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With Lucullus and Apicius (That prevailed during)

that prevailed during the Republic and the Empire, when fabulous revenues were squandered at a single feast, and gluttony and intemperance were the gods of the hour.

It was towards the decline of the Republic, during the period of Pompey the Great, Cæsar, and Lucullus, that, dispensing with the culinary preceptors of Greece, the Roman cuisine attained its greatest celebrity. For it was at this period that the great ravagers of the world, who were to carry the name and arms of Rome into distant lands, brought their cooks with them, who vied with one another in contributing the most appetising dishes of various countries. It was then when Antony, intoxicated with the spoils of conquest and more than usually pleased with the artist of his kitchen, sent for him at the dessert and presented him with a city of thirty-five thousand inhabitants-an example followed in a minor way by Henry VIII of England, who rewarded his cook for having composed a pudding of especial merit by the gift of a manor. It was then that the Sybarites bestowed public recompense and marks of distinction upon those who gave the most magnificent banquets, and especially upon those who invented new dishes.¹ It was then that the practised epicure professed to distinguish by the taste from what locality of Italy a 1 The world has scarcely been as liberal to literature as to gastronomy; although the graceful French poet, the Abbé Philippe Desportes, who so celebrated his mistresses Diane, Hypolite and Cléonice in verse, was munificently rewarded for his lyrical talent by Henry III, and presented besides with an abbey worth an annual rental of ten thousand crowns for having written a sonnet which captivated the Duc de Joyeuse, brotherin-law of the king. wild boar had been procured, or whether a pike had been caught in the lower or upper Tiber. Thus Horace, in one of the "Satires": "But say by what Discernment are you taught To know that this voracious Pike was caught Where the full River's lenient Waters glide, Or where the Bridges break the rapid Tide: