Horace in particular, a scholar, poet, and man of the world, the friend of Mæcenas, and an onlooker and frequenter of society, may be accepted as a competent authority on the table manners and customs of the times. No one more than he was aware of the gross extravagance and intemperance of the age. Nor has any writer depicted his own and the everyday life of the Romans more vividly. To peruse him attentively in the "Satires," "Epistles," "Epodes," and "Odes," is to take part in the feasts, be admitted to the inner circle of the _optimates_, knock at the door of Lydia, and join in the pageant of the Sacra Via. The table of Mæcenas, the rich voluptuary and dilettante, who had a palace on the Esquiline Hill, where Horace was often a guest, was widely celebrated. As the poet was a visitor also at the palace of Augustus, and numbered among his friends the most eminent men of Rome, he had unusual opportunities to become acquainted both with the _vie intime_ and _haute cuisine_ of his day. While not a gastronomer, he was far from averse to good living, though, from his digestion not being of the soundest, he had frequent cause to rue the sumptuous banquets, borrowed from the Asiatic Greeks, which were in vogue at the time. And while he was a frequent attendant at the entertainments of the wealthy, we nevertheless find him constantly censuring their intemperance and extravagance at table. For himself, he would have "simple dinners, richly dressed," and "let the strong toil give relish to the feast." Rare old Cæcuban, Falernian, and Massic, Mæcenas might pour out at home from his well-filled amphoræ into chased crystal cups and vessels of gold--at the Sabine farm the common Sabine wine in modest goblets would alone be tendered him. If we may regard the elaborate repast of Nasidienus as a typical one, we may readily conceive the nightmares that must have ensued from such a plenitude of viands and wines and such copious libations. The student of Horace will remember the menu. First a Lucanian boar, surrounded by excitants to the appetite-- "Rapes, Lettuce, Radishes, Anchovy-Brine With Skerrets, and the Lees of Coan Wine." Fish and wild fowl, lampreys and shrimps, succeeded, washed down with brimmers of Cæcuban, Alban, Falernian, and vintages of Greece; and finally, as the feast and the night wore on,