ished so much as the coarsest of all--
the luxury of the table. The whole villa arrangements and the whole
villa life had ultimate reference to dining; not only had they
different dining-rooms for winter and summer, but dinner was served
in the picture-gallery, in the fruit-chamber, in the aviary,
or on a platform erected in the deer-park, around which,
when the bespoken "Orpheus" appeared in theatrical costume
and blew his flourish, the duly-trained roes and wild boars congregated.
Such was the care bestowed on decoration; but amidst all this
the reality was by no means forgotten. Not only was the cook
a graduate in gastronomy, but the master himself often acted
as the instructor of his cooks. The roast had been long ago
thrown into the shade by marine fishes and oysters; now the Italian
river-fishes were utterly banished from good tables, and Italian
delicacies and Italian wines were looked on as almost vulgar.
Now even at the popular festivals there were distributed,
besides the Italian Falerian, three sorts of foreign wine--Sicilian,
Lesbian, Chian, while a generation before it had been sufficient
even at great banquets to send round Greek wine once; in the cellar
of the orator Hortensius there was found a stock of 10,000 jars
(at 33 quarts) of foreign wine. It was no wonder that the Italian
wine-growers began to complain of the competition of the wines
from the Greek islands. No naturalist could ransack land and sea
more zealously for new animals and plants, than the epicures of that day
ransacked them for new culinary dainties.(53) The circumstance
of the guest taking an emetic after a banquet, to avoid the consequences
of the varied fare set before him, no longer created surprise.
Debauchery of every sort became so systematic and aggravated
that it found its professors, who earned a livelihood by serving
as instructors of the youth of quality in the theory
and practice of vice.

Debt

It will not be necessary to dwell longer on this confused picture,
so monotonous in its variety; and the less so, that the Romans
were far from original in this respect, and confined themselves
to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more
exaggerated and stupid than their model. Plutos naturally devours
his children as well as Kronos; the competition for all these
mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices,
that those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate
melt a