§300. The last two centuries of the Republic saw all this changed. The conquest of Greece and the wars in Asia Minor gave the Romans a taste of eastern luxury, and altered their simple table customs, as other customs had been altered by like contact with the outside world (§§5, 101, 112, 192). From this time the poor and the rich no longer fared alike. The former constrained by poverty lived frugally as of old: every schoolboy knows that the soldiers who won Caesar's battles for him lived on grain (§282 and note), which they ground in their handmills and baked at their campfires. The very rich, on the other hand, aping the luxury of the Greeks but lacking their refinement, became gluttons instead of gourmands. They ransacked the world[4] for articles of food, preferring the rare and the costly to what was really palatable and delicate. They measured the feast by the quantities they could consume, reviving the sated appetite by piquant sauces and resorting to emetics to prolong the pleasures of the table and prevent the effects of over-indulgence. The separate dining-room (_triclinium_) was introduced, the great houses having two or more (§204), and the _oeci_ (§207) were pressed into service for banquet halls. The dining couch (§224) took the place of the bench or stool, slaves served the food to the reclining guests, a dinner dress (§249) was devised, and every _familia urbana_ (§149) included a high-priced chef with a staff of trained assistants. Of course there were always wealthy men, Atticus, the friend of Cicero, for example (§155), who clung to the simpler customs of the earlier days, but these could make little headway against the current of senseless dissipation and extravagance. Over against these must be set the fawning poor, who preferred the fleshpots of the rich patron (§§181, 182) to the bread of honest independence. Between the two extremes was a numerous middle class of the well-to-do, with whose ordinary meals we are more concerned than with the banquets of the very rich. These meals were the _ientaculum_, the _prandium_, and the _cena_.
[Footnote 4: Gellius (2d century A.D.) gives a list from a satirical poem of Varro: Peacock from Samos, heath-cock from Phrygia, crane from Media, kid from Ambracia, young tunny-fish from Chalcedon, _murena_ from Tartessus, cod (?) from Pessinus, oysters from Tarentum, scallop from Chios (?), sturgeon (?) from Rhodes, _scarus_ from Cilicia, nuts from Thasos, dates from Egypt, chestnuts (?) from Spain.]