Cicero - Anthony Everitt [42]
Cicero would take a light lunch or snack if he wished but did not have to wait long for the main meal of the day, dinner, which was taken in the mid- to late afternoon. For a man who liked company, as he did, this was the ideal occasion for entertainment and, witty and well-informed, he was at the top of many guest lists. The food served was as sumptuous as could be afforded and laws were passed in unavailing attempts to limit extravagance. Meals would begin with a gustatio or taster—honeyed wine and canapés. The main courses featured a varied diet of meats—chicken, turbot, boar and (a special delicacy) sows’ udders and vulvas. Fattened game, fowl and pigs were the height of luxury. Finally came dessert, for which only the lightest food was served—not only fruit but also shellfish.
During the late Republic a fashion grew for collecting fish, which sold for very high prices in the markets. Well-heeled gourmets had fishponds of their own where they bred eels, bream and lampreys. One was sold by a contemporary of Cicero for the astonishingly high price of 40,000 sesterces and the mentor of his adolescence, Crassus, was supposed to have gone into mourning when a lamprey of his died.
Diners, lying on couches, were provided with knives, spoons and toothpicks; forks were unknown and much use was made of fingers. Slaves went around with water jugs and towels so that guests could wash their hands course by course. Wine was served during the meal (rich and heavy, it was usually diluted with water), but the real drinking began once the food had been cleared away. This was the commissatio—a ceremonial drinking competition at which goblets had to be drained in a single gulp. Healths were drunk. This was the time for conversation and debate, which might last well into the evening, and was the Roman equivalent to the Greek symposium.
Unless out at a late-night party, most people were safely back at home by sunset, when public life shut down; at this hour Senate meetings were adjourned and the baths closed. For most people bedtime was early, although Cicero admitted to writing speeches or books and reading papers at night (there was a Latin word for it, lucubrare—to work by lamplight).
Sulla’s reforms promised a return to order. Traditionalists were back in charge and, despite a brief, unsuccessful insurrection by a popularis ex-Consul in 77, the Senate’s authority had been greatly enhanced. But two major new threats called for urgent attention. Spain, in the hands of a general who had fought under Marius, was in revolt. Then, in 73, a small band of gladiators escaped from their barracks in Padua, set up camp for a time on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, marched to the cattle ranches of the south and freed thousands of slaves. The gladiators were led by a Thracian named Spartacus, who not only was physically brave and aggressive but was an educated and cultured man. He also had an instinct for generalship and defeated four Roman armies sent out to dispose of him.
Two of Sulla’s former protégés rose to the occasion. The first was thirty-three-year-old Cnaeus Pompeius (our Pompey), who put down the Spanish rebellion with some difficulty. He was a delightful man to look at. According to Plutarch, “his hair swept back in a kind of wave from the forehead, and the configuration of his face around the eyes gave him a melting look, so that he was supposed (although the resemblance was not a close one) to resemble statues of Alexander the Great.” His appearance belied a vigorous organizational energy. A decade previously, on Sulla’s return from his eastern wars, he had raised (entirely against the law) an army of his own from the district of Picenum, northeast of Rome, where his family had estates. At the scandalously early age of twenty-three he had appointed himself its commander and been active in wiping out opposition from the defeated popularis regime. He had acted so ruthlessly that he had been nicknamed the Butcher Boy (adulescens carnifex). It was in these early campaigns