iptions of a Roman
dinner, but the tendency, especially with the novelist, is to
exaggerate grossly the average costliness and gluttony of such
banquets. Undoubtedly there were such things as "freak" dinners almost
as absurd as those of the inferior order of American plutocrat.
Undoubtedly also there was often a detestable ostentation of reckless
expenditure. But we are endeavouring to obtain a fair view of
representative Roman practice, and must put out of our minds all such
vagaries as those of the ceiling opening and letting down surprises,
or of dishes composed of nightingales' tongues and flamingoes' brains.
These were always, as a later writer calls them, "the solecisms of
luxury." Nero himself, or rather the ministers of the vulgar pleasures
which he regarded as those of artistic genius, devised an abundance of
such expensive follies and surprises, but we must not permit the
professional satirist or Stoic moralist to delude us into believing
them typical of Roman life. Praise of the "simple life" and the simple
past is no new thing. It is extremely doubtful whether at an ordinary
Roman dinner-party there was any such lavish luxury as to surpass that
of a modern aldermanic banquet. We can hardly blame the people who
could afford it for obtaining for their tables the best of everything
produced around the Mediterranean Sea, any more than we blame the
modern citizen of London or New York for obtaining the choicest foods
and dainties from a much wider world. Doubtless a Roman dinner too
often meant over-eating and over-drinking, and doubtless neither the
ordinary table manners nor the ordinary table conversation would
recommend themselves to us. The same might be said of our own
Elizabethan age. But any one intimately acquainted with Latin
literature as a whole, and not merely with the more savoury passages
commonly selected, will necessarily incline to the belief that
novelistic historians have too often been taking what was exceptional,
eccentric, and strongly disapproved by contemporaries, for the usual
and the normal. If we read about Romans swallowing emetics after
gorging themselves, so that they might begin eating afresh, we may
feel both disgust and pity, but we must not imagine such a practice to
have been a national habit.

The dinner regularly consisted of three divisions: a preliminary
course of _hors d'oeuvres_, the dinner proper, and a sort of enlarged
dessert. It might or might not be accompanied or f