Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/746

726 of those entertainments, to which the above-named potentates had an unpleasant habit of inviting themselves.

The symposia of Apicius lasted from twenty to thirty hours, and his semi-annual state dinners even two days, during which host and guests were restricted to recesses of ten minutes, and etiquette required them to partake of every dish and drink, the quantity being optional, except in regard to certain spiced wines, of which a good-sized jug was de rigueur—a rule which could only be circumvented by liberal libations to the gods. Yet even excess itself was exceeded by the mania of Vitellius, who wasted the yearly revenue of a province on a single banquet, gorged himself for hour after hour without intermission, and, in the words of Tacitus, "unadmonished by the eruptive protests of nature, never thought of yielding while he could see and hear"! He and some of his successors on the throne of gluttony probably owed their immunity to the virtues of a long lineage of frugal ancestors. Italy, truly, is the land of contrasts, of extremes in virtue as well as in vice. The resources wasted on a single day at one of those saturnalia of intemperance would probably have fed a village for a century of the early republican era, and for at least twenty years in our present time of poverty-born frugality. Frugal, in its original sense, meant literally subsisting on fruit in distinction to carnivorous habits, which were thought extravagant. Cyrus, King of Persia, according to Xenophon, was brought up on a diet of water, bread, and cresses, till up to his fifteenth year, when honey and raisins were added; and the family names of the Fabii and Lentuli were derived from their customary and possibly exclusive diet. Eggs and apples, with a little bread, were for centuries the alpha and omega of a Roman dinner; and, in earlier times, even bread and turnips, if not turnips alone, which the patriot Cincinnatus thought sufficient for his wants. It is singular that our temperance societies direct their efforts only against the fluid part of our vicious diet; a league of temperate eaters would certainly find a large field for reform. But in Italy the thing was attempted by Luigi de Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the fifteenth century, who restricted himself to a daily allowance of ten ounces of solid food and six ounces of wine, and prolonged his life to one hundred and two years. Though he did not organize his followers into a sect, his example and his voluminous writings influenced the manners of his country for many years. Cornaro would not have gained many converts in Russia and Germany; but throughout southern Europe frugality, in the truest old Latin sense, is by no means rare. Lacour, a Marseilles' longshoreman, earned from ten to twenty francs a day, loaned money on interest and gave alms, but slept at night in his basket, and subsisted on fourteen onions a day, which preserved him in excellent health and humor, but got him the nickname of quatorze oignons.

A pound of bread with six ounces of poor cheese, and such berries as the roadside may offer, constitute the daily ration of the Turkish