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.
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