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, Seneca, and Pliny, have all enlarged upon the various qualities of the oyster; and it was to Sergius Orata 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 'Ephemerides'--as Plutarch calls _The Times_ and _Morning 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 it 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 Cæsars, 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 exhausted the beds in that great fly-catcher's reign; and it was not till under the wise administration of Agricola in Britain, when the Romans got their far-famed Rutupians from the shores of Kent, from Richborough, and the Reculvers--the _Rutupi Portus_ of the 'Itinerary' of which the latter, the Regulbium, near Whitstable, in the mouth of the Thames, was the northern boundary-that Juvenal praised them as he does; and he was right; for in the whole world there are no oysters like them; and of all the 'breedy creatures' that glide, or have ever glided, down the throats of the human race, our 'natives' are probably the most delectable." The Roman emperors later on never failed to have British oysters at their banquets.