Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/313

 by the bailiff's wife when done with her spindle, and some lordly eggs, warm in their wisps of hay, together with the hens that laid them. There will be grapes too, kept half the year, as fresh as when they hung upon the tree; pears from Signia and Syria, and in the same baskets fresh-smelling apples that rival those of Picenum, and of which you need not be afraid, seeing that winter's cold has dried up their autumnal juice, and removed the perils of unripeness.

Such were the banquets of our Senate in days of old, when already grown luxurious; when Curius, with his own hands, would lay upon his modest hearth the simple herbs he had gathered in his little garden—herbs scoffed at nowadays by the dirty ditcher who works in chains, and remembers the savour of tripe in the reeking cookshop. For feast days, in olden times, they would keep a side of dried pork, hanging from an open rack, or put before the relations a flitch of birthday bacon, with the addition of some fresh meat, if there happened to be a sacrifice to supply it. A kinsman who had thrice been hailed as Consul, who had commanded armies, and filled the office of Dictator, would come home earlier than was his wont for such a feast, shouldering the spade with which he had been subduing the hillside. For when men quailed before a Fabius or a stern Cato, before a Scaurus or a Fabricius—when even a Censor might dread the severe verdict of his colleague —no one deemed it a matter of grave and serious concern what kind of tortoise-shell was swimming in the waves of Ocean to form a head-rest for our Troy-born grandees. Couches in those days were 227