ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE OYSTER.
The Ancients; Oysters a Greek and Roman Luxury; Sergius Orata and the
Oyster-beds of Baia; Immense Consumption at Rome; Failure of the Circean
and Lucrinian Oyster-beds under Domitian, and Introduction of Rutupians
from Britain; Agricola, Constantine, and Helena; Athenian Oysters and
Aristides.
Horace, Martial, and Juvenal, Cicero and Seneca, Pliny, Ætius, and the
old Greek doctor Oribasius, whom Julian the Apostate delighted to
honour, and other men of taste amongst the ancients, have enlarged upon
the various qualities of the oyster; and was it not to Sergius Orata
that we owe our present oyster-beds; for he it was who introduced layers
or stews for oysters at Baia, the Brighton of ancient Rome, as we have
them at present. That was in the days when luxury was rampant, and when
men of great wealth, like Licinius Crassus, the leviathan slave
merchant, rose to the highest honours; for this dealer in human flesh in
the boasted land of liberty, served the office of consul along with
Pompey the Great, and on one occasion required no less than 10,000
tables to accommodate all his guests. How many barrels of oysters were
eaten at that celebrated dinner, the "Ephemerides"—as Plutarch calls
"The Times" and "Morning Post" of that day—have omitted to state; but as
oysters then took the place that turtle-soup now does at our great City
feeds, imagination may busy itself if it likes with the calculation. All
we know is, that oysters then fetched very long prices at Rome, as the
author of the "Tabella Cibaria" has not failed to tell us; and then, as
now, the high price of any luxury of the table was sure to make a
liberal supply of it necessary, when a man like Crassus entertained half
the city as his guests, to rivet his popularity.
But the Romans had a weakness for the "breedy creatures," as our dear
old friend Christopher North calls them in his inimitable "Noctes." In
the time of Nero, some sixty years later, the consumption of oysters in
the "Imperial City" was nearly as great as it now is in the "World's
Metropolis;" and there is a statement, which I recollect to have read
somewhere, that during the reign of Domitian, the last of the twelve
Cæsars, a greater number of millions of bushels were annually consumed
at Rome than I should care to swear to. These oysters, however, were but
Mediterranean produce—the small fry of Circe, and the smaller
Lucrinians; and this unreasonable demand upon them quite exhausted the
beds in that great fly-catcher's reign; and it was not till under the
wise administration of Agricola in Britain, when the Romans got their
far-famed Rutupians from the shores of Kent, from Richborough and the
Reculvers—the _Rutupi Portus_ of the "Itinerary," of which the latter,
the _Regulbium_, near Whitstable, in the mouth of the Thames, was the
northern boundary—that Juvenal praised them as he does; and he was
right: for in the whole world there are no oysters like them; and of all
the "breedy creatures" that glide, or have ever glided down the throats
of the human race, our "Natives" are probably the most delectable. Can
we wonder, then, when Macrobius tells us that the Roman pontiffs in the
fourth century never failed to have these Rutupians at table,
particularly, feeling sure that Constantine the Great, and his mother,
the pious Helena, must have carried their British tastes with them to
Rome at that period.
The Greeks have not said much in praise of oysters; but then they knew
nothing of Britain beyond its name, and looked upon it very much in the
same light as we now regard the regions of the Esquimaux; and as to the
little dabs of watery pulps found in the Mediterranean, what are they
but oysters in name? Indeed, the best use the Athenians could make of
them was to use their shells to ostracise any good citizen who, like
Aristides, was too virtuous for a "Greek." However, on the plea that
oysters are oysters, we presume—for it could not be on account of their
flavour—"oysters," says the author of the "Tabella Cibaria," "were held
in great esteem by the Athenians." No doubt when Constantine moved the
seat of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople, he did not forget to
have his Rutupians regularly forwarded; so, perhaps, after all it was
our "Natives," which thus found their way into Greece, that they
delighted in; and if so, the good taste of the Athenians need not be
called into question; but, as in literature and the arts, in
oyster-eating too, it deserves to be held up to commendation.