It is not, however, to be supposed that every evening meal, even of a noble, took the form of a dinner-party.  It is indeed probable that there were few occasions upon which, while in town, he was not either entertaining visitors or being himself entertained.  Occasionally there would be an invitation to dine at Court, where perhaps eighty or a hundred guests of both sexes, distributed in different sets of nine or seven over the wide banquet-hall, would eat off gold plate, and be entertained from three or four o’clock till midnight with all the unbridled extravagance that a Petronius or some other “arbiter of taste” might devise for the Caesar.  The snob of the period set an enormous value upon this distinction.  The emperor could not always review his list of invitations, nor could he on every occasion be personally acquainted with every guest.  It was therefore quite possible for his servants now and then to smuggle in a person ambitious of having dined at the palace.  Under Caligula a rich provincial once paid nearly L2000 for such an “invitation.”  When the emperor found it out, he was, if anything, rather flattered; the next day he caused some worthless trifle to be sold to the same man for the same amount, and on the strength of this acquaintance invited him to dinner, this time pocketing the money for himself.

Yet there must have been no few evenings upon which Silius preferred the company of an intimate friend or two, making all together the “number of the graces,” and dined with less form and ceremony.  At such times the meal would be of comparatively short duration, and there would be deeper and more intimate matter of conversation.  Now and then the dinner would be purely domestic; and, after it, Silius would perhaps pass an hour or two in reading, or in listening to the slave who was his professional “reader.”  If he was himself an author, as an astonishing number of his contemporaries actually were, he might spend the time in preparing a speech, composing some non-committal epic or drama, jotting down memoranda for a history, or concocting an epigram or satire to embody his humorous fancies or to relieve his exasperation.  If, as was often the case, he kept in the house a salaried Greek philosopher—­in a large measure the analogue of the domestic chaplain of the later seventeenth century—­he might enjoy his conversation and pick his brains; or, if a man of real earnestness of purpose, discuss with him the tenets of his particular philosophy, Stoic, Epicurean, or Eclectic.  This was the nearest approach which the ancient Roman made to what we should call theological or religious argument.