[Illustration: FIGURE 126. DRINKING CUPS]
§314. The wine was mixed under the direction of the _magister_ in a large bowl (_crater_), the proportions of the wine and water being apparently constant for the evening, and from the _crater_ (Fig. 125), placed on the table in view of all, the wine was ladled by the servants into the goblets (_pocula_, Fig. 126) of the guests. The ladle (_cyathus_, Fig. 127) held about one-twelfth of a pint, or more probably was graduated by twelfths. The method of drinking seems to have differed from that of the regular dinner chiefly in this: at the ordinary dinner each guest mixed his wine to suit his own taste and drank as little or as much as he pleased, while at the _comissatio_ all had to drink alike, regardless of differences in taste and capacity. The wine seems to have been drunk chiefly in "healths," but an odd custom regulated the size of the bumpers. Any guest might propose the health of any person he pleased to name; immediately slaves ladled into each goblet as many _cyathi_ (twelfths of a pint) as there were letters in the given name, and the goblets had to be drained at a draft. The rest of the entertainment was undoubtedly wild enough (§310); gambling seems to have been common, and Cicero speaks of more disgraceful practices in his speeches against Catiline. Sometimes the guests spent the evening roaming from house to house, playing host in turn, and making night hideous as they staggered through the streets with their crowns and garlands.
§315. The Banquets of the Rich.--Little need be said of the banquets of the wealthy nobles in the last century of the Republic and of the rich parvenus (§181) who thronged the courts of the earlier Emperors. They were arranged on the same plan as the dinners we have described, differing from them only in the ostentatious display of furniture, plate, and food. So far as particulars have reached us, they were grotesque and revolting, judged by the canons of to-day, rather than magnificent. Couches made of silver, wine instead of water for the hands, twenty-two courses to a single cena, seven thousand birds served at another, a dish of livers of fish, tongues of flamingos, brains of peacocks and pheasants mixed up together, strike us as vulgarity run mad. The sums spent upon these feasts do not seem so fabulous now as they did then. Every season in our great capitals sees social functions that surpass the feasts of Lucullus in cost as far as they do in taste and refinement. As signs of the times, however, as indications of changed ideals, of degeneracy and decay, they deserved the notice that the Roman historians and satirists gave them.