§315. The Banquets of the Rich.--Little need be said of the banquets of the wealthy nobles in the last century of the Republic and of the rich parvenus (§181) who thronged the courts of the earlier Emperors. They were arranged on the same plan as the dinners we have described, differing from them only in the ostentatious display of furniture, plate, and food. So far as particulars have reached us, they were grotesque and revolting, judged by the canons of to-day, rather than magnificent. Couches made of silver, wine instead of water for the hands, twenty-two courses to a single cēna, seven thousand birds served at another, a dish of livers of fish, tongues of flamingos, brains of peacocks and pheasants mixed up together, strike us as vulgarity run mad. The sums spent upon these feasts do not seem so fabulous now as they did then. Every season in our great capitals sees social functions that surpass the feasts of Lucullus in cost as far as they do in taste and refinement. As signs of the times, however, as indications of changed ideals, of degeneracy and decay, they deserved the notice that the Roman historians and satirists gave them. CHAPTER IX AMUSEMENTS; BATHS REFERENCES: Marquardt, 269-296, 834-861; Staatsverwaltung, III, 504-565; Göll, III, 455-480, 104-157; Guhl and Koner, 643-658, 804-829, 609-618; Friedländer, II, 295-637; Ramsay, 394-409; Pauly-Wissowa, _amphitheātrum_, _calx_, _circus_, _Bader_; Smith, Harper, Rich, _amphitheātrum_, _balneae_, _circus_, _gladiātōrēs_, _theātrum_, and other Latin words in text; Baumeister, 694, 241-244, 2089-2111; Lübker, 1073 f., 1199 f., 477 f., 1048 f., 185, 1213; Kelsey-Mau, 135-161, 180-220. §316. After the games of childhood (§§102, 103) were passed the Roman seemed to lose all instinct for play. Of sport for sport's sake he knew nothing, he took part in no games for the sake of excelling in them. He played ball before his dinner for the good of the exercise, he practiced riding, fencing, wrestling, hurling the discus (Fig. 128), and swimming for the strength and skill they gave him in arms, he played a few games of chance for the excitement the stakes afforded, but there was no "national game" for the young men, and there were no social amusements in which men and women took part together. The Roman made it hard and expensive, too, for others to amuse him. He cared nothing for the drama, little for spectacular shows, more for farces and variety performances, perhaps, but the one thing that really appealed to him was excitement, and this he found in gambling or in such amusements only as involved the risk of injury to life and limb, the sports of the circus and the amphitheater. We may describe first the games in which the Roman participated himself and then those at which he was a mere spectator. In the first class are field sports and games of hazard, in the second the public and private games (_lūdī pūblicī et prīvātī_). [Illustration: FIGURE 128. DISCUS THROWER]