Miscellaneous Essays Part 9

If we should suppose the case of a nation taking three equidistant meals all of the same material and the same quant.i.ty, all milk, for instance, it would be impossible for Thomas Aquinas himself to say which was or was not dinner. The case would be that of the Roman _ancile_ which dropped from the skies; to prevent its ever being stolen, the priests made eleven _facsimiles_ of it, that the thief, seeing the hopelessness of distinguishing the true one, might let all alone. And the result was, that, in the next generation, n.o.body could point to the true one. But our dinner, the Roman _coena_, is distinguished from the rest by far more than the hour; it is distinguished by great functions, and by still greater capacities. It _is_ most beneficial; it may become more so.

In saying this, we point to the lighter graces of music, and conversation _more varied_, by which the Roman _coena_ was chiefly distinguished from our dinner. We are far from agreeing with Mr. Croly, that the Roman meal was more "intellectual" than ours. On the contrary, ours is the more intellectual by much; we have far greater knowledge, far greater means for making it such. In fact, the fault of our meal is--that it is _too_ intellectual; of too severe a character; too political; too much tending, in many hands, to disquisition. Reciprocation of question and answer, variety of topics, shifting of topics, are points not sufficiently cultivated. In all else we a.s.sent to the following pa.s.sage from Mr. Croly's eloquent Salathiel:--

"If an ancient Roman could start from his slumber into the midst of European life, he must look with scorn on its absence of grace, elegance, and fancy. But it is in its festivity, and most of all in its banquets, that he would feel the incurable barbarism of the Gothic blood. Contrasted with the fine displays that made the table of the Roman n.o.ble a picture, and threw over the indulgence of appet.i.te the colors of the imagination, with what eyes must he contemplate the tasteless and commonplace dress, the coa.r.s.e attendants, the meagre ornament, the want of mirth, music, and intellectual interest--the whole heavy machinery that converts the feast into the mere drudgery of devouring!"

Thus far the reader knows already that we dissent violently; and by looking back he will see a picture of our ancestors at dinner, in which they rehea.r.s.e the very part in relation to ourselves that Mr. Croly supposes all moderns to rehea.r.s.e in relation to the Romans; but in the rest of the beautiful description, the positive, though not the comparative part, we must all concur:--

"The guests before me were fifty or sixty splendidly dressed men,"

(they were in fact t.i.tus and his staff, then occupied with the siege of Jerusalem,) "attended by a crowd of domestics, attired with scarcely less splendor; for no man thought of coming to the banquet in the robes of ordinary life. The embroidered couches, themselves striking objects, allowed the ease of position at once delightful in the relaxing climates of the South, and capable of combining with every grace of the human figure.

At a slight distance, the table loaded with plate glittering under a profusion of lamps, and surrounded by couches thus covered by rich draperies, was like a central source of light radiating in broad shafts of every brilliant hue. The wealth of the patricians, and their intercourse with the Greeks, made them masters of the first performances of the arts.

Copies of the most famous statues, and groups of sculpture in the precious metals; trophies of victories; models of temples; were mingled with vases of flowers and lighted perfumes. Finally, covering and closing all, was a vast scarlet canopy, which combined the groups beneath to the eye, and threw the whole into the form that a painter would love."

Mr. Croly then goes on to insist on the intellectual embellishments of the Roman dinner; their variety, their grace, their adaptation to a festive purpose. The truth is, our English imagination, more profound than the Roman, is also more gloomy, less gay, less _riante_. That accounts for our want of the gorgeous _trictinium_, with its scarlet draperies, and for many other differences both to the eye and to the understanding. But both we and the Romans agree in the main point; we both discovered the true purpose which dinner might serve,--1, to throw the grace of intellectual enjoyment over an animal necessity; 2, to relieve and antagonize the toil of brain incident to high forms of social life.

Our object has been to point the eye to this fact; to show uses imperfectly suspected in a recurring accident of life; to show a steady tendency to that consummation, by holding up, as in a mirror, (together with occasional glimpses of hidden corners in history,) the corresponding revolution silently going on in a great people of antiquity.

NOTES.

[NOTE 1.

"_In procinct_."--Milton's translation (somewhere in The Paradise Regained) of the technical phrase "in procinctu."]

[NOTE 2.

"_Geologists know not_."--Observe, reader, we are not at all questioning the Scriptural Chronology of the earth as a _habitation for man_, for on the pre-human earth Scripture is silent: not upon the six thousand years does our doubt revolve, but upon a very different thing, viz. to what age in man these six thousand years correspond by a.n.a.logy in a planet. In man the sixtieth part is a very venerable age. But as to a planet, as to our little earth, instead of arguing dotage, six thousand years may have scarcely carried her beyond babyhood. Some people think she is cutting her first teeth; some think her in her teens. But, seriously, it is a very interesting problem. Do the sixty centuries of our earth imply youth, maturity, or dotage?]

[NOTE 3.

"_Everywhere the ancients went to bed, like good boys, from seven to nine o'clock_."--As we are perfectly serious, we must beg the reader, who fancies any joke in all this, to consider what an immense difference it must have made to the earth, considered as a steward of her own resources-whether great nations, in a period when their resources were so feebly developed, did, or did not, for many centuries, require candles; and, we may add, fire. The five heads of human expenditure are,--1, Food; 2, Shelter; 3, Clothing; 4, Fuel; 5, Light. All were pitched on a lower scale in the Pagan era; and the two last were almost banished from ancient housekeeping. What a great relief this must have been to our good mother the earth! who, at _first_, was obliged to request of her children that they would settle round the Mediterranean. She could not even afford them water, unless they would come and fetch it themselves out of a common tank or cistern.]

[NOTE 4.

"_The manesalutantes_."--There can be no doubt that the _levees_ of modern princes and ministers have been inherited from this ancient usage of Rome; one which belonged to Rome republican, as well as Rome imperial. The fiction in our modern practice is--that we wait upon the _leve_, or rising of the prince. In France, at one era, this fiction was realized: the courtiers did really attend the king's dressing. And, as to the queen, even up to the revolution, Marie Antoinette almost from necessity gave audience at her toilette.]

[NOTE 5.

"_Or again, 'sicc.u.m pro biscodo, ut hodie vocamus, sumemus_?'"--It is odd enough that a scholar so complete as Salmasius, whom nothing ever escapes, should have overlooked so obvious an alternative as that of _siccus_, meaning without _opsonium--Scotice_, without "kitchen."]

[NOTE 6.

"_The whole amount of relief_;"--from which it appears how grossly Locke (see his _Education_) was deceived in fancying that Augustus practised any remarkable abstinence in taking only a bit of bread and a raisin or two, by way of luncheon. Augustus did no more than most people did; secondly, he abstained only with a view to dinner; and, thirdly, for this dinner he never waited longer than up to four o'clock.]

[NOTE 7.

"_Mansiones_"--the halts of the Roman legions, the stationary places of repose which divided the marches, were so called.]

[NOTE 8.

"_The everlasting Jew_;"--the German name for what we English call the Wandering Jew. The German imagination has been most struck with the duration of the man's life, and his unhappy sanct.i.ty from death; the English by the unrestingness of the man's life, his incapacity of repose.]

[NOTE 9.

"_Immeasurable toga_."--It is very true that in the time of Augustus the _toga_ had disappeared amongst the lowest plebs, and greatly Augustus was shocked at that spectacle. It is a very curious fact in itself, especially as expounding the main cause of the civil wars. Mere poverty, and the absence of bribery from Rome, whilst all popular compet.i.tion for offices drooped, can alone explain this remarkable revolution of dress.]

[NOTE 10.

That boys in the Praetexta did not bathe in the public baths, is certain; and most unquestionably that is the meaning of the expression in Juvenal so much disputed--"Nisi qui nondum _aere_ lavantur." By _aes_ he means the _ahenum_, a common name for the public bath, which was made of copper; in our navy, "the _coppers_" is a name for the boilers. "n.o.body believes in such tales except children," is the meaning. This one exclusion cut off three eighths of the Roman males.]

[NOTE 11.

"_His young--English bride_."--The case of an old man, or one reputed old, marrying a very girlish wife, is always too much for the gravity of history; and, rather than lose the joke, the historian prudently disguises the age, which, after all, was little above fifty. And the very persons who insist on the late dinner as the proximate cause of death, elsewhere insinuate something else, not so decorously expressed. It is odd that this amiable prince, so memorable as having been a martyr to late dining at eleven, A.M., was the same person who is so equally memorable for the n.o.ble answer about a King of France not remembering the wrongs of a Duke of Orleans.]

[NOTE 12.

"_Took their coena at noon_."--And, by the way, in order to show how little _coena_ had to do with any evening hour (though, in any age but that of our fathers, four in the afternoon would never have been thought an evening hour in the sense implied by _supper_,)--the Roman _gourmands_ and _bons vivants_ continued through the very last ages of Rome to take their coena, when more than usually sumptuous, at noon. This, indeed, all people did occasionally, just as we sometimes give a dinner even now so early as four, P.M., under the name of a _dejeuner a la fourchette_. Those who took their _coena_ so early as this, were said _de die coenare_--to begin dining from high day. Just as the line in Horace--"Ut jugulent homines surgunt _de nocte_ latrones," does not mean that the robbers rise when others are going to bed, viz., at nightfall, but at midnight. For, says one of the three best scholars of this earth, _de die, de nocte_, mean from that hour which was most fully, most intensely day or night, viz., the centre, the meridian. This one fact is surely a clencher as to the question whether _coena_ meant dinner or supper.]