SOCIAL DAY OF A ROMAN ARISTOCRAT (_continued_)--AFTERNOON AND DINNER
We will suppose that Silius is specially inclined for action and
society. The afternoon is growing chilly, and, as he has no further
ceremonial to undergo, he will probably throw over his toga a richly
coloured mantle--violet, amethyst, or scarlet--to be fastened on the
shoulder with a buckle or brooch. In very cold weather, especially
when travelling, Romans of all classes would wear a thick cloak,
somewhat like the cape worn by a modern policeman or cab-driver, or
perhaps more closely resembling the _poncho_ of Spanish America. This,
which consisted of some strong and as nearly as possible waterproof
stuff, had no opening at the sides, but was put on by passing the head
through a hole. To-day Silius puts on the coloured mantle, and gets
himself carried across the Forum, through the gap between the
Capitoline and Quirinal Hills, and into the Campus Martius, somewhere
about the modern Piazza Venezia and the entrance to the Corso. Here he
may descend from his litter, and purchase a statuette, or a vessel of
Corinthian bronze or silver, or an attractive table with the true
peacock markings, or a handsome slave. While doing so, he may find
amusement in observing a pretender who "shops" but does not buy,
wearying the dealers by pricing and disparaging the costliest tables
and most artistic vessels, and ending with the purchase of a penny pot
which he carries home himself. He may then stroll along under the
pictured and statued colonnades, perhaps offering the cold shoulder to
various impecunious toadies who are there on the look-out for an
invitation to dinner, perhaps succumbing to their blandishments. His
lackeys are of course in attendance, and clients are still about him.
In passing he is greeted by some person who is hanging officiously
round a litter containing an elderly lady or gentleman, and whom he
recognises as what was called an "angler"--that is to say, one whose
business is to wheedle gifts or a legacy out of childless people of
wealth. This was a regular profession and extremely lucrative when
well managed.
A little further, and he stops to look at the young men curvetting and
wheeling on horseback over the riding-ground. Away in the distance
others are swimming backwards and forwards across the Tiber. Or he
steps into an enclosure, commonly connected with the baths, where not
only young men, but their seniors, even of high rank, are engaged in
various exercises. Some of them are stripped and are playing a game
with a small hard ball, which is struck or thrown, and smartly caught
or struck onward by right or left hand equally, from the three corners
of a triangle. Some are playing with a larger and lighter article,
something like a football stuffed with feathers, which seems to have
been punched about by the fist in a way calling for considerable
judgment and practice. Others are jumping with dumb-bells in each
hand, or they are running races, or hurling a disk of stone, or
wrestling. Yet others are practising all manner of sword strokes with
a heavy wooden weapon against a dummy post, merely to exercise
themselves keep down their flesh.
[Illustration: FIG. 65.--DISCUS-THROWER.]
[Illustration FIG 66.--STABIAN BATHS. (Pompeii.)]
Probably Silius will himself take a hand in the three-cornered game,
unless he possesses a private court at home and is intending to take
his bath there instead of in one of the larger public or semi-public
establishments. Whether he bathes in the baths of Agrippa at the back
of the Pantheon, or in those of Nero, or in his own, the process will
be much the same. The arrangements are practically uniform however
great may be the differences of sumptuousness and spaciousness. We
have not indeed yet reached the times of those huge and amazing
constructions of Caracalla and Diocletian, but there is no reason to
doubt that the existing public baths were already of much
magnificence. Regularly we should first find a dressing-room with
painted walls, a mosaic floor, and glass windows, and provided with
seats, as well as with niches in the walls to hold the clothes.
Adjoining this is a "cold" room, containing a large swimming-bath.
Next comes a "warm" chamber, with water heated to a sufficient and
reasonable degree, and with the general temperature raised either by
braziers or by warm air circulating under the floor or in the walls.
After this a "hot" room, with both a hot swimming-bath and a smaller
marble bath of the common domestic shape--though of much larger
size--provided with a shower, or rather with a cold jet. Lastly there
is a domelike sweating-chamber filled with an intense dry heat. The
public baths built by Nero were particularly notorious for their high
temperature. After the bath the body was rubbed over with perfumed
oil, in order to close the pores against the cold, and then was
scraped down with the hollow sickle-shaped instrument of bronze or
iron depicted in the illustration. The other articles there shown are
a vessel containing the oil, and a flat dish into which to pour it for
use. These, together with linen towels, were brought by your own
slave.
[Illustration: FIG. 67.--BATHING IMPLEMENTS.]
Silius is now carried home, and as it is approaching four o'clock, he
dresses, or is dressed, for dinner. His toga and senatorial
walking-shoes are thrown off, and he puts on light slippers or
house-shoes, and dons what is called a "confection" of light and easy
material--such as a kind of half-silk--and of bright and festive
colours. Some ostentatious diners changed this dress several times
during the course of a protracted banquet, giving the company the
benefit of as great a variety of "confections" as is afforded by a
modern star actress in the theatre. If the days are long and it is
suitable weather, he may perhaps dine in the garden at the back of the
peristyle. Otherwise in the dining-room the three couches mentioned in
a previous chapter (FIG. 48) are arranged along three sides of a
rectangle. Their metal and ivory work gleams brightly, and they are
resplendent with their embroidered cushions. In the middle of the
enclosed space shines the polished table, whether square or round. The
sideboard is laden with costly plate; the lamps are, or soon will be,
alight upon their tall shafts or hanging from their chains; the stand
for the carver is awaiting its load. The dining-room steward and his
subordinates are all in readiness.
At the right time the guests arrive, endeavouring to show neither
undue eagerness by being too early nor rudeness by being too late.
Each brings his own footman to take off his shoes and to stand behind
him, in case he may be needed, though not to wait at table, for this
service belongs to the slaves of the house. After they have been
received by the host, the "name-caller" leads them to their places,
according to such order of precedence as Silius chooses to
pre-arrange. The regular number of guests for the three couches will
be nine--the number of the Muses--or three to each couch. To squeeze
in more was regarded as bad form. If the crescent couch and the large
round table are to be used the number may be either six or seven. The
position of Silius himself as host will be regularly that marked H on
the plan, while the position of honour--occupied by a consul if one be
present--will be that marked C.
Each guest throws himself as easily as possible into a reclining
attitude, resting his left elbow on the cushion provided for the
purpose. He has brought his own napkin, marked with a purple stripe if
he is a senator, and this he tucks, in a manner still sufficiently
familiar on the continent of Europe, into upper part of his attire.
Bread is cut and ready, but there are no knives and forks, although
there is a spoon of dessert size and also one with a smaller bowl and
a point at the other end of the handle for the purpose of picking out
the luscious snail or the succulent shell-fish. The dainty use of
fingers well inured to heat was necessarily a point of Roman domestic
training.
There have been many--perhaps too many--descriptions 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 followed by various
entertainments, and closed by a protracted course of wine-drinking.
All would depend upon the tastes of the host and the nature of the
company. The meal, it may be mentioned, begins with an invocation
corresponding to our grace. The _hors d'oeuvres_ are taken in the
shape of shell-fish, such as oysters and mussels, snails with piquant
sauce, lettuce, radishes and the like, eggs, and a taste of wine
tempered with honey.
Next comes the dinner proper, commonly divided into three services,
comprising a considerable choice of fish (particularly turbot,
flounder, mullet, and lampreys), poultry and game (from chicken, duck,
pigeon, and peacock, to partridges, pheasants, ortolans, and
fieldfares), hare, joints of the ordinary meats, as well as of wild
boar and venison, a kind of haggis, a variety of the vegetables most
familiar to modern use, mushrooms, and truffles. There is abundant,
and to our taste excessive, use of seasonings, not only of salt,
vinegar, and pepper, but of oil, thyme, mint, ginger, and the like,
The _pièce de résistance_--a wild boar, or whatever it may
be--regularly arrives as the middle of the three services. The
substantial meal ends with a small offering to the household deities.
After this follows the dessert, consisting of fresh and dried fruits,
and of cakes and sweet-meats artistically composed.
During the dinner a special feature is made of the artistic
arrangement of the various viands upon the large trays or stands from
which the guest makes his choice, for the several dishes belonging to
one course were not brought separately to table. In full view of the
guests the professional carver exhibits his dexterity with much
demonstration of grace and rapidity, and well-dressed and
neat-fingered slaves render the necessary service. Of plates and
dishes of various shapes and purposes, silver and silver-gilt, there
is great profusion.
The conversation meanwhile depends upon the company. Sometimes it
turns upon the chariot-races and the chances of the "Red" or "Green";
sometimes it is social gossip and scandal. If the guests are of a
graver cast of mind, it may be concerned with questions of art and
literature, or even philosophy. The Roman particularly affected
encyclopaedic information, and frequently posted himself with such
miscellaneous matter derived from a salaried domestic philosopher or
_savant_--commonly, of course, a Greek. But upon politics in any real
sense conversation will either not turn at all, or else very
cautiously, at least until some one has drunk more than is good for
him. It is only too easy to drop some remark which may be construed
into an offence to the emperor, and there are too many ears among the
slaves, and perhaps too many among the guests, to permit of any risk
in that direction. In some rather serious companies a professional
reader or reciter entertained the diners with interesting passages of
poetry or prose; before others there might be a performance of scenes
from a comedy. At times vocal and instrumental music was discoursed by
the domestic minstrels; or persons, generally women, were hired to
play upon the harp, lyre, or double flageolet. Such performances would
also be carried on during the carousal which often followed deep into
the night, and to these may be added posture-dances by girls from
Cadiz, juggling and acrobatic feats, and other forms of "variety"
entertainment. Dicing in public, except at the chartered Saturnalian
festival, was illegal--a fact which did not, of course, prevent it
from being practised---but it was permitted in private gatherings like
this, provided that ostensibly no money was staked. The dice are
rattled in a tower-like box and are thrown upon a special board or
tray. You may play "for love," or, as the Romans called it, "for the
best man," or you may play for forfeits. Naturally the forfeits became
in practice, in spite of the law, sums of money. The best possible
throw is called "Venus," the worst possible "the dog." A sort of
draughts or of backgammon may be preferred at more quiet times of
social intercourse; but a game like "head or tail," called in Latin
"heads or ships," was a game for the vulgar.
[Illustration: FIG. 68.--ACROBATS.]
If it was decided to indulge in a prolonged carousal in form, heads
were wreathed with garlands of roses, violets, myrtle, or ivy; lots
were cast for an "umpire of the drinking," and he decided both how
much wine--Falernian, Setine, or Massic--should be drunk, and in what
degree it should be mixed with water. A large and handsome mixing-bowl
stands in the dining-hall. From this the wine is drawn by a ladle
holding about as much as a sherry-glass, and a certain number of such
"glasses" are poured into each cup according to the bidding of the
umpire. While being poured into the "mixer" the wine is passed through
a strainer and in the hot weather the strainer would be filled with
snow brought down from the nearest mountains and artificially
preserved. Healths were drank in as many "glasses" as the name
contained letters; absent ladies were toasted in a similar way; and at
some hour or other guests asked their footmen for their shoes and
cloaks, and departed to their homes under the escort of attendants,
who carried the torches or lanterns and were ready to deal with
possible footpads and garroters, if any were lurking in the unlighted
streets for pedestrians less wary or less protected. The "Mohawks"
also will let them alone, and perhaps their homeward way may be
entertained by the sounds of serenaders at the door of some beautiful
Chloe or Lydia on the Upper Sacred Way or near the Subura.
It is not, however, to be supposed that every evening meal, even of a
noble, took the form of a dinner-party. It is indeed probable that
there were few occasions upon which, while in town, he was not either
entertaining visitors or being himself entertained. Occasionally there
would be an invitation to dine at Court, where perhaps eighty or a
hundred guests of both sexes, distributed in different sets of nine or
seven over the wide banquet-hall, would eat off gold plate, and be
entertained from three or four o'clock till midnight with all the
unbridled extravagance that a Petronius or some other "arbiter of
taste" might devise for the Caesar. The snob of the period set an
enormous value upon this distinction. The emperor could not always
review his list of invitations, nor could he on every occasion be
personally acquainted with every guest. It was therefore quite
possible for his servants now and then to smuggle in a person
ambitious of having dined at the palace. Under Caligula a rich
provincial once paid nearly £2000 for such an "invitation." When the
emperor found it out, he was, if anything, rather flattered; the next
day he caused some worthless trifle to be sold to the same man for the
same amount, and on the strength of this acquaintance invited him to
dinner, this time pocketing the money for himself.
Yet there must have been no few evenings upon which Silius preferred
the company of an intimate friend or two, making all together the
"number of the graces," and dined with less form and ceremony. At such
times the meal would be of comparatively short duration, and there
would be deeper and more intimate matter of conversation. Now and then
the dinner would be purely domestic; and, after it, Silius would
perhaps pass an hour or two in reading, or in listening to the slave
who was his professional "reader." If he was himself an author, as an
astonishing number of his contemporaries actually were, he might spend
the time in preparing a speech, composing some non-committal epic or
drama, jotting down memoranda for a history, or concocting an epigram
or satire to embody his humorous fancies or to relieve his
exasperation. If, as was often the case, he kept in the house a
salaried Greek philosopher--in a large measure the analogue of the
domestic chaplain of the later seventeenth century--he might enjoy his
conversation and pick his brains; or, if a man of real earnestness of
purpose, discuss with him the tenets of his particular philosophy,
Stoic, Epicurean, or Eclectic. This was the nearest approach which the
ancient Roman made to what we should call theological or religious
argument.
On other days a patron would naturally entertain a number of his
clients at dinner, and on no occasion would he be better able to show
how much or how little he was a gentleman in the modern sense of the
term. It is not merely from the satirist that we learn how
discourteous the Roman grandee might be at his own table if he chose.
It was no uncommon thing for a patron to set before these humbler
guests dishes or portions of dishes markedly inferior to those which
were offered to himself and to any aristocrat whom he had placed near
him. In this sense the client was often made to feel very distinctly
that he was "sitting below the salt." While the mellowest Setine or
Falernian wine was poured into the patron's own jewelled goblet of
gold or silver or crystal, his client might be drinking from thick
glass or earthenware the poorer stuff grown on the Sabine Hills. The
fish presented to Silius and his "brother" noble might be a choice
turbot, and the bird might be pheasant, while Proculus the client must
be content with pike from the Tiber and the common barndoor fowl. The
later satirist Juvenal presents us with inimitable pictures of the
hungry dependants at the table of their "king," waiting "bread in
hand" (like the sword drawn for the fray) to see what fortune would
send them. On the other hand there were, of course, patrons who made
no such distinctions. The younger Pliny, who was himself a gentleman
almost in the modern sense--if we overlook a too frequent tendency to
contemplate his own undeniable virtues--writes a letter to a young
friend in the following terms: "I need not go into details as to how I
came to be dining with a person with whom I am by no means intimate.
In his own eyes he combined elegance with economy; in mine he combined
meanness with extravagance. The dishes set before himself and a few
others were of the choicest; those supplied to the rest were poor
scraps. There was the same difference in his wine, which was of three
kinds. The intention was not to offer a choice, but to prevent the
right of refusing. One kind was for himself and us; another for his
less important friends (for his friends are graded); another for his
and our freedmen. My next neighbour noticed this, and asked me if I
approved of it. I said 'No!' 'Well,' said he, 'what is your own
practice?' 'I treat every one alike, for I invite people to a dinner,
not to an insult, and when they share my table I let them share
everything.' 'Your freedmen as well?' 'Yes, at such times I regard
them as guests, not as freedmen.' At this he said, 'It costs you a
good deal?' 'Not at all.' 'How can that be?' 'Because it is not a case
of their drinking the same wine as I do, but of my drinking the same
wine as they do.'" The letter is perhaps nearly half a century later
than our chosen period, but there is no reason to think that manners
had undergone any great change in the interval.