=92. The Afternoon and Dinner-Time. Importance of the Dinner (_cena_).=--After that it is near the sixth hour (12 M.). All over Rome work ceases almost automatically; the poorer classes make for the cook shops or itinerant food venders; while people of rank either go home or accept the hospitality of friends for the mid-day lunch, the _prandium_. This is a real meal, although taken as informally as possible. The food is mostly cold,--bread, salads, olives, cheeses, and meats remaining from last night’s dinner; although sometimes there are hot dishes, such as hams and pigs’ heads, and a good deal of common wine is drunk. During the next hour everybody who can possibly spare the time takes a short siesta. Rome, in fact, in summer seems to have gone to sleep under the glaring sun. Then for the humbler folk toil resumes; while the fortunate classes make for the great baths where, indeed, under the guise of sociability a great deal of real business can be transacted. By the ninth hour (3. P.M.) Calvus and Gratia alike have usually finished all the formal duties for the day and are being escorted homeward preparatory to the standard climax of every four-and-twenty hours--the dinner. The dinner (_cena_) is always eaten at home or at the house of some friend. It is so strictly personal an affair that there are almost no first-class, handsomely appointed, public restaurants in Rome, although there is a superabundance of cheaper eating houses, yet many of these close up during the afternoon. There are almost no other evening entertainments--no receptions, no balls, no theaters, no concerts.[50] But Italians in every age have been a sociable, talk-loving, gregarious people, and the dinner seems to many of them apparently the “be all and end all” of existence. =93. Dinner Hunters and Parasites (“Shadows”).=--Wealthy and popular personages never have to bother about the dinner problem; every night they can invite whom they desire, or be sure of a summons to a congenial board. Plenty of substantial citizens are willing and happy to join in a simple family meal in the good old style, the master reclining on a couch, with his wife in a somewhat more conventional attitude beside him, the younger children sitting on a lower couch, the freedmen and more important slaves arranged on benches at a respectful distance.