Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome

rare occurrences. The follies and the vices of a Nero, a boy Heliogabalus, a Pollio, a Vitellius and a few other notorious wasters are spread sporadically over a period of at least eight hundred years. Between these cases of gastronomic insanity lie wellnigh a thousand years of everyday grind and drudgery of the Roman people. The bulk was miserably fed as compared with modern standards of living. Only a few patricians could afford "high living." Since a prosperous bourgeoisie (usually the economic and gastronomic background of any nation) was practically unknown in Rome, where the so-called middle classes were in reality poor, shiftless and floating freedmen, it is evident that the bulk of the population because of the empire's unsettled economic conditions, its extensive system of slavery (precluding all successful practice of trades by freemen), the continuous military operations, the haphazard financial system, was forced to live niggardly. The contrast between the middle classes and the upper classes seemed very cruel. This condition may account for the many outcries against the "extravagances" of the few privileged ones who could afford decent food and for the exaggerated stories about their table found in the literature of the time. The seemingly outlandish methods of Apician food preparation become plain and clear in the light of social evolution. "Evolution" is perhaps not the right word to convey our idea of social perpetual motion. Apicius used practically all the cooking utensils in use today. He only lacked gas, electricity and artificial refrigeration, modern achievements while useful in the kitchen and indispensable in wholesale production and for labor saving, that have no bearing on purely gastronomical problems. There is only one difference between the cooking utensils of yore and the modern products: the old ones are hand-made, more individualistic, more beautiful, more artistic than our machine-made varieties. Despite his strangeness and remoteness, Apicius is not dead by any means. We have but to inspect (as Gollmer has pointed out) the table of the Southern Europeans to find Apician traditions alive. In the Northern countries, too, are found his traces. To think that Apicius should have