Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 02.djvu/335

Rh calculations and they base fallacious systems on no better footing.

The question next agitated was whether the citizens of Rome, in the time of the Cæsars, were richer than the citizens of Paris in the time of Monsieur Silhouette?

"Oh," says Mr. Andrew, "this is a point on which I have some call to speak. I was a long time the Man of Forty Crowns, but I conceive that the citizens of  Rome had more. Those illustrious robbers on the  highway pillaged the finest countries of Asia, of  Africa, and of Europe. They lived splendidly on the  produce of their rapines; but yet there were doubtless  some beggars at Rome. I am persuaded that  among those conquerors of the world there were  some reduced to an income of forty crowns a year, as  I formerly was."

"Do you know," said a learned member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres, "that it cost Lucullus, for every supper he gave in the  saloon of Apollo, thirty-nine thousand three hundred  and twelve livres of our money; but that the  celebrated epicurean Atticus did not expend above two  hundred and thirty livres a month for his table."

"If that be true," said I, "he deserved to be president of the Miser-society, lately established in Italy. I have read, as you have done, in Florus, that incredible  anecdote; but, perhaps Florus had never supped  with Atticus, or else his text, like so many others,