[476] In charity to the Greeks may I hazard the plea (the rules of even the Law Courts are now sensibly relaxed) that their delight in Brobdingnagian meals may have originated in the days when their gods walked with men on earth, or grew up later as the sincerest form of flattery? No one in Homer keeps his eye more skinned or his nose more active than a god, when hecatombs “are about.” The Olympians flit constantly to Æthiopia and are impatient of any business, mundane or heavenly, which interferes with a trip thither, when with the keen scent (or vision?) of vultures, they smell (or see?) hecatombs in preparation in the heart of the Dark Continent, where the inhabitants, as a scholiast tells us, kept a feast for twelve days, one for every god! See A. Shewan’s Homeric Games at an Ancient St. Andrews (Edinburgh, 1911), p. 116—a most delightful and destructive skit at the expense of The Higher Criticism of Homer!
[477] The greatest number of fish which I can count at any feast mentioned in Athenæus (in Bk. IV. 13) amounts to only thirty-two! Badham (p. 587) omits to state that the whole poem is nothing but a parody, chiefly of Homer, by Matron, and is not a “Bill of fare of an Attic supper” in any sense.
[478] Sammonicus Serenus, a savant of the early third century a.d., states that the acipenser was brought to table to the accompaniment of flutes by servants crowned with flowers. Cf. Macrob. III. 16, 7 f. Cf. Athen. VII. 44, and Ælian, VIII. 28.
In describing this imaginary Attic supper, Badham certainly lets himself go. The allusion to “the present of the God of Love” he may have taken from an anonymous epigram in Burmann’s Anthologia (1773), Bk. V. 217.
“Est rosa flos Veneris; cuius quo furta laterent Harpocrati matris dona dicavit Amor. Inde rosam mensis hospes suspendit amicis, Convivæ ut sub ea dicta tacenda sciant.”
These lines, of which several variants exist (notably that of the Rose Cellar in the Rathskeller of Bremen), are founded on the legend that Cupid bribed the God of Silence with his mother’s flower not to divulge the amours of Venus. Hence a host hung a rose over his table as a sign that nothing there said was to be repeated. A quaint and touching legend runs that in the beginning all roses were white, but when Venus walking one day among the flowers was pricked by one of their thorns, these roses “drew their colour from the blood of the goddess,” and remained encarmined for ever. Cf. Natal. Com. Mythol., V. 13. See also A. de Gubernatis, La Mythologie des Plantes (Paris, 1882), II. 323, and R. Folkard, Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics (London, 1884), 516 ff.
[479] Cf. Ausonius, Id., XIV. 39, and 43.
[480] Suet., Vitell. 13.
[481] For Vitellius’s habit, see Dion., 65. 2.
[482] Adrian had the good taste to melt it down.