Marcus Apicius flourished in Tiberius’s age; and he developed a positive genius for inventing new sources of culinary delight. Every quarter of the Roman world was ransacked to find strange objects whereon to whet his appetite. In Hadrian’s day people continue to eat Apician cakes and Apician sauces, such as are described in his encyclopædic cook books. But although he inherited a hundred million sesterces ($4,000,000), at last his steward reported glumly, “You have only ten million ($400,000) left.” How was it possible for a true gourmand to exist in such poverty?--Apicius, therefore, committed suicide rather than live on commonplace fare! Many will tell you that he showed the right spirit and that his busts stand as a kind of inspiration for dozens of rich epicures in their marble triclinia. =82. Vitellius, the Imperial Glutton.=--One of Apicius’s disciples, Vitellius, rose to Empire. In his brief reign (April-December 69 A.D.) before Vespasian’s troops killed him, he taught his subjects how truly a man can live to eat. He had trained himself by the constant use of emetics to devour four heavy meals per day.[45] His senatorial friends, obliged to invite him to their houses, never dared to offer him a dinner costing less than 400,000 sesterces ($16,000). His brother gave him a banquet at which were served “2000 choice fishes and 7000 birds”; but he returned the favor by giving a feast at the imperial palace in which he served his favorites with “The Shield of Minerva”--a kind of salad-supreme made of “the livers of charfish, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingoes, and the entrails of lampreys.” Warships had been sent as far as the Ægean or Spain to round up some of these viands. It was lucky for the treasury that his reign was a very short one. =83. Simple Diet of the Early Romans.=--And yet these worthies gorged and guzzled in a city whose founders had been famous for their abstemiousness. For many a generation even prosperous Romans had lived very largely on coarse bread or even on a coarser wheat porridge (_puls_). Wheat porridge was what supplied the brawn and courage to the legionaries who brought to ruin Pyrrhus, Hannibal, Philip of Macedon, and Antiochus. They were fortunate if their meal was not made of barley, later counted as being barely fit for inferior slaves.