INFATUATION FOR FISH—EXTRAVAGANT PRICES—COSTLY
ENTERTAINMENTS—VITELLIUS—CLEOPATRA—APICIUS—COOKS—SAUCES
Leaving now the Lore of fishing among the Greeks and Romans, let us
turn, before examining the nature and number of their Lures, to their
estimation of Fish as a food.
We found, it will be remembered, that the Homeric poems make no mention
of fish being served at a banquet of the heroes, or even appearing on
the tables of people of position. Only poor or starving folk ate fish.
Although fish became later an insensate luxury, the Greeks at first
apparently abstained from all fish caught in fresh water, except the
eels of Lake Copaïs, then as now far-famed.[459]
This abstention from fresh-water fish originated (according to
Plutarch) in the belief that every spring and every stream was sacred
to some god or nymph, to catch whose property or progeny—the fish in
them—would be an act of impiety.[460] This sounds like a laboured
explanation of a fact really due to other causes. One of these is
brought out clearly in Geikie. When noticing the difference which
existed between the Greek and the Roman interest in and feeling for
the sea, he, or rather Professor Mackail, attributes it largely to a
question of food supply.[461]
Greece proper, from its comparative sterility and poverty of water,
was very limited in its capacity to grow crops or rear herds. It
compulsorily fell back largely on fish. And principally sea-fish,
because of their superior palatability, and because of the inadequacy,
owing to scarcity of lakes and perennial rivers, of fresh-water fish.
Whatever be the cause of the early abstention, three points arouse our
interest. (A) The passages in Greek writers (previous to Ælian) that
describe angling in _Greek fresh_ waters, reach but a scant half-dozen,
while those that depict fishing in such waters—sacred lakes, temple
stew-ponds, and eeling in Lake Copaïs excepted—can probably be reckoned
on both hands.[462]
(B) The _Palatine Anthology_ (at least in the period from 700 B.C.
to 500 A.D.) contains no reference (as far as I know) to aught but
sea-fishing.
(C) The Greek comedians, Athenæus, the Greek opsophagic authors all
almost always reserve their appreciations for food from ἰχθυόεις πόντος.
The statement that the Romans abstained, like the Maeatæ or Celts[463]
of North Britain, from fresh-water fish from similar, or any motives,
cannot be established. It goes far beyond the evidence at our command,
although some aversion may be possibly deduced from Ovid (_Fast._,
VI. 173 f.), and as regards shellfish from Varro. Unlike the Greeks,
however, they certainly in a very short period became great consumers
of fish from the Tiber, the Po, the Italian Lakes, and afterwards from
the Danube, Rhine, etc., but in their estimation, as in that of the
Greeks, fish from the sea ever held the higher place.[464]
If cost be a true criterion, this preference for salt-water fish
continued as late as the fourth century. In Diocletian’s Edict, 301
A.D., fixing the price of food, etc., throughout the Empire, the
maximum allowed for best quality sea-fish was nearly double that of
best quality river-fish.[465]
In both Greece and Rome fish became luxuries of the most expensive
kind. Seas and rivers were scoured far and wide. No price was thought
too extravagant for a mullet, a sturgeon, or a turbot; three mullets of
historical celebrity even fetched in Rome the almost incredible sum of
£240![466]
In spite of many laws and decrees made at Athens and at Rome (where
the Censor often interfered[467] in cases of extravagance in dress,
living, etc.) the prices, owing to the ingenuity of the sellers and the
wild competition of the buyers, rose constantly higher. The plaint of
Cato the Censor that things could not be well with a community, where
“a fish fetched more than a bull,” was uttered in and of a generation,
which in comparison with its successors looks frugal, even niggardly.
Pliny records (_N. H._, IX. 31) “octo milibus nummum unum mullum
mercatum fuisse”—one mullet equalled £64, or the price of nine bulls!
He also says (_N. H._, IX. 30) that mullets were plentiful and cheap
when under 2 lb., “a weight they rarely exceeded.” Martial (_Ep._, XIV.
97) confirms this in his “Do not dishonour your gold serving-dish by a
small mullet: none less than two pounds is worthy of it.” In proportion
as they exceeded this, they grew in value.
One would imagine that Nature had fallen in with the caprice of the
Romans, for the fish seems to have grown larger in the decline of the
Empire, as if to humour the extravagance of this degenerate people.
Horace thought he had pretty well stigmatised the frantic folly of his
glutton by a mullet of 3 lbs. (_Sat._, II. 2, 33); but the next reign
furnished one of 4½ lbs., which presented to and sold at auction by the
Emperor Tiberius was bought by Octavius for £40 (Seneca, _Ep._, XCV.
42), while in Juvenal, IV. 15 f., we have one of 6 lbs.[468]
How long the passion for these big mullets lasted it is impossible to
tell, but Macrobius, speaking with indignation of one purchased by
Asinius Celer in the reign of Claudius for £56 (in Pliny, _N. H._,
IX. 31, I find the price was £64!), declares that in his time (fifth
century A.D.) such mad prices had vanished.
Alongside of Pliny’s caustic comment[469] that the price of a
victorious Triumph equalled that of a cook, or a fish, can be set the
lament of the Greek comedians that for some fish one had to pay ἴσον
ἲσῳ, _i.e._ for weight avoirdupois you handed over a similar weight
in money or, as Mayor neatly renders it, “£ for lb.” This gibe at the
public mania sprang from bitter personal experience. At Rome, too, we
read “of those who sell rare fish for their weight in money.”
Does not Martial’s savage outburst on a glutton who had sold a slave
for £10 to procure a dinner, which was not really a good one because
nearly all the money was spent on a _mullet_—
“Non est hic, improbe, non est
Piscis: homo est; hominem, Calliodore, comes,”
apply with greater force to “the men-eaters” who purchased mullets for
£40 or £60 each?[470]
Juvenal’s scathing invective on Crispinus—who had bought a mullet of 6
lbs. for £48—runs:
“What! _you_, Crispinus, brought to Rome erewhile,
Lapt in the rushes of your native Nile,
Buy scales at such a price! You might, I guess,
Have bought the fisherman himself for less;
Bought, in some countries, manors at this rate,
And, in Apulia, an immense estate.”[471]
The folly of the Roman nobles and millionaires did not exhaust itself
in buying fish at insane prices, or squandering their fortunes on
_Vivaria_ and similar extravagances. They touched a yet lower depth of
infamy by taking their _cognomen_ from fish.
Thus Columella contrasts the custom of their ancestors of taking a
_cognomen_ from some great victory, _e.g._ Numantinus or Isauricus,
with that of their decadent successors such as Licinius _Muræna_ or
Sergius _Orata_.[472]
The Greek Comic Poets and Satirists castigate with bitter sarcasms and
jeers the frenzied, almost cat-like devotion to fish.
Even Diogenes the Cynic came to an untimely end by eating with eager
haste a polypus _raw_.[473] Philoxenus the Poet, when warned by his
doctor, after “he had bought a polypus two cubits long, dressed it, and
ate it up himself all but the head,” that he had but six hours left to
live and to arrange his affairs, bequeathed his poems and the prizes of
his poems to the Nine Muses:
“Such is my Will! But since old Charon’s voice
Keeps crying out ‘Now cross’: and deadly Fate,
Whom none can disobey, calls me away,
That I may go below with all my goods,
Bring me the fragments of that polypus.”[474]
The moralists of the Empire bewail “the costly follies of the
patricians.” Juvenal, Martial, and other Roman Satirists lampoon the
gluttony and extravagance connected with opsophagy, or the eating of
_fish_. This limitation of the word is explained by Plutarch (_Symp._,
IV. 4), “fish alone above all the rest of the dainties is called ὄψον,
because it is more excellent than all the rest,” and characteristically
defended by Athen., VII. 4.[475]
The banquets of the Greeks[476] seem to have outdone even those of
Imperial Rome. Both must have weighed heavy, alike on table and on
chest.
At these, writes Badham, “although all flesh was there, although
quadrupeds mustered strong, and a whole heaven of poultry, still it
was the flesh of _fishes_ that ever bore away the palm; they were the
soul of the supper, and the number of kinds brought together at one
repast was surprisingly great. From the poetic bills of fare preserved
by Athenæus I have verified twenty-six species of fish in one Attic
supper, and not less than forty at another![477] On the fish course
being brought in, the appearance of the banqueting hall soon became
more splendid: hardware made way for solid silver: gold breadbaskets
were now handed round: the flower of youth of both sexes entered
bearing bits of pumice, drugs against drunkenness, and trays full of
chaplets of Violets and Amaranth, while others hung up that mystic
flower, the present of the God of Love to the God of Silence, to
intimate that henceforth all things said or done at the feast were to
be kept, inviolable and _sub rosa_, under which flower by the rain of
myriads of petals all the guests literally soon were.”[478]
The amount of money spent on suppers and entertainments at Rome
staggers conception. The figures recorded by even serious historians
seem beyond all belief: for instance, the ordinary expense of Lucullus
for a supper in the Hall of Apollo is given at 50,000 _drachmæ_, or
£1600.
At one of the suppers to which it was the custom of Nero to invite
himself—his meals, Suetonius (_Nero_, 27) tells us, were prolonged from
mid-day to midnight or _vice-versa_—no less than £32,000 was expended
on chaplets, and at another still more on roses alone. But it must
be remembered that the Italian rose bloomed only for one day—witness
the lines, “Una dies aperit, conficit una dies,” and “Quam longa una
dies, ætas tam longa rosarum.”[479] The cost of an entertainment by his
brother in honour of the Emperor Vitellius on his entrance to Rome was
nearly £80,000!
But of Vitellius himself let Suetonius[480] speak: “He was chiefly
addicted to the vices of luxury and cruelty. He always made three
meals a day, sometimes four—breakfast, dinner, supper, and a drunken
revel afterwards. This load of food he bore well enough, from a custom
to which he had inured himself, of frequently vomiting!” No wonder
Seneca lashes the gluttons of Rome with “Vomunt ut edant, edunt
ut vomant!”[481] For each of these meals he would make different
appointments at the houses of his friends for the same day. None
ever entertained him at less expense than 400,000 sesterces (or
£3200). But the most famous entertainment—given in his honour by his
brother—commandeered no less than 2,000 choice fishes, and 7,000 birds.
Yet even this supper he himself outdid at a feast to celebrate
the first use of a dish fashioned expressly for him, and from its
extraordinary size yclept “The Shield of Minerva.” In this dish[482]
costing £100,000 and capable of feeding one hundred and thirty guests
“were tossed together the livers of charfish, the brains of pheasants
and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, and the entrails (or rather the
milt) of lampreys, brought in ships of war from the Carpathian Sea, or
the Spanish Straits.”[483]
In order “satiare inexplebiles libidines,” etc., Vitellius is believed
to have squandered in a few months[484] no less than seven million two
hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds (£7,265,000)![485]
No wonder that Caligula, perhaps the biggest spendthrift of the Cæsars,
laid down the maxim that “a man ought to be either an economist, or an
Emperor!”
The fabulous sums spent on entertainments by the Greeks and Romans were
equalled, even surpassed by the Persians, the Sybarites, the Egyptians,
and other nations. But the cost, though prodigious, of Cleopatra’s
four-day entertainment to Antony and his captains (in the _menu_ of
which fishes from the Nile and the Red Sea figured conspicuously),
pales before that of a supper given in honour of Xerxes and his
captains by Antipater of Thasos, _i.e._ 400 (presumably Attic) talents
or some £100,000! No wonder Herodotus mournfully adds, “Wherever Xerxes
took two meals, dinner and supper, that city was utterly ruined!”[486]
Nor at the feasts, which the invader of Media made “for a great
multitude _every day_,” was it a case of taking up of the fragments
that remained but twelve basketsful, because, as Posidonius (in the
14th book of his _History_) continues, “besides the food that was
consumed and the heaps of fragments which were left, every guest
carried away with him entire joints of beasts, and birds, and fishes,
which had never been carved, all ready dressed,[487] in sufficient
quantities to fill a waggon. And after this they were presented with a
quantity of sweetmeats,” etc.
The prize, however, for mad lavishness must be adjudged even in
a race of such strenuous competitors, to “that most admirable of
all monarchs,” Ptolemy Philadelphus. It is “Eclipse first, the
rest nowhere,” if the description of the coronation feast given by
Callixenus in his _History of Alexandria_ be faithfully rendered by
Athenæus.[488]
The imagination of the average reader before reaching the last chapters
will have been fatigued and appalled by the picture of overwhelming
wealth and magnificence, but as Ptolemy, after a reign of grandiose and
continuous expenditure, left at his death £200,000,000 in the treasury,
the cost of the whole entertainment must have been as nought compared
with his revenue.
M. Gavius Apicius, after squandering half a million sterling on the
indulging his passion for creating new dishes and new combinations
of food from materials collected in Europe, Asia, and Africa, one
day balanced his accounts. Finding that but barely £80,000 remained,
and despairing of being able to satisfy the cravings of his hunger
from such a miserable pittance he poisoned himself. He is possibly
the author of a Treatise (in ten books!) of recipes for new dishes
and new sauces for fish; for one of the latter more than twenty-five
ingredients were necessary.[489]
The importance attached to cooks and cooking finds a cloud of witnesses
in Greek and Roman writers. Athenæus in especial recites their
triumphs and their bombastic boasts. So high was the _chef’s_ position
and so excellent was the _cuisine_ in Greece that we find the Roman
ambassadors, who in the sixth century B.C. were sent to investigate the
working of Solon’s Laws, bringing home a special report on Cooking!
To these Attic _cordons bleus_ in succeeding generations not only
Italy but Persia were glad to send pupils, and pay exorbitant fees for
tuition. The Attic cook gave himself the same airs of superiority over
his Roman brother, as the French _chef_ over the Anglican—him “of a
hundred sects but only one sauce.” Carême, the _chef_ of Talleyrand
(the author of this _mot_), never abated his claim that to the success
of the Congress of Vienna he contributed no less than his master.[490]
His salary, however, does not begin to compare with that of Antony’s
cook, £3000 a year and “perquisites” galore.
Anaxandrides[491] compares the beauteous work of portrait painters
unfavourably with the beauty of a dish of fish. Xenarchus[492]
contrasts poets with fishmongers, much to the detriment of the former:
“Poets are nonsense: for they never say
A single thing that’s new. But all they do
Is to clothe old ideas in language new,
Turning the same things o’er again
And upside down. But as for fishmongers,
They’re an inventive race and yield to none,” etc.
Hegesippus’s summing up, “But the whole race of cooks is conceited and
arrogant,” finds confirmation in dozens of instances. Two grandiloquent
boasts may serve: “I have known many a guest who has, for my sake,
eaten up his whole estate,” and
“I am in truth a God, I bring the dead
By mere scent of my food, to life again.”
Self-laudation is no monopoly of Greece, or Sicily, whence came perhaps
the most famous of the tribe. In our own Beaumont and Fletcher’s
play—_The Bloody Brother_—a _chef_ vaunts,
“For fish I’ll make you a standing lake of white broth,
And pikes shall come ploughing up the plums before them,
Arion on a dolphin playing Lachrymæ.”
Lucian, in his witty Dialogue,[493] makes Hermes act as auctioneer at
the sale of the different creeds as personified by their founders or
by philosophers, and dilate on the exceptional merits of the lot then
under the hammer, “because he will teach you how long a gnat will live,
and what sort of soul an oyster possesses.” Mr. Lambert states that
Ausonius wrote a poem on the oyster! To be more accurate, he wrote
two,[494] and lengthy ones to boot!
The Emperor Domitian (Juvenal, IV.) ordered a special sitting of
the Senate to deliberate and advise on a matter of such grave State
importance as the best method of cooking a turbot.
Greek and Roman writers frequently poke fun at the _gourmets_ who
asserted that they could instantly tell from the flavour whence the
fish came: from what sea, and what part of that sea, from what river,
and even from which side of that river.[495]
Either these ancient connoisseurs were blessed with a more exquisite
and developed sense of taste than we moderns, or the whole pose was
an intolerable affectation, for “they drenched their subtly-conceived
dishes with garum, alec, and other sauces, which were so strong and
composite that it would have been hardly possible to distinguish a
fresh fish from a putrid cat—except by the bones!”[496]
This assertion is none too strong, if the receipts for these sauces be
duly pondered. Mention of _garum_, which gets its name from being made
originally from the salted blood and entrails of a fish called _garon_
or _garos_ by the Greeks, is in classical writers very general: we find
it even in Æschylus and Sophocles.[497]
The various sauces known in Latin are too numerous to recite.[498] The
two best, although the authorities are far from unanimous, seem to have
been made out of the gills and entrails of the Mackerel and Tunny. The
components of one recipe justify Robinson. In addition to other odds
and ends, its outstanding feature was the gore and entrails of the
Tunny, crammed in a vessel hermetically closed, and only drawn off when
decomposition was complete! No wonder Plato the Comedian complains ...
“drenching them in putrid _garum_ they will suffocate me.”
_Alec_, like _garum_, once the name of a fish (possibly the anchovy),
came to signify only the sauce made from it, and subsequently from
other cheap fish. It differed from _garum_ chiefly from being thicker,
and judging from the recipes probably nastier. You took first the dregs
and fæculence remaining after the _garum_ liquor had been decanted:
to them, add turbid brine, sodden bodies of the fish, etc., and then
you have the semi-solid compound, from which _alec_ was derived, not
inaptly yclept “Putrilago.”[499]
If, as Badham (p. 69) asserts but not convincingly, _garum_ a double
duty served, as a sauce and as a liqueur, the price of the latter was
exorbitant, over £3 a gallon.[500] Martial (_Ep._, XIII. 102) in
“Expirantis adhuc scombri de sanguine primo
Accipe fastosum, munera _cara_, garum,”
calls attention to the expensive nature of his present, for _garum_
made from the _scomber_ was in Pliny’s words “laudatissimum,” while the
ἄλμη, or _muria_, fabricated from the intestines and nothing else of
the tunny was cheap and inferior.
Apart from their gastronomic popularity, the medical efficacy of the
various _gara_ as pæaned by Pliny must, like the Waverley Pen, have
“come as a boon and a blessing to men,” in the wide range of their
cures.[501] For ulcers of the mouth and ears, one _mirifice prodest_.
On the application of other _gara_, “dumb-foundered flee away” burns,
blains, dysenteries, bites of dogs, _maximeque crocodili_, etc. Chapter
44 might indeed easily pass as the leaflet of an advance agent for a
patent pill.
With the knowledge and use of the various internal parts of fish, it is
strange to find Caviare, made out of the roe of the Sturgeon, first in
a recipe of the ninth century. Soft and hard roes then, as now, were
generally exported, but as a separate article it became known only in
Byzantine times.[502]
With the hungry desire for fish among all classes and with the deep
pockets of the rich enabling them to go to any extreme price, is it
any wonder that the trade of a fishmonger at Athens and Rome was
most lucrative? Several fishmongers acquired large fortunes and high
position. The Athenians even raised to the rank of citizens the sons
of Chærephilus, for the adequate reason that he sold such excellent
pickled fish![503]
At Athens, and probably at Rome, there existed a Society or Corporation
of Fishmongers, akin to our own Fishmongers’ Company, one of the many
trade guilds of mediæval times. Its power and political pull often
defeated or evaded the stringent regulations, which from time to time
fixed the price of fish. In early times fish were sold by the fishermen
themselves, as soon as the Fish-Market at Rome had been opened by the
ringing of its bell.
FOOTNOTES:
[459] Cf. Chapter IV. Also Plutarch, _Symp._, VIII. 8, and Aristoph.,
_Ach._, 880.
[460] Akin to this we have the special prohibition—unique as far
as I know—whereby priests at the temple of Leptis abstained from
eating _sea_ fish, because Poseidon was god of the sea, and owner and
protector of its denizens. Plutarch, _De solert. an._, 35, 11. At other
of his temples, _e.g._ in Laconia, the fate awaiting a violator of the
sacred fish was that common to poachers of similar holy waters, death.
[461] _The Love of Nature among the Romans_ (London, 1912), p. 300, n.
1.
[462] Passages which at first sight seem to conflict with this summary
can often be ruled out from (A) geographical reasons, where (1) the
fishing occurs in some non-Greek water, as in the Tiber (Galen,
περὶ τροφῶν δυνάμεως, 3), or (2) the locality is not specified, as
in Athen., VIII. 56, which is merely a quotation from a treatise of
Mnesitheus, concerned with _all_ kinds of fish from a digestive point
of view; and (B) from the _brackish_ nature of water.
[463] Dio. Cass. 76, 12, 2, speaks of the Scottish Seas as swarming and
crammed with fish.
[464] Damm, p. 465, asserts that the order of eating of fish among the
Greeks was (1) Fish from the sea, and then, but much later, (2) Fish
from the rapids of a river. Daremberg and Saglio: “Pour les Grecs le
poisson d’eau douce comptait à peine dans la consommation du poisson de
mer: seules les anguilles du lac Copaïs avaient quelque renom. Mais la
pêche maritime eut toujours beaucoup plus d’importance.” Pliny, XXXII.
10: Pisces marinos in usu fuisse protinus a condita Roma. Philemon the
comedian makes the cook in his play, “The Soldier” (cited by Athen.,
VII. 32), bewail having for the feast mere,
“river fish, eaters of mud;
If I had had a scare or bluebacked fish from Attic waters
I should have been accounted an immortal!”
[465] See _infra_, p. 287.
[466] Suetonius (_Tib._, 34), “Tresque mullos triginta milibus nummum.”
A thousand sesterces, in the time of Augustus, equalled £8 17_s._
1_d._, but later only £7 15_s._ 1_d._ For convenience I take 1000
sesterces as roughly equivalent to about £8 0_s._ 0_d._
[467] An amusing instance of official interference is recorded in
Apuleius, _Metamorhp._ I. 18. Lucius, the hero of the story, tries to
buy some fish for dinner from a fishmonger at Hypata in Thessaly, who
demanded 100 _nummi_ (_denarii_): after much haggling, 20 _denarii’s_
worth is bought and being taken home, when the local ædile intervenes,
seizes the parcel on account of the extravagant charge, and destroys
the fish in the presence of the seller. The result, which Lucius
bewails, was loss of both dinner, and _denarii_!
[468] See Mayor’s _Juvenal_ and Gifford’s _Trans._, IV. 15. In Pliny,
IX. 31, Mutianus speaks of a mullet which was caught in the Red Sea,
weighing 80 lbs. The comment of I. D. Lewis (on _Juv._, IV. 15 f.) that
this fish “is utterly fabulous,” is not the voice of _one_ crying in
the wilderness.
[469] IX. 31, “at nunc coci triumphorum pretiis parantur, et coquorum
pisces.”
[470] _Ep._, X. 31 f.
[471] _Sat._, IV. 23 ff. (Gifford’s _Trs._).
[472] VIII. 16. Cf. also Varro, _De Re Rust._, Bk. III. 3, 10; Ælian,
VIII. 4; and Macrobius, _Sat._, III. xv. 1 ff.
[473] Athen., VIII. 26.
[474] _Ibid._ VIII. 26.
[475] Xenophon, in speaking of a man as “an opsophagist and the biggest
dolt possible,” evidently does not subscribe to the pleasant theory
that fish-food increases the grey matter of our brain. Holland’s
translation of Plutarch is not complimentary: “hence it is we call
those gluttons who love belly-cheer so well opsophagists.”
[476] In charity to the Greeks may I hazard the plea (the rules of
even the Law Courts are now sensibly relaxed) that their delight in
Brobdingnagian meals may have originated in the days when their gods
walked with men on earth, or grew up later as the sincerest form of
flattery? No one in Homer keeps his eye more skinned or his nose more
active than a god, when hecatombs “are about.” The Olympians flit
constantly to Æthiopia and are impatient of any business, mundane or
heavenly, which interferes with a trip thither, when with the keen
scent (or vision?) of vultures, they smell (or see?) hecatombs in
preparation in the heart of the Dark Continent, where the inhabitants,
as a scholiast tells us, kept a feast for twelve days, _one for every
god_! See A. Shewan’s _Homeric Games at an Ancient St. Andrews_
(Edinburgh, 1911), p. 116—a most delightful and destructive skit at the
expense of _The Higher Criticism_ of Homer!
[477] The greatest number of _fish_ which I can count at any feast
mentioned in Athenæus (in Bk. IV. 13) amounts to only thirty-two!
Badham (p. 587) omits to state that the whole poem is nothing but a
parody, chiefly of Homer, by Matron, and is _not_ a “Bill of fare of an
Attic supper” in any sense.
[478] Sammonicus Serenus, a _savant_ of the early third century A.D.,
states that the _acipenser_ was brought to table to the accompaniment
of flutes by servants crowned with flowers. Cf. Macrob. III. 16, 7 f.
Cf. Athen. VII. 44, and Ælian, VIII. 28.
In describing this imaginary Attic supper, Badham certainly lets
himself go. The allusion to “the present of the God of Love” he may
have taken from an anonymous epigram in Burmann’s _Anthologia_ (1773),
Bk. V. 217.
“Est rosa flos Veneris; cuius quo furta laterent
Harpocrati matris dona dicavit Amor.
Inde rosam mensis hospes suspendit amicis,
Convivæ ut sub ea dicta tacenda sciant.”
These lines, of which several variants exist (notably that of the Rose
Cellar in the Rathskeller of Bremen), are founded on the legend that
Cupid bribed the God of Silence with his mother’s flower not to divulge
the amours of Venus. Hence a host hung a rose over his table as a sign
that nothing there said was to be repeated. A quaint and touching
legend runs that in the beginning all roses were white, but when Venus
walking one day among the flowers was pricked by one of their thorns,
these roses “drew their colour from the blood of the goddess,” and
remained encarmined for ever. Cf. Natal. Com. _Mythol._, V. 13. See
also A. de Gubernatis, _La Mythologie des Plantes_ (Paris, 1882), II.
323, and R. Folkard, _Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics_ (London, 1884),
516 ff.
[479] Cf. Ausonius, _Id._, XIV. 39, and 43.
[480] Suet., _Vitell._ 13.
[481] For Vitellius’s habit, see Dion., 65. 2.
[482] Adrian had the good taste to melt it down.
[483] Thomson’s translation. The mania for expensive bowls obtained
in either nation: the philosopher Aristotle owned 70, while Æsop, the
tragic actor, paid £8000 for a single ewer. The histrionic, as Æsop and
Roscius show, was a most lucrative profession. Cf. Pliny, XXXV. 46.
[484] According to Dion., 65. 4, and Tacitus, _Hist._, II. 95.
[485] Tac., _loc. cit._, “noviens milies sestertium paucissimis
mensibus intervertisse creditur sagina.”
[486] Herodot., VII. 118-120, Athen., IV. 27.
[487] See Athenæus (V. 46), who is so struck that he quotes the passage
twice! The culinary accommodations must have been “prodeegeous!” At the
birthday feast of a mere Persian grandee, an ox and an ass, and other
animals that were his, even a horse and a camel, were roasted _whole in
stoves_ (or ovens). Herodot., I. 133.
[488] V. 25-35.
[489] “The Treatise we now possess is a sort of Cook-Confectioners’
Manual, containing a multitude of recipes for preparing and cooking
all kinds of flesh, fish, and fowl. From the solecisms of style it is
probable that it was compiled at a late period by one who prefixed
the name of Apicius in order to attract attention and insure the
circulation of his book.”—Smith’s _Dict. Gk. Rom. Biog. and Myth._
Teuffel and Schwabe, _History of Roman Literature_ (trans. G. C. W.
Warr, London, 1892), II. 28 f., point out that _Cœlius_ Apicius, the
traditional author of the work _de re coquinaria_, should rather be
_Cœlii_ Apicius, _i.e._ “the Apicius of Cœlius,” _Apicius_ being the
title and Cœlius the writer. The book was founded on Greek originals.
In Seneca (_ad. Helv._, 10), “sestertium milies in culinam consumpsit.”
See Martial, III. 22, who flays Apicius with biting scorn in his—
“Dederas, Apici, bis trecenties ventri,
Sed adhuc supererat centiens tibi laxum.
Hoc tu gravatus ut famem et sitim ferre
Summa venenum potione perduxti.
Nil est, Apici, tibi gulosius factum.”
For C. Matius the earliest (in the time of Augustus) and for other
Latin writers on Cookery, see Columella, XXI. 4 and 44.
[490] See A. Hayward, _Art of Dining_.
[491] Anaxandrides, _Odysseus_, _frag._ 1. _ap._ Athen., VI. 11.
See also Athen., VI. 4-12; VII. 35-41; Livy, XXXIX. 6: “Tum coquus,
vilissimum antiquis mancipium et æstimatione et usu, in pretio esse, et
quod ministerium fuerat, ars haberi coepta”; and Martial, XIV. 220.
[492] _Porphyra_, _frag._ 1. _ap._ Athen., VI. 6.
[493] βίων πρᾶσις s. 26. The opening (s. 1) of the auction is not
unlike a modern one: “For Sale! a varied assortment of Live Creeds,
Tenets of every description. Cash on delivery, or credit on suitable
security!” While lot (in s. 26)—The Peripatetic—fetches £80 0_s._
0_d._, the great Diogenes (in s. 11) is knocked down for threepence!
Fowler’s Trs.
[494] Ausonius, _Epist._, 5 and 15. But, after all, our own Keats,
addressing his favourite Moon, did not hesitate to write:
“thou art a relief
To the poor patient oyster!”
(_Endymion_, III. 66 f.)
[495] Pliny, IX. 79: “Is (Sergius Orata) primus ... adiudicavit quando
eadem aquatilium genera aliubi atque aliubi meliora, sicut lupi pisces
in Tiberi amne inter duos pontes ... et alia genera similiter, _ne
culinarum censura peragatur_.” See Horace, _Sat._, II. 2, 31 ff. Also
Columella, _R.R._, VIII. 16, 4: “Fastidire docuit fluvialem lupum, nisi
quem Tiberis adverso torrente defatigasset”; and also Juvenal IV. 139
ff.:
“Nulli maior fuit usus edendi
Tempestate mea: Circeis nata forent an
Lucrinum ad saxum Rutupinove edita fundo
Ostrea, callebat primo deprendere morsu,
Et semel aspecti litus dicebat echini.”
More of the same sort is to be read in Macrob., _Sat._, III. 16, 16-18.
[496] Robinson, _op. cit._, p. 45.
[497] Æsch., _Proteus, frag._, 211; Nauck^2, and Soph., _Triptolemos_,
_frag._ 606, Jebb, _ap._ Poll. 6. 65 and Athen., II. 75.
[498] Pauly-Winowa, _Real-Enc._, VII. 841-9, has nine columns on the
subject, ending with a bibliography!
[499] Horace, _Sat._, II. 4. 73; Martial, III. 77. 5; and V. II., 94.
The greatest delicacy of all these mixtures, the so-called _Garum
Sociorum_, exported all over the Empire from Carteia, New Carthage,
etc., was compounded of the intestines of the Spanish Mackerel. The
absence of beard in the Mackerel is accounted for by this fish being
convicted of treason against the reigning Monarch, and condemned to
perpetual loss of beard. Keller, _op. cit._, 326, omits a reference
to this _Fischeprozess_, but cites the habit of writers—especially
Bucolic—explaining any natural curiosity by putting into poetic or
other shape a legend or Volkslied dealing with the point, _e.g._ Æsop’s
fable why the Camel lacks horns.
[500] Pliny, XXXI. 43: “singulis milibus nummum permutantibus congios
fere binos.” _Ibid._, 44: “transiit deinde in luxuriam creveruntque
genera ad infinitum, sicuti garum ad colorem mulsi veteris, adeoque
suavitatem dilutum, ut bibi possit.” Cf. Martial, _Ep._, XIII. 82.
2: “Nobile nunc sitio luxuriosa garum, and Cælius Aurelianus” (_De
Chronicis, II.; De Paralysi_), on the liquor extracted from the
_Scomber_.
[501] Cf. XXXI. 44, and XXXII. 25.
[502] If O. Keller, _op. cit._, 338, be right in his authorities,
Blakey’s, “the praise of Caviare is frequent,” is far astray. Despite
the view of Hullmann’s _Handelsgesch. d. Gr._, 149, Athenæus deals
merely with _garum_ and _oxygarum_, while the classical cookery books
maintain a uniform silence.
[503] Athen., III. 90.