poets speak of an army as taking food, the word used is always _prandens_
and _pransus_; and, when the word used is _prandens_, then always it is an
army that is concerned. Thus Juvenal in a well-known satire--
----"Credimus altos
Desiccasse amnes, epotaque ftumina, Medo _Prandente_."
Not _coenante_, observe: you might as well talk of an army taking tea
and toast. Nor is that word ever applied to armies. It is true that the
converse is not so rigorously observed: nor ought it, from the explanations
already given. Though no soldier dined, (_coenabat_,) yet the citizen
sometimes adopted the camp usage and took a _prandium_. But generally the
poets use the word merely to mark the time of day. In that most humorous
appeal of Perseus--"Cur quis non prandeat, hoc est?" "Is this a sufficient
reason for losing one's _prandium_?" He was obliged to say _prandium_,
because no exhibitions ever could cause a man to lose his _coenia_, since
none were displayed at a time of day when anybody in Rome would have
attended. Just as, in alluding to a parliamentary speech notoriously
delivered at midnight, an English satirist must have said, Is this a speech
to furnish an argument for leaving one's bed?--not as what stood foremost
in his regard, but as the only thing that _could_ be lost at the time of
night.
On this principle, also, viz. by going back to the military origin of
_prandium_, we gain the interpretation of all the peculiarities attached to
it; viz.--1, its early hour--2, its being taken in a standing posture--3,
in the open air--4, the humble quality of its materials--bread and biscuit,
(the main articles of military fare.) In all these circumstances of the
meal, we read, most legibly written, the exotic and military character of
the meal.
Thus we have brought down our Roman friend to noonday, or even one hour
later than noon, and to this moment the poor man has had nothing to eat.
For, supposing him to be not _impransus_, and supposing him _jentâsse_
beside; yet it is evident, (we hope,) that neither one nor the other means
more than what it was often called, viz. [Greek: Bouchismos], or, in
plain English, a mouthful. How long do we intend to keep him waiting?
Reader, he will dine at three, or (supposing dinner put off to the latest)
at four. Dinner was never known to be later than the tenth hour in Rome,
which in summer would be past five; but for a far greater proportion of
days would be near four in Rome, except for one or two of the emperors,
whom the mere business attached to their unhappy station kept sometimes
dinnerless till six. And so entirely was a Roman the creature of ceremony,
that a national mourning would probably have been celebrated, and the "sad
augurs" would have been called in to expiate the prodigy, had the general
dinner lingered beyond four.
But, meantime, what has our friend been about since perhaps six or seven in
the morning? After paying his little homage to his _patronus_, in what
way has he fought with the great enemy Time since then? Why, reader, this
illustrates one of the most interesting features in the Roman character.
The Roman was the idlest of men. "Man and boy," he was "an idler in the
land." He called himself and his pals "rerum dominos, gentemque togatam;"
_the gentry that wore the toga_. Yes, and a pretty affair that "toga" was.
Just figure to yourself, reader, the picture of a hardworking man, with
horny hands like our hedgers, ditchers, weavers, porters, &c., setting to
work on the highroad in that vast sweeping toga, filling with a strong
gale like the mainsail of a frigate. Conceive the roars with which this
magnificent figure would be received into the bosom of a poor-house
detachment sent out to attack the stones on some new line of road, or a
fatigue party of dustmen sent upon secret service. Had there been nothing
left as a memorial of the Romans but that one relic--their immeasurable
toga,[9]--we should have known that they were born and bred to idleness. In
fact, except in war, the Roman never did anything at all but sun himself.
_Ut se apricaret_ was the final cause of peace in his opinion; in literal
truth, that he might make an _apricot_ of himself. The public rations at
all times supported the poorest inhabitant of Rome if he were a citizen.
Hence it was that Hadrian was so astonished with the spectacle of
Alexandria, "_civitas opulenta, fæcunda, in qua nemo vivat otiosus_." Here
first he saw the spectacle of a vast city, second only to Rome, where every
man had something to do; "_podagrosi quod agant habent; habent cæci quod
faciant; ne chiragrici_" (those with gout in the fingers) "_apud eos otiosi
vivunt_." No poor rates levied upon the rest of the world for the benefit
of their own paupers were there distributed _gratis_. The prodigious
spectacle (so it seemed to Hadrian) was exhibited in Alexandria, of all men
earning their bread in the sweat of their brow. In Rome only, (and at one
time in some of the Grecian states,) it was the very meaning of _citizen_
that he could vote and be idle.
In these circumstances, where the whole sum of life's duties amounted
to voting, all the business a man _could_ have was to attend the public
assemblies, electioneering, or factious. These, and any judicial trial
(public or private) that might happen to interest him for the persons
concerned, or for the questions, amused him through the morning; that
is, from eight till one. He might also extract some diversion from
the _columnæ_, or pillars of certain porticoes to which they pasted
advertisements. These _affiches_ must have been numerous; for all the girls
in Rome who lost a trinket, or a pet bird, or a lap-dog, took this mode of
angling in the great ocean of the public for the missing articles.
But all this time we take for granted that there were no shows in a course
of exhibition, either the dreadful ones of the amphitheatre, or the
bloodless ones of the circus. If there were, then that became the business
of all Romans; and it was a business which would have occupied him from
daylight until the light began to fail. Here we see another effect from the
scarcity of artificial light amongst the ancients. These magnificent shows
went on by daylight. But how incomparably greater would have been the
splendor by lamp-light! What a gigantic conception! Eighty thousand human
faces all revealed under one blaze of lamp-light! Lord Bacon saw the mighty
advantage of candle-light for the pomps and glories of this world. But the
poverty of the earth was the ultimate cause that the Pagan shows proceeded
by day. Not that the masters of the world, who rained Arabian odors and
perfumed waters of the most costly description from a thousand fountains,
simply to cool the summer heats, would have regarded the expense of light;
cedar and other odorous woods burning upon vast altars, together with every
variety of fragrant torch, would have created light enough to shed a new
day over the distant Adriatic.
However, as there are no public spectacles, we will suppose, and the courts
or political meetings, (if not closed altogether by superstition,) would at
any rate be closed in the ordinary course by twelve or one o'clock, nothing
remains for him to do, before returning home, except perhaps to attend the
_palæstra_, or some public recitation of a poem written by a friend, but in
any case to attend the public baths. For these the time varied; and many
people have thought it tyrannical in some of the Cæsars that they imposed
restraints on the time open for the baths; some, for instance, would not
suffer them to open at all before two, and in any case, if you were later
than four or five in summer, you would have to pay a fine which most
effectually cleaned out the baths of all raff, since it was a sum that
_John Quires_ could not have produced to save his life. But it should be
considered that the emperor was the steward of the public resources for
maintaining the baths in fuel, oil, attendance, repairs. We are prepared
to show, on a fitting occasion, that every fourth person[10] amongst the
citizens bathed daily, and non-citizens, of course, paid an _extra_ sum.
Now the population of Rome was far larger than has ever been hinted at
except by Lipsius. But certain it is, that during the long peace of the
first Cæsars, and after the _annonaria prorisio_, (that great pledge of
popularity to a Roman prince,) had been increased by the corn tribute from
the Nile, the Roman population took an immense lurch ahead. The subsequent
increase of baths, whilst no old ones were neglected, proves _that_
decisively. And as citizenship expanded by means of the easy terms on which
it could be had, so did the bathers multiply. The population of Rome in the
century after Augustus, was far greater than during that era; and this,
still acting as a vortex to the rest of the world, may have been one great
motive with Constantine for "transferring" the capital eastwards; in
reality, for breaking up one monster capital into two of more manageable
dimensions. Two o'clock was often the earliest hour at which the public
baths were opened. But in Martial's time a man could go without blushing
(_salvâ fronte_) at eleven, though even then two o'clock was the meridian
hour for the great uproar of splashing, and swimming, and "larking" in the
endless baths of endless Rome.
And now, at last, bathing finished, and the exercises of the _palæstra_, at
half-past two, or three, our friend finds his way home--not again to leave
it for that day. He is now a new man; refreshed, oiled with perfumes, his
dust washed off by hot water, and ready for enjoyment. These were the
things that determined the time for dinner. Had there been no other proof
that _coena_ was the Roman dinner, this is an ample one. Now first the
Roman was fit for dinner, in a condition of luxurious ease; business
ever--that day's load of anxiety laid aside--his _cuticle_, as he delighted
to talk, cleansed and polished--nothing more to do or to think of until
the next morning, he might now go and dine, and get drunk with a safe
conscience. Besides, if he does not get dinner now, when will he get it?
For most demonstrably he has taken nothing yet which comes near in value
to that basin of soup which many of ourselves take at the Roman hour of
bathing. No; we have kept our man fasting as yet. It is to be hoped that
something is coming at last.
It _does_ come,--dinner, the great meal of "coena;" the meal sacred to
hospitality and genial pleasure, comes now to fill up the rest of the day,
until light fails altogether.
Many people are of opinion that the Romans only understood what the
capabilities of dinner were. It is certain that they were the first great
people that discovered the true secret and meaning of dinner, the great
office which it fulfils, and which we in England are now so generally
acting on. Barbarous nations,--and none were, in that respect, more
barbarous than our own ancestors,--made this capital blunder; the brutes,
if you asked them what was the use of dinner, what it was meant for, stared
at you and replied--as a horse would reply if you put the same question
about his provender--that it was to give him strength for finishing his
work! Therefore, if you point your telescope back to antiquity about twelve
or one o'clock in the daytime, you will descry our most worthy ancestors
all eating for their very lives, eating as dogs eat, viz. in bodily fear
that some other dog will come and take their dinner away. What swelling of
the veins in the temples! (see Boswell's natural history of Dr. Johnson at
dinner;) what intense and rapid deglutition! what odious clatter of knives
and plates! what silence of the human voice! what gravity! what fury in the
libidinous eyes with which they contemplate the dishes! Positively it was
an _indecent_ spectacle to see Dr. Johnson at dinner. But, above all, what
maniacal haste and hurry, as if the fiend were waiting with red-hot pincers
to lay hold of the hindermost!
Oh, reader, do you recognize in this abominable picture your respected
ancestors and ours? Excuse us for saying--"What monsters!" We have a right
to call our own ancestors monsters; and, if so, we must have the same right
over yours. For Dr. Southey has shown plainly in the "Doctor," that every
man having four grand parents in the second stage of ascent, (each of whom
having four, therefore,) sixteen in the third, and so on, long before you
get to the Conquest, every man and woman then living in England will be
wanted to make up the sum of my separate ancestors; consequently, you must
take your ancestors out of the very same fund, or (if you are too proud for
that) you must go without ancestors. So that, your ancestors being clearly
mine, I have a right in law to call the whole "kit" of them monsters. _Quod
erat demonstrandum_. Really and upon our honor, it makes one, for the
moment, ashamed of one's descent; one would wish to disinherit one's-self
backwards, and (as Sheridan says in the _Rivals_) to "cut the connection."
Wordsworth has an admirable picture in Peter Bell of "A snug party in a
parlor," removed into _limbus patrum_ for their offences in the flesh:--
"Cramming, as they on earth were cramm'd;
All sipping wine, all sipping tea;
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent, and all d--d."
How well does that one word describe those venerable ancestral
dinners--"All silent!" Contrast this infernal silence of voice and fury
of eye with the "risus amabilis," the festivity, the social kindness, the
music, the wine, the "dulcis insania," of a Roman "coena." We mentioned
four tests for determining what meal is, and what is not, dinner; we may
now add a fifth, viz. the spirit of festal joy and elegant enjoyment, of
anxiety laid aside, and of honorable social pleasure put on like a marriage
garment.
And what caused the difference between our ancestors and the Romans? Simply
this--the error of interposing dinner in the middle of business, thus
courting all the breezes of angry feeling that may happen to blow from the
business yet to come, instead of finishing, absolutely closing, the account
with this world's troubles before you sit down. That unhappy interpolation
ruined all. Dinner was an ugly little parenthesis between two still uglier
clauses of a tee-totally ugly sentence. Whereas with us, their enlightened
posterity, to whom they have the honor to be ancestors, dinner is a great
reaction. There lies our conception of the matter. It grew out of the very
excess of the evil. When business was moderate, dinner was allowed to
divide and bisect it. When it swelled into that vast strife and agony, as
one may call it, that boils along the tortured streets of modern London or
other capitals, men began to see the necessity of an adequate counterforce
to push against this overwhelming torrent, and thus maintain the
equilibrium. Were it not for the soft relief of a six o'clock dinner, the
gentle manner succeeding to the boisterous hubbub of the day, the soft
glowing lights, the wine, the intellectual conversation, life in London is
now come to such a pass, that in two years all nerves would sink before it.
But for this periodic reaction, the modern business which draws so cruelly
on the brain, and so little on the hands, would overthrow that organ in
all but those of coarse organization. Dinner it is,--meaning by dinner
the whole complexity of attendant circumstances,--which saves the modern
brain-working men from going mad.
This revolution as to dinner was the greatest in virtue and value ever
accomplished. In fact, those are always the most operative revolutions
which are brought about through social or domestic changes. A nation must
be barbarous, neither could it have much intellectual business, which dined
in the morning. They could not be at ease in the morning. So much must be
granted: every day has its separate _quantum_, its dose (as the doctrinists
of rent phrase it) of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon.
No man will say it. He, therefore, who dined at noon, was willing to sit
down squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off.
And what follows from that? Why, that to him, to such a canine or cynical
specimen of the genus _homo_, dinner existed only as a physical event, a
mere animal relief, a mere carnal enjoyment. For what, we demand, did this
fleshly creature differ from the carrion crow, or the kite, or the vulture,
or the cormorant? A French judge, in an action upon a wager, laid it down
in law, that man only had a _bouche_, all other animals had a _gueule_:
only with regard to the horse, in consideration of his beauty, nobility,
use, and in honor of the respect with which man regarded him, by the
courtesy of Christendom, he might be allowed to have a _bouche_, and his
reproach of brutality, if not taken away, might thus be hidden. But surely,
of the rabid animal who is caught dining at noonday, the _homo ferus_, who
affronts the meridian sun like Thyestes and Atreus, by his inhuman meals,
we are, by parity of reason, entitled to say, that he has a "maw," (so has
Milton's Death,) but nothing resembling stomach. And to this vile man a
philosopher would say--"Go away, sir, and come back to me two or three
centuries hence, when you have learned to be a reasonable creature, and to
make that physico-intellectual thing out of dinner which it was meant to
be, and is capable of becoming." In Henry VII.'s time the court dined at
eleven in the forenoon. But even that hour was considered so shockingly
late in the French court, that Louis XII. actually had his gray hairs
brought down with sorrow to the grave, by changing his regular hour of
half-past nine for eleven, in gallantry to his young English bride.[11] He
fell a victim to late hours in the forenoon. In Cromwell's time they dined
at one, P.M. One century and a half had carried them on by two hours.
Doubtless, old cooks and scullions wondered what the world would come to
next. Our French neighbors were in the same predicament. But they far
surpassed us in veneration for the meal. They actually dated from it.
Dinner constituted the great era of the day. _L'apres diner_ is almost the
sole date which you find in Cardinal De Retz's memoirs of the _Fronde_.
Dinner was their _Hegira_--dinner was their _line_ in traversing the ocean
of day: they crossed the equator when they dined. Our English revolution
came next; it made some little difference, we have heard people say, in
Church and State; but its great effects were perceived in dinner. People
now dined at two. So dined Addison for his last thirty years; so dined
Pope, who was coeval with the revolution through his entire life. Precisely
as the rebellion of 1745 arose, did people (but observe, very great people)
advance to four, P.M. Philosophers, who watch the "semina rerum," and the
first symptoms of change, had perceived this alteration singing in the
upper air like a coming storm some little time before. About the year 1740,
Pope complains to a friend of Lady Suffolk's dining so late as four. Young
people may bear those things, he observes; but as to himself, now turned
of fifty, if such doings went on, if Lady Suffolk would adopt such strange
hours, he must really absent himself from Marble Hill. Lady Suffolk had a
right to please herself: he himself loved her. But if she would persist,
all which remained for a decayed poet was respectfully to "cut his stick,
and retire." Whether Pope ever put up with four o'clock dinners again, we
have vainly sought to fathom. Some things advance continuously, like a
flood or a fire, which always make an end of A, eat and digest it, before
they go on to B. Other things advance _per saltum_--they do not silently
cancer their way onwards, but lie as still as a snake after they have made
some notable conquest, then when unobserved they make themselves up "for
mischief," and take a flying bound onwards. Thus advanced dinner, and by
these fits got into the territory of evening. And ever as it made a motion
onwards, it found the nation more civilized, (else the change would not
have been effected,) and raised them to a still higher civilization. The
next relay on that line of road, the next repeating frigate, is Cowper in
his poem on _Conversation_. He speaks of four o'clock as still the elegant
hour for dinner--the hour for the _lautiores_ and the _lepidi homines_. Now
this was written about 1780, or a little earlier; perhaps, therefore,
just one generation after Pope's Lady Suffolk. But then Cowper was living
amongst the rural gentry, not in high life; yet, again, Cowper was nearly
connected by blood with the eminent Whig house of Cowper, and acknowledged
as a _kinsman_. About twenty-five years after this, we may take Oxford as
a good exponent of the national advance. As a magnificent body of
"foundations," endowed by kings, and resorted to by the flower of the
national youth, Oxford is always elegant and even splendid in her habits.
Yet, on the other hand, as a grave seat of learning, and feeling the weight
of her position in the commonwealth, she is slow to move: she is inert as
she should be, having the functions of _resistance_ assigned to her against
the popular instinct of _movement_. Now, in Oxford, about 1804-5, there was
a general move in the dinner hour. Those colleges who dined at three, of
which there were still several, now dined at four; those who had dined
at four, now translated their hour to five. These continued good general
hours, but still amongst the more intellectual orders, till about Waterloo.
After that era, six, which had been somewhat of a gala hour, was promoted
to the fixed station of dinner-time in ordinary; and there perhaps it will
rest through centuries. For a more festal dinner, seven, eight, nine, ten,
have all been in requisition since then; but we have not yet heard of any
man's dining later than 10, P.M., except in that single classical instance
(so well remembered from our father Joe) of an Irishman who must have dined
_much_ later than ten, because his servant protested, when others were
enforcing the dignity of their masters by the lateness of their dinner
hours, that _his_ master dined "to-morrow."
Were the Romans not as barbarous as our own ancestors at one time? Most
certainly they were; in their primitive ages they took their _coena_ at
noon,[12] _that_ was before they had laid aside their barbarism; before
they shaved: it was during their barbarism, and in consequence of their
barbarism, that they timed their _coena_ thus unseasonably. And this is
made evident by the fact, that, so long as they erred in the hour, they
erred in the attending circumstances. At this period they had no music
at dinner, no festal graces, and no reposing upon sofas. They sate bolt
upright in chairs, and were as grave as our ancestors, as rabid, and
doubtless as furiously in haste.