which we may not even venture to dream of
or hope to know.

Whatever there has been preserved by "Providence," by freaks of chance,
by virtue of its own inherent strength--whatever has been buried by
misers, fondled, treasured by loving hands of collectors and
connoisseurs during all these centuries--every speck of ancient dust,
every scrap of parchment or papyrus, a corroded piece of metal, a
broken piece of stone or glass, so eagerly sought by the archaeologists
and historians of the last few generations--all these fragmentary
messages from out of the past emphasize the greatness of their time.
They show its modernity, its nearness to our own days. They are now
hazy reminiscences, as it were, by a middle-aged man of the hopes and
the joys of his own youth. These furtive fragments--whatever they
are--now tell us a story so full and so rich, they wield so marvelous a
power, no man laying claim to possessing any intelligence may pass them
without intensely feeling the eternal pathetic appeal to our hearts of
these bygone ages that hold us down in an envious manner, begrudging us
the warm life-blood of the present, weaving invisible ties around us to
make our hearts heavy.

However, we are not here to be impeded by any sentimental
considerations. Thinking of the past, we are not so much concerned
with the picture that dead men have placed in our path like ever so
many bill boards and posters! We do not care for their "ideals"
expounded in contemporary histories and eulogies. We are hardly moved
by the "facts" such as they would have loved to see them happen, nor do
we cherish the figments of their human, very human, subconsciousness.

To gain a correct picture of the Roman table we will therefore set
aside for a while the fragments culled from ancient literature and
history that have been misused so indiscriminately and so profusely
during the last two thousand years--for various reasons. They have
become fixed ideas, making reconstruction difficult for anyone who
would gain a picture along rational lines. Barring two exceptions,
there is no trustworthy detailed description of the ancient table by
an objective contemporary observer. To be sure, there are some
sporadic efforts, mere reiterations. The majority of the ancient word
pictures are distorted views on our subject by partisan writers,
contemporary moralists on the one side, satirists on the other.
Neither of them, we venture to say, knew the subject professiona