NOTE-BOOK OF A NATURALIST. 273 



ten melons of Ossia, and twenty pounds of grapes from 

 the luscious vine3^ards of the blessed Island of Leuce, that 

 paradise of the Euxine Sea. These delicacies paved the 

 way for the volaille, consisting of one hundred gnat- 

 snappers; and then the orifice was satisfactorily closed 

 upon forty oysters. Claudius, in this sweeping supper, 

 seems to have reversed the modern order of dishes, end- 

 ing where an epicure of the nineteenth century begins. 

 What his drinking capabilities were, does not appear. 

 But the stern Eomans were in the habit of becomino- 



o 



somewhat hazy occasionally. People do not like to have 

 their various weaknesses paraded before the senate; and 

 Mark Antony bitterly paid off Cicero's philippics. The 

 son of the orator, by way of commentary, and bent on 

 eclipsing the fame of his father's murderer as the greatest 

 bibber of the empire, took off two gallons at a draught. 

 Nivellius Torquatus threw the prowess of Marcus Cicero 

 into the shade ; for, in the presence of Tiberius, he drank 

 off three gallons without drawing breath; and Firmus 

 disposed of two buckets-full of wine without flinching ; 

 to say nothing of Offellius Burgetius, who spent the whole 

 of his life in making himself a thoroughfare for wine. 

 The accomplishment was worth something in those da3^s. 

 Three bacchanalian nights with Piso so endeared him to 

 Tiberius — whom the wags irreverently called Biberius — 

 that he made him praetor; and for the same convivial 

 qualities, the emperor gave Pomponius Flaccus the ipro- 

 vince of S}rria. The road to preferment generally, under 

 his reign, seems to have been the same rosy way, for ' He 

 also did prefer a man that was unknown, and sought for 

 the quaestor's ofiice, before the most noble men, for pledg- 

 ing at a banquet an amphora of wine, that he drank to 

 him. And at that time, when the i/e^i^a?Mik(- was pub- 

 lished, the matter was come so far, that many of the 

 people of Rome would come drunk into the senate- 

 house, and so consult of the affairs of the common- 



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