"Enough! When you have drunk a little more, you will be able to understand a plain demonstration. But whom have we here? Why, it is our glorious Apicius, whose table no other table rivals for either abundance or delicacy. Who is your venerable friend, Apicius?"
This was addressed to a dyspeptic-looking youth, magnificently attired, who, in company with a person in the extreme decline of life, approached the door. Paulus and Benigna stood aside, finding themselves still constrained to listen while waiting for room to enter the blocked-up door of the palace.
"Is it possible," replied Apicius, "that you forget Vedius Pollio, who, since you mention my poor table, has often kindly furnished it with such lampreys as no other mortal ever reared?"
The old man, whose age was not redolent of holiness, but reeking with the peculiar aroma of a life passed in boundless and systematic self-indulgence, leered with running, bloodshot eyes, and murmured that they paid him too much honor.
"Sir, you feed your lampreys well," said Pomponius Flaccus, "in your Vesuvian villa. They eat much living, and they eat well dead."
"I assure you," said Pollio, "that nothing but humorous exaggerations and witty stories have been circulated upon that subject. I can, with the strictest accuracy, establish the statement that no human being ever died merely and simply in order that my lampreys should grow fat and luscious. On the other hand, I do not deny that if some slave, guilty of great enormities, had in any event to forfeit life, the lampreys may in such cases, perhaps, have availed themselves of the circumstance. An opportunity might then arise which they had neither caused nor contrived."
"The flavor, in other words, never was the final cause of any slave's punishment," said Lucius Piso.
"You use words, sir," said Pollio, "which are correct as to the fact, and philosophical as to the style."
"Talking of philosophy," said Apicius, "do you hold with this young Greek, this Athenian Dion who has lately visited the court, that man eats in order to live? or with me, that he lives in order to eat?"
"Horror of horrors!" murmured Flaccus, "the Athenian boy is demented."