easy-going days I put up with that sort of thing: but times are changed. Hirtius and Dolabella are my pupils in rhetoric, but my masters in the art of dining. For I think you must have heard, if you really get all news, that their practice is to declaim at my house, and mine to dine at theirs. Now it is no use your making an affidavit of insolvency to me: for when you had some property, petty profits used to keep you a little too close to business; but as things are now, seeing that you are losing money so cheerfully, all you have to do, when entertaining me, is to regard yourself as accepting a "composition"; and even that loss is less annoying when it comes from a friend than from a debtor.[1] Yet, after all, I don't require dinners superfluous in quantity: only let what there is be first-rate in quality and recherché. I remember you used to tell me stories of Phamea's dinner. Let yours be earlier,[2] but in other respects like that. But if you persist in bringing me back to a dinner like your mother's, I should put up with that also. For I should like to see the man who had the face to put on the table for me what you describe, or even a polypus—looking as red as Iupiter Miniatus.[3] Believe me, you won't
- ↑ To understand this rather elaborate chaff we must remember the circumstances of the time. Cæsar's law of B.C. 49 to relieve the financial situation in Italy enacted that creditors foreclosing for mortgage debtors were: (1) to deduct certain sums received as interest; (2) to take over the mortgaged properties at their value before the war panic. That value had to be estimated, and to accept an æstimatio meant generally a loss: for a creditor had property on his hands which often would not fetch the amount of the debt. Suetonius reckons the average loss to have been twenty-five per cent. Now Pætus was a Cæsarian, and therefore Cicero says, "Of course you are bearing your losses cheerfully (in the good cause), so you needn't make a fuss about entertaining me. It was some good being close-fisted when you had anything to save, now you may look upon any expense I cause you as only one other item in your bankruptcy." He does not seriously mean that Pætus was bankrupt. He chooses to represent the losses under the Cæsarian law as amounting to that. I have accepted the reading, non est quod non sis, though I do not feel that it is satisfactory.
- ↑ See vol. ii., pp. 311, 344.
- ↑ That is, "red-leaded" Iupiter. On certain festivals, especially at triumphal banquets, figures of Iupiter were introduced stained with red lead or cinnabar (Plin. N. H. 33, § 112). An earthenware figure of the same god was also in the Capitolium coloured in the same way (id. 35. § 157). It is remarked that the polypus is not naturally red—some colouring substance must have been used in the cooking.
