of spring—­ not the spring of the calendar but the beginning of the season of roses—­ he had himself conveyed, as was the custom with the kings of Bithynia, in a litter with eight bearers, sitting on a cushion of Maltese gauze stuffed with rose-leaves, with one garland on his head, and a second twined round his neck, applying to his nose a little smelling bag of fine linen, with minute meshes, filled with roses; and thus he had himself carried even to his bed chamber.”

Table Luxury

But no sort of luxury flourished so much as the coarsest of all—­ the luxury of the table.  The whole villa arrangements and the whole villa life had ultimate reference to dining; not only had they different dining-rooms for winter and summer, but dinner was served in the picture-gallery, in the fruit-chamber, in the aviary, or on a platform erected in the deer-park, around which, when the bespoken “Orpheus” appeared in theatrical costume and blew his flourish, the duly-trained roes and wild boars congregated.  Such was the care bestowed on decoration; but amidst all this the reality was by no means forgotten.  Not only was the cook a graduate in gastronomy, but the master himself often acted as the instructor of his cooks.  The roast had been long ago thrown into the shade by marine fishes and oysters; now the Italian river-fishes were utterly banished from good tables, and Italian delicacies and Italian wines were looked on as almost vulgar.  Now even at the popular festivals there were distributed, besides the Italian Falerian, three sorts of foreign wine—­Sicilian, Lesbian, Chian, while a generation before it had been sufficient even at great banquets to send round Greek wine once; in the cellar of the orator Hortensius there was found a stock of 10,000 jars (at 33 quarts) of foreign wine.  It was no wonder that the Italian wine-growers began to complain of the competition of the wines from the Greek islands.  No naturalist could ransack land and sea more zealously for new animals and plants, than the epicures of that day ransacked them for new culinary dainties.(53) The circumstance of the guest taking an emetic after a banquet, to avoid the consequences of the varied fare set before him, no longer created surprise.  Debauchery of every sort became so systematic and aggravated that it found its professors, who earned a livelihood by serving as instructors of the youth of quality in the theory and practice of vice.

Debt

It will not be necessary to dwell longer on this confused picture, so monotonous in its variety; and the less so, that the Romans were far from original in this respect, and confined themselves to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more exaggerated and stupid than their model.  Plutos naturally devours his children as well as Kronos; the competition for all these mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices, that those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate melt away