“To such perfection now is carving brought,
      That different gestures by our curious men
      Are used for different dishes, hare or hen.”

Their entertainments were accompanied with everything which could flatter vanity or excite the passions; musicians, male and female dancers, players of farce and pantomime, jesters, buffoons, and gladiators exhibited, while the guests reclined at table after the fashion of the Orientals.  The tables were made of Thuja-root, with claws of ivory or Delian bronze.  Even Cicero, in an economical age, paid six hundred and fifty pounds for his banqueting-table.  Gluttony was carried to such a point that the sea and earth scarcely sufficed to set off their tables; they ate as delicacies water-rats and white worms.  Fish were the chief object of the Roman epicures, of which the mullus, the rhombus, and the asellus were the most valued; it is recorded that a mullus (sea barbel), weighing but eight pounds, sold for eight thousand sesterces.  Oysters from the Lucrine Lake were in great demand; snails were fattened in ponds for cooking, while the villas of the rich had their piscinae filled with fresh or salt-water fish.  Peacocks and pheasants were the most highly esteemed among poultry, although the absurdity prevailed of eating singing-birds.  Of quadrupeds, the greatest favorite was the wild boar,—­the chief dish of a grand coena,—­coming whole upon the table; and the practised gourmand pretended to distinguish by the taste from what part of Italy it came.  Dishes, the very names of which excite disgust, were used at fashionable banquets, and held in high esteem.  Martial devotes two entire books of his “Epigrams” to the various dishes and ornaments of a Roman banquet.

The extravagance of that period almost surpasses belief.  Cicero and Pompey one day surprised Lucullus at one of his ordinary banquets, when he expected no guests, and even that cost fifty thousand drachmas,—­about four thousand dollars; his table-couches were of purple, and his vessels glittered with jewels.  The halls of Heliogabalus were hung with cloth of gold, enriched with jewels; his table and plate were of pure gold; his couches were of massive silver, and his mattresses, covered with carpets of cloth of gold, were stuffed with down found only under the wings of partridges.  His suppers never cost less than one hundred thousand sesterces.  Crassus paid one hundred thousand sesterces for a golden cup.  Banqueting-rooms were strewed with lilies and roses.  Apicius, in the time of Trajan, spent one hundred millions of sesterces in debauchery and gluttony; having only ten millions left, he ended his life with poison, thinking he might die of hunger.  Things were valued for their cost and rarity rather than their real value.  Enormous prices were paid for carp, the favorite dish of the Romans as of the Chinese.  Drusillus, a freedman of Claudius, caused a dish to be made of five hundred pounds weight of silver.  Vitellius had one made of such prodigious size that he was obliged to build a furnace on purpose for it; and at a feast which he gave in honor of this dish, it was filled with the livers of the scarrus (fish), the brains of peacocks, the tongues of parrots, and the roes of lampreys caught in the Carpathian Sea.