There was of course another side to this picture of the evening of a Roman gentleman.  There was a coarse side to the Roman character, and in the age when wealth, the slave trade, and idle habits encouraged self-indulgence, meals were apt to become ends in themselves instead of necessary aids to a wholesome life.  The ordinary three parts or courses (mensae) of a dinner,—­the gustatio or light preliminary course, the cena proper, with substantial dishes, and the dessert of pastry and fruit, could be amplified and extended to an unlimited extent by the skill of the slave-cooks brought from Greece and the East (see above, p. 209); the gourmand had appeared long before the age of Cicero and had been already satirised by Lucilius and Varro.[448] Splendid dinner-services might take the place of the old simple ware, and luxurious drapery and rugs covered the couches instead of the skins of animals, as in the old time.[449] Vulgarity and ostentation, such as Horace satirised, were doubtless too often to be met with.  Those who lived for feasting and enjoyment would invite their company quite early in the day (tempestativum convivium) and carry on the revelry till midnight.[450] And lastly, the practice of drinking wine after dinner (comissatio), simply for the sake of drinking, under fixed rules according to the Greek fashion, familiar to us all in the Odes of Horace, had undoubtedly begun some time before the end of the Public.  In the Actio prima of his Verrine orations Cicero gives a graphic picture of a convivium beginning early, where the proposal was made and agreed to that the drinking should be “more graeco."[451]

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that this kind of self-indulgence was characteristic of the average Roman life of this age.  The ordinary student is liable to fall into this error because he reads his Horace and his Juvenal, but dips a very little way into Cicero’s correspondence; and he needs to be reminded that the satirists are not deriding the average life of the citizen, any more than the artists who make fun of the foibles of our own day in the pages of Punch.  Cicero hardly ever mentions his meals, his cookery, or his wine, even in his most chatty letters; such matters did not interest him, and do not seem to have interested his friends, so far as we can judge by their letters.  In one amusing letter to Poetus, he does indeed tell him what he had for dinner at a friend’s house, but only by way of explaining that he had been very unwell from eating mushrooms and such dishes, which his host had had cooked in order not to contravene a recent sumptuary law.[452] The Letters are worth far more as negative evidence of the usual character of dinners than either the invectives (vituperationes) against a Piso or an Antony, or the lively wit of the satirists.  Let us return for an instant, in conclusion, to that famous letter, already quoted, in which Cicero describes the entertainment of Caesar at Cumae in December, 45.  It contains an expression which has given rise to very mistaken conclusions both about Caesar’s own habits and those of his day.  After telling Atticus that his guest sat down to dinner when the bath was over he goes on:  “[Greek:  Emetikaen] agebat; itaque et edit et bibit [Greek:  adeos] et iucunde, opipare sane et apparate, nec id solum, sed