amateur gladiators in the arena. They drove as competing charioteers on
the race-course. They even condescended to appear as actors on the
stage. They devoted themselves with such frantic eagerness to the
excitement of gambling, that we read of their staking hundreds of pounds
on a single throw of the dice, when they could not even restore the
pawned tunics to their shivering slaves. Under the cold marble statues,
or amid the waxen likenesses of their famous stately ancestors, they
turned night into day with long and foolish orgies, and exhausted land
and sea with the demands of their gluttony. "Woe to that city," says an
ancient proverb, "in which a fish costs more than an ox;" and this
exactly describes the state of Rome. A banquet would sometimes cost the
price of an estate; shell-fish were brought from remote and unknown
shores, birds from Parthia and the banks of the Phasis; single dishes
were made of the brains of the peacocks and the tongues of nightingales
and flamingoes. Apicius, after squandering nearly a million of money in
the pleasures of the table, committed suicide, Seneca tells us, because
he found that he had only 80,000_l_. left. Cowley speaks of--

"Vitellius' table, which did hold
As many creatures as the ark of old."

"They eat," said Seneca, "and then they vomit; they vomit, and then
they eat." But even in this matter we cannot tell anything like the
worst facts about--

"Their sumptuous gluttonies and gorgeous feasts
On citron tables and Atlantic stone,
Their wines of Setia, Gales, and Falerne,
Chios, and Crete, and how they quaff in gold,
Crystal, and myrrhine cups, embossed with gems