Page:The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus.djvu/307

Rh were unknown; times when the Emperor served, as we have recorded, grains of gold with his peas, rubies with lentils, beans and amber, for the mere pleasure of sight; though his salads of mullets' fins with cress, balm mint, and fenugreek, we should probably have found no greater delicacy than the undercooked vegetables of this twentieth century of our salvation and discomfort.

As with food, so with wine, Elagabalus was a glutton. Mulsum, that cup composed of white wine, roses, nard, absinthe and honey, was vieux jeu. The delicate wines of Greece were always palatable; so was the crusty Falernian of the year 632, to those who were of an age to appreciate its worth. The young gourmet thought otherwise, and rendered them noisome by the addition of crushed pine kernels and fir cones. It was a youthful taste, such as we still distrust, but scarcely immoral in the generally accepted sense of the term. As regards a tendency to over-indulgence in good liquor, we have no data; there is a passage in Lampridius (though evidently faulty) which asserts that the Emperor used to mix wine with the baths and then invite the guests to drink, the basin from which he had drunk being easily distinguishable by the fall in its level; an utter impossibility, and not even clever as a bit of scandal. Another extravagance culled from the same biographer tells how this child realised the summer by feasts at which all was of one colour, food as well as fittings, and how he would order all the dishes of a certain day to be composed of a single sort of flesh: it might be pheasant under