38 OYSTERS, AND ALL ABOUT THEM. 



than slave merchant, rose to the highest honours ; for this 

 dealer in human flesh, in the boasted land of liberty, served 

 the office of consul along with Pompey the Great, and on 

 one occasion required no less than 10,000 tables to accom- 

 modate all his guests. How many barrels of oysters were 

 eaten at that celebrated dinner, the " Ephemerides" -as 

 Plutarch calls "The Times" and " Morning Post" of that 

 day have omitted to state ; but as oysters then took the 

 place that turtle-soup now does at our great City feeds, 

 imagination may busy itself if it likes with the calculation. 

 All we know is, that oysters then fetched very long prices 

 at Rome, as the author of the " Tabella Cibaria" has not 

 failed to tell us ; and then, as now, the high price of any 

 luxury of the table was sure to make a liberal supply of it 

 necessarv, when a man like Crassus entertained half the 



J ' 



city as his guests, to rivet his popularity. 



But the Romans had a weakness for the " breedy 

 creatures," as Christopher North calls them in his inimit- 

 able " Noctes." In the time of Nero, some 124 years 

 later, the consumption of oysters in the "Imperial City' 

 was nearly as great as it now is in the "World's Metro- 

 polis ;" and there is a statement, which I recollect to have 

 read somewhere, that during the reign of Domitian, the 

 last of the twelve Caesars, a greater number of millions of 

 bushels were annually consumed at Rome than I should 

 care to swear to. 



These oysters, however, were but Mediterranean 

 produce the small fry of Circeii, and the smaller Lucri- 

 nians ; and this unreasonable demand upon them quite 

 exhausted the beds in that great fly-catcher's reign ; and 

 it was not till under the wise administration of Agricola in 

 Britain, when the Romans got their far-famed Rutupians 

 from the shores of Kent, from Richborough and the 



