ent his
vast fortune for food, as the stories go, and when he had only a
quarter million dollars left (a paltry sum today but a considerable
one in those days when gold was scarce and monetary standards in a
worse muddle than today) Apicius took his own life, fearing that he
might have to starve to death some day.

This story seems absurd on the face of it, yet Seneca and Martial tell
it (both with different tendencies) and Suidas, Albino and other
writers repeat it without critical analysis. These writers who are
unreliable in culinary matters anyway, claim that Apicius spent one
hundred million _sestertii_ on his appetite--_in gulam_. Finally when
the hour of accounting came he found that there were only ten million
_sestertii_ left, so he concluded that life was not worth living if
his gastronomic ideas could no longer be carried out in the accustomed
and approved style, and he took poison at a banquet especially
arranged for the occasion.

In the light of modern experience with psychology, with economics,
depressions, journalism, we focus on this and similar stories, and we
find them thoroughly unreliable. We cannot believe this one. It is too
melodramatic, too moralistic perhaps to suit our modern taste. The
underlying causes for the conduct, life and end of Apicius have not
been told. Of course, we have to accept the facts as reported. If only
a Petronius had written that story! What a story it might have been!
But there is only one Petronius in antiquity. His Trimalchio, former
slave, successful profiteer and food speculator, braggard and
drunkard, wife-beater--an upstart who arranged extravagant banquets
merely to show off, who, by the way, also arranged for his funeral at
his banquet (Apician fashion and, indeed, Petronian fashion! for
Petronius died in the same manner) and who peacefully "passed out"
soundly intoxicated--this man is a figure true to life as it was then,
as it is now and as it probably will continue to be. Last but not
least: Mrs. Trimalchio, the resolute lady who helped him "make his
pile"--these are human characters much more real, much more
trustworthy than anything and everything else ever depicted by any
ancient pen; they bring out so graphically the modernity of antiquity.
Without Petronius and Pompeii the antique world would forever remain
at an inexplicably remote distance to our modern conception of life.
With him, and with the dead city, the riddles of antiquity are cleared
up.