Time fails to tell of various rare vintages which are treasured by the epicures as if worth their weight in gold. In 121 B.C. there was a wonderful yield of wine called Vina Opimia from the then Consul Opimius. By Hadrian’s day the last drops of this precious liquor have long since disappeared, but men still discuss the traditions of its nectarous flavor. In every great house the wine cellar retains a number of web-covered and dirty glass jars carefully sealed with gypsum, and with labels showing that they were laid away perhaps a hundred years ago. As for the undesirability of wine-drinking, that idea has hardly crossed any man’s head; and Horace in Augustus’s day voiced a universal thought when he sang that good wine, “Made the wise confess their secret lore; brought hope to anxious souls, and gave the poor strength to lift up his horn.” =90. Kitchens and the Niceties of Cookery.=--With such attention to good eating and drinking a Roman kitchen necessarily requires an elaborate equipment. Cook stoves there are none; but there are extensive masonry or brick hearths. The charcoal fire heats the stones until a broad surface is glowing and ready for remarkable culinary achievements. The head cook in Calvus’s house rejoices in a great battery of copper utensils often of truly elegant shape; and copper ware (more expensive than tin, but far more durable) appears in every Roman kitchen. There are pastry molds, dippers, ladles, great spoons, little spoons, baking pans for small cakes, in short, everything to delight the heart of the housewife of another age. Nobody expects us to investigate rudely the peculiar dishes evolved in the kitchen of a genuine gourmand. Cookery, the disciples of Apicius aver, is not a common handicraft, but the noblest of sciences. Only a thrice-initiated epicure, a man who has carefully trained his tongue to discriminate the least shades of taste, and his fingers to endure hot viands so that he may pluck out the morsels at precisely the proper temperature, can appreciate many of the refinements. Calvus laughs, indeed, at a friend of his who lately insisted on serving “a wild boar from Lucania caught when the South wind was blowing,” with “honey apples picked under a waning moon,” and “lampreys caught just before spawning.” Such people will also explain dogmatically that “eggs of oblong shape have better flavor than round ones;” and that “after drinking wine the appetite is better stimulated by dried ham than by boiled sausage,” or that “it spoils the flavor of Massic wine to strain it through linen; but you can clear it by mixing with the lees of Falernian and then adding the yolk of a pigeon’s egg.”[49] A new dish coming loyally into favor is that to which Hadrian is personally so partial--a huge meat pie wherein pheasant, peacock, sow’s udder, and wild-boar flesh are all baked up together.