132 THE SEA. 



than when thus operated on by yourself, so that you do not ' job ' the knife into 

 your hand ! " 



The Greeks have not said much in praise of oysters, but then they regarded 

 Britain much as we now do Greenland. The Romans, however, highly appreciated them. 

 Horace, Martial, and Juvenal, Cicero, Seueca, and Pliny, have all enlarged upon the various 

 qualities of the oyster ; and it was to Sergius Grata that we owe the introduction of 

 oyster-beds, for he it was that invented the layers or stews for oysters at Baia. 

 " That was in the days when luxury was rampant, and when men of great wealth, like 

 Licinius Crassus, the leviathan 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 accommodate 

 all his guests. How many barrels of oysters were eaten at that celebrated dinner, the 



ISOLATED PILES COVERED WITH THE SPAWN OF MUSSELS. 



' Ephemerides ' as Plutarch calls The Times and Horning 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 as it likes with the calculation. All we know is, that 

 oysters then fetched very long prices at Rome, as the author of the ' Tabella Ciberia ' 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 necessary when a man like Crassus entertained half the city as 

 his guests, to rivet his popularity. 



" But the Romans had a weakness for the ' breedy creatures/ as our dear old friend 

 Christopher North calls them in his inimitable 'Noctes/ In the time of Nero, some sixty 

 years later, the consumption of oysters in the ' Imperial City ' was nearly as great as ifc 

 now is in the ' World's Metropolis ; ' and there is a statement, which I remember 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 Circe, and the smaller Lucrinians ; and this unreasonable demand upon them quite 



