sumptuous buildings, porticos and baths, still
less to his paintings and sculptures, and all his industry about these
curiosities, which he collected with vast expense, lavishly bestowing
all the wealth and treasure which he got in the war upon them, insomuch
that even now, with all the advance of luxury, the Lucullean gardens are
counted the noblest the emperor has. Tubero, the stoic, when he saw his
buildings at Naples, where he suspended the hills upon vast tunnels,
brought in the sea for moats and fish-ponds round his house, and
pleasure-houses in the waters, called him Xerxes in a gown. He had also
fine seats in Tusculum, belvederes, and large open balconies for men's
apartments, and porticos to walk in, where Pompey coming to see him,
blamed him for making a house which would be pleasant in summer, but
uninhabitable in winter; whom he answered with a smile, "You think me,
then, less provident than cranes and storks, not to change my home with
the season." When a praetor, with great expense and pains, was preparing
a spectacle for the people, and asked him to lend him some purple robes
for the performers in a chorus, he told him he would go home and see,
and if he had any, would let him take them; and the next day asking how
many he wanted, and being told that a hundred would suffice, bade him
take twice as many: on which the poet Horace observes, that a house is
indeed a poor one, where the valuables unseen and unthought of do not
exceed all those that meet the eye.

Lucullus' daily entertainments were ostentatiously extravagant, not
only in purple coverlets, and plate adorned with precious stones, and
dancings, and interludes, but with the greatest diversity of dishes and
the most elaborate cookery, for the vulgar to admire and envy. It was a
happy thought of Pompey in his sickness, when his physician prescribed
a thrush for his dinner, and his servants told him that in summer time
thrushes were not to be found anywhere but in Lucullus' fattening coops,
that he would not suffer them to fetch one thence, but observed to
his physician, "So if Lucullus had not been an epicure, Pompey had
not lived," and ordered something else that could easily be got to be
prepared for him. Cato was his friend and connection, but, nevertheless,
so hated his life and habits, that when a young man in the senate made a
long and tedious speech in praise of frugality and temperance, Cato
got up and said, "How long do you mean to go makin