umed. These laws classified gastronomic functions
with an ingenious eye for system, professing all the time to protect
the public's morals and health; but they were primarily designed to
replenish the ever-vanishing contents of the Imperial exchequer and
to provide soft jobs for hordes of enforcers. The amounts allowed to
be spent for various social functions were so ridiculously small in
our own modern estimation that we may well wonder how a Roman host
could have ever made a decent showing at a banquet. However, he and
the cooks managed somehow. Imperial spies and informers were
omnipresent. The market places were policed, the purchases by
prospective hosts carefully noted, dealers selling supplies and cooks
(the more skillful kind usually) hired for the occasion were bribed to
reveal the "menu." Dining room windows had to be located conveniently
to allow free inspection from the street of the dainties served; the
passing Imperial food inspector did not like to intrude upon the
sanctity of the host's home. The pitiable host of those days, his
unenviable guests and the bewildered cooks, however, contrived and
conspired somehow to get up a banquet that was a trifle better than a
Chicago quick lunch.

How did they do it?

In the light of modern experience gained by modern governments
dillydallying with sumptuary legislation that has been discarded as a
bad job some two thousand years ago, the question seems superfluous.

_Difficile est satyram non scribere!_ To make a long story short: The
Roman host just broke the law, that's all. Indeed, those who made the
laws were first to break them. The minions, appointed to uphold the
law, were easily accounted for. Any food inspector too arduous in the
pursuit of his duty was disposed of by dispatching him to the rear
entrance of the festive hall, and was delivered to the tender care of
the chief cook.

Such was the case during the times of Apicius. Indeed, the Roman idea
of good cheer during earlier epochs was provincial enough. It was
simply barbaric before the Greeks showed the Romans a thing or two in
cookery. The methods of fattening fowl introduced from Greece was
something unheard-of! It was outrageous, sacrilegious! Senators,
orators and other self-appointed saviors of humanity thundered against
the vile methods of tickling the human palate, deftly employing all
the picturesque tam-tam and _elan_ still the stock in trade of ever so
many modern colleagues in any civil