But the fullest and minutest arrangements for these modest meals are to be found in the document relating to the foundation of the poor college of Diana and Antinous, to which reference has already been made. The master of the feast was taken in regular order from the roll of the society. Each brother had to accept this office in his turn, or pay a fine of five shillings of our money. The regular festivals of the club were six in the year, on the natal days of Diana and Antinous, and those of the founder and some of his relatives. There is some obscurity in the regulations for these common feasts, and at first sight they are a ludicrous contrast to the pontiff’s famous banquet in the days of Julius Caesar, described by Macrobius.(1542) M. Boissier naturally refuses to imagine that even the poor brethren of the club of Diana and Antinous would be contented with bread, four sardines, a bottle of good wine, with hot water and the proper table service. The slave steward of Horace probably found much better fare in his _popina_.(1543) Dr. Mommsen has resolved the mystery. It is evident, from several inscriptions, that _sportulae_ were sharply distinguished from distributions of bread and wine.(1544) The _sportula_ was a gift of richer food or dainties, which in public distributions might be carried home; it was sometimes an equivalent in money. If those who received the _sportula_ preferred to enjoy it at a common table, an appointed member of the college would have the food prepared, or convert the money into dishes for the feast. The bread and wine he might add from his own pocket, if they were not provided by the foundation. How much for these meals came from the club funds, and how much out of the pocket of the _magister coenae_, is not always clearly stated. But we may be sure, from the tone of the times, that additions to a modest _menu_ were often made by the generosity of patrons and officers of the club.
It would be futile and uninteresting to pursue into all its minute details throughout the inscriptions, the system of _sportulae_ founded by so many patrons and benefactors. Any one who wishes can temperately regale himself for hours at these shadowy club-feasts of the second century. Perhaps the clearest example of such distributions is the donation of Marcellina and Aelius Zeno to the little college of Aesculapius, to which reference has been made for another purpose.(1545) On seven different anniversaries and festivals, sums of money, with bread and wine, were distributed to the brethren of the college in due proportions, according to their official dignity and social rank. Thus, in the division on the 4th of November, the fête-day of the society, the shares in money, according to the various grades, from the father of the college downwards, are six, four, and two. The division of the wine, according to social rank, follows the proportion of nine, six, and three. A slightly different scale is followed on the birthday of the Emperor Antoninus Pius in September, and on the day for New Year’s gifts in January. But in these benefactions the difference of grade is always observed, the patron and the chief magistrates and magnates of the society always receiving a larger share than the obscure brethren at the bottom of the list. In the college of Aesculapius, Marcellina herself, and Aelius Zeno, the two great benefactors of the society, along with the highest of its dignitaries, are allotted three times as much as the plebeian brother. The excellent Marcellina, who, in the fourth century might perhaps have followed S. Jerome and Paula to Bethlehem, was the widow of a good and tender husband, who had been curator of the imperial picture galleries.(1546) Had she been drawn into the ranks of that hidden society, who were beginning to lay their dead in the winding vaults beneath the Appian Way, she would certainly have dealt out her bounty on a different scale and on different principles. Her bequest to the college of Aesculapius reveals how deep in the soul of a charitable pagan woman, who was probably sprung from servile stock, lay that aristocratic instinct of the Roman world which survived the advent of the Divine Peasant and the preaching of the fishermen of Galilee, for far more than four hundred years.