The whole villa arrangements and the whole villa life had ultimate reference to dining; not only had they different dining-rooms for winter and summer, but dinner was served in the picture-gallery, in the fruit-chamber, in the aviary, or on a platform erected in the deer-park, around which, when the bespoken "Orpheus" appeared in theatrical costume and blew his flourish, the duly-trained roes and wild boars congregated. Such was the care bestowed on decoration; but amidst all this the reality was by no means forgotten. Not only was the cook a graduate in gastronomy, but the master himself often acted as the instructor of his cooks. The roast had been long ago thrown into the shade by marine fishes and oysters; now the Italian river-fishes were utterly banished from good tables, and Italian delicacies and Italian wines were looked on as almost vulgar. Now even at the popular festivals there were distributed, besides the Italian Falerian, three sorts of foreign wine--Sicilian, Lesbian, Chian, while a generation before it had been sufficient even at great banquets to send round Greek wine once; in the cellar of the orator Hortensius there was found a stock of 10,000 jars (at 33 quarts) of foreign wine. It was no wonder that the Italian wine-growers began to complain of the competition of the wines from the Greek islands. No naturalist could ransack land and sea more zealously for new animals and plants, than the epicures of that day ransacked them for new culinary dainties.(53) The circumstance of the guest taking an emetic after a banquet, to avoid the consequences of the varied fare set before him, no longer created surprise. Debauchery of every sort became so systematic and aggravated that it found its professors, who earned a livelihood by serving as instructors of the youth of quality in the theory and practice of vice.
Debt
It will not be necessary to dwell longer on this confused picture, so monotonous in its variety; and the less so, that the Romans were far from original in this respect, and confined themselves to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more exaggerated and stupid than their model. Plutos naturally devours his children as well as Kronos; the competition for all these mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices, that those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate melt away in a short time, and even those, who only for credit's sake joined in what was most necessary, saw their inherited and firmly- established wealth rapidly undermined. The canvass for the consulship, for instance, was the usual highway to ruin for houses of distinction; and nearly the same description applies to the games, the great buildings, and all those other pleasant, doubtless, but expensive pursuits. The princely wealth of that period is only surpassed by its still more princely liabilities; Caesar owed about 692, after deducting his assets, 25,000,000 sesterces (250,000 pounds); Marcus Antonius, at the age of twenty-four 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), fourteen years afterwards 40,000,000 (400,000 pounds); Curio owed 60,000,000 (600,000 pounds); Milo 70,000,000 (700,000 pounds). That those extravagant habits of the Roman world of quality rested throughout on credit, is shown by the fact that the monthly interest in Rome was once suddenly raised from four to eight per cent, through the borrowing of the different competitors for the consulship. Insolvency, instead of leading in due time to a meeting of creditors or at any rate to a liquidation which might at least place matters once more on a clear footing, was ordinarily prolonged by the debtor as much as possible; instead of selling his property and especially his landed estates, he continued to borrow and to present the semblance of riches, till the crash only became the worse and the winding-up yielded a result like that of Milo, in which the creditors obtained somewhat above four per cent of the sums for which they ranked. Amidst this startlingly rapid transition from riches to bankruptcy and this systematic swindling, nobody of course gained so much as the cool banker, who knew how to give and refuse credit. The relations of debtor and creditor thus returned almost to the same point at which they had stood in the worst times of the social crises of the fifth century; the nominal landowners held virtually by sufferance of their creditors; the debtors were either in servile subjection to their creditors, so that the humbler of them appeared like freedmen in the creditor's train and those of higher rank spoke and voted even in the senate at the nod of their creditor-lord; or they were on the point of declaring war on property itself, and either of intimidating their creditors by threats or getting rid of them by conspiracy and civil war. On these relations was based the power of Crassus; out of them arose the insurrections--whose motto was "a clear sheet"-of Cinna(54) and still more definitely of Catilina, of Coelius, of Dolabella entirely resembling the battles between those who had and those who had not, which a century before agitated the Hellenic world.(55) That amidst so rotten an economic condition every financial or political crisis should occasion the most dreadful confusion, was to be expected from the nature of the case; we need hardly mention that the usual phenomena--the disappearance of capital, the sudden depreciation of landed estates, innumerable bankruptcies, and an almost universal insolvency--made their appearance now during the civil war, just as they had done during the Social and Mithradatic wars.(56)
Immortality
Under such circumstances, as a matter of course, morality and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks of society. To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime: for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom; the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath is called "the plaster for debts." Men had forgotten what honesty was; a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man, but as a personal foe.