prone, rather than otherwise, to attack these with a relish, which his feeble digestion had frequent reason to repent. His servant Davus more than hints as much in the passage above quoted (p. 83); and the consciousness of his own frailty may have given additional vigour to his assaults on the ever-increasing indulgence in the pleasures of the table, which he saw gaining ground so rapidly around him.