Under the cold marble statues, or amid the waxen likenesses of their famous stately ancestors, they turned night into day with long and foolish orgies, and exhausted land and sea with the demands of their gluttony.

"Woe to that city," says an ancient proverb, "in which a fish costs more than an ox;" and this exactly describes the state of Rome.

A banquet would sometimes cost the price of an estate; shell-fish were brought from remote and unknown shores, birds from Parthia and the banks of the Phasis; single dishes were made of the brains of the peacocks and the tongues of nightingales and flamingoes.

Apicius, after squandering nearly a million of money in the pleasures of the table, committed suicide, Seneca tells us, because he found that he had only 80,000_l_.

left.