We find the orator Calvus complaining that the saucepans are made of silver; but it has been left for us to invent a plan of covering our very carriages with chased silver, and in our own age Poppæa, the wife of the Emperor Nero, ordered her favorite mules to be shod with gold!
The younger Scipio Africanus left to his heir thirty-two pounds’ weight of silver: the same person who, on his triumph over the Carthaginians, displayed four thousand three hundred and seventy pounds’ weight of that metal. Such was the sum total of the silver possessed by the whole of the inhabitants of Carthage, that rival of Rome for the empire of the world! How many a Roman since then has surpassed her in his display of plate for a single table! After the destruction of Numantia, the same Africanus gave to his soldiers, on the day of his triumph, a largess of seven denarii each—and right worthy were they of such a general, when satisfied with such a sum! His brother, Scipio Allobrogicus, was the very first who possessed one thousand pounds’ weight of silver, but Drusus Livius, when he was tribune of the people, possessed ten thousand. That an ancient warrior, Rufinus the consul, a man, too, who had enjoyed a triumph, should have incurred the notice of the censor for being in possession of five pounds’ weight of silver, is a thing that would appear quite fabulous at the present day.
For a long time past it has been the fashion to plate the couches of our women, as well as some of our banqueting-couches, entirely with silver. Two centuries ago these couches were invented, as well as chargers of silver, one hundred pounds in weight: it is a well-known fact, that there were then upwards of one hundred and fifty of these in Rome, and that many persons were proscribed through the devices of others who were desirous to gain possession thereof. Well may our Annals be put to the blush for having to impute those civil wars to the existence of such vices as these!
Our own age, however, has waxed even stronger in this respect. In the reign of Claudius, his slave Drusillanus, surnamed Rotundus, who acted as his steward in Nearer Spain, possessed a silver charger weighing five hundred pounds, for the manufacture of which a workshop had to be expressly built. This charger was accompanied also by eight other dishes, each two hundred and fifty pounds in weight. How many of his fellow-slaves, pray, would it have taken to introduce these dishes, or who were to be the guests served therefrom? Compare this extravagance with the simplicity of the times of Fabricius, who would allow no general of an army to have any other plate of silver than a patera and a salt-cellar.—Oh that he could see how that the rewards of valor in our day are either composed of these objects of luxury, or are broken up to make them! Alas for the morals of our age! Fabricius puts us to the blush.