rule to celebrate the daily meal at noon, if nothing
hindered; not that a later hour would not have been preferred had the
choice been free; but it was better to have a certainty at a bad hour, than
by waiting for a better hour to make it an uncertainty. For it was a camp
proverb--_Pransus, paratus_; armed with his daily meal, the soldier
is ready for service. It was not, however, that all meals, as Isidore
imagined, were indiscriminately called _prandium_; but that the one sole
meal of the day, by accidents of war, might, and did, revolve through all
hours of the day.

The first introduction of this military meal into Rome itself, would be
through the honorable pedantry of old centurions, &c., delighting (like the
_Trunnions_, &c., of our navy) to keep up in peaceful life some image or
memorial of their past experience, so wild, so full of peril, excitement,
and romance, as Roman warfare must have been in those ages. Many
non-military people for health's sake, many as an excuse for eating early,
many by way of interposing some refreshment between the stages of forensic
business, would adopt this hurried and informal meal. Many would wish to
see their sons adopting such a meal as a training for foreign service in
particular, and for temperance in general. It would also be maintained by a
solemn and very interesting commemoration of this camp repast in Rome.

This commemoration, because it has been grossly misunderstood by Salmasius,
(whose error arose from not marking the true point of a particular
antithesis,) and still more, because it is a distinct confirmation of all
we have said as to the military nature of _prandium_, we shall detach from
the series of our illustrations, by placing it in a separate paragraph.

On a set day the officers of the army were invited by Caesar to a banquet;
it was a circumstance expressly noticed in the invitation, by the proper
officers of the palace, that the banquet was not a "coena," but a
"prandium." What followed, in consequence? Why, that all the guests sate
down in full military accoutrement; whereas, observes the historian, had it
been a coena, the officers would have unbelted their swords; for, he adds,
even in Caesar's presence the officers lay aside their swords. The word
_prandium_, in short, converted the palace into the imperial tent; and
Caesar was no longer a civil emperor and _princeps senatus_, but became a
commander-in-chief amongst a council of his staff, all belted