In the Actio prima of his Verrine orations Cicero gives a graphic picture of a convivium beginning early, where the proposal was made and agreed to that the drinking should be "more graeco."[451] But it would be a great mistake to suppose that this kind of self-indulgence was characteristic of the average Roman life of this age.

The ordinary student is liable to fall into this error because he reads his Horace and his Juvenal, but dips a very little way into Cicero's correspondence; and he needs to be reminded that the satirists are not deriding the average life of the citizen, any more than the artists who make fun of the foibles of our own day in the pages of _Punch_.

Cicero hardly ever mentions his meals, his cookery, or his wine, even in his most chatty letters; such matters did not interest him, and do not seem to have interested his friends, so far as we can judge by their letters.

In one amusing letter to Poetus, he does indeed tell him what he had for dinner at a friend's house, but only by way of explaining that he had been very unwell from eating mushrooms and such dishes, which his host had had cooked in order not to contravene a recent sumptuary law.[452] The Letters are worth far more as negative evidence of the usual character of dinners than either the invectives (vituperationes) against a Piso or an Antony, or the lively wit of the satirists.

Let us return for an instant, in conclusion, to that famous letter, already quoted, in which Cicero describes the entertainment of Caesar at Cumae in December, 45.
It contains an expression which has given rise to very mistaken conclusions both about Caesar's own habits and those of his day.