Birds
Scop. Bring up roasted chickens, partridges, thrushes, ducklings, teal, wood-pigeons, rabbits, hares, calf’s flesh, kids, and sauce or flavours, vinegar, oil, fruit penetrating in its medical properties, also citrons, olives from the Balearic Islands, preserved, pressed, and kept in pickle.
Dem. Are no Bethica (district of Spain) olives there?
Scop. Those from the Balearic Islands taste better.
Crit. What will happen to those big animals there, the goose, the swan, the peacock?
Scop. Merely show them, and take them back to the kitchen.
Pol. See there a peacock! Where is Q. Hortensius who held a peacock for such a delicacy?76
Sim. Take the lamb-meat away.
Scop. Why?
Sim. Because it is unsound. They say it does not go out by any other way than that it entered.
Crit. I have seen someone who swallowed olive stones like an ostrich.
Scop. From what meat are those pasties made?
Crit. This here is stag’s flesh.
Scop. This is deer’s flesh; and that there, I believe, is boar’s flesh.
Crit. I prefer the condiments to meat itself.
Sim. And that is clearly right, for spice renders the sourest things sweet.
Crit. What is the spice of the whole of life?
Dem. An equable mind.
Crit. I can name something else, which is of larger scope and more august.
Dem. What can be more important than what I have named?
Crit. Pietas, under which equanimity is included. Moreover, “piety” is the most suitable and pleasant sauce for all things hard and easy, and those things which lie between these extremes.
Scop. Pour white Spanish wine in that beaker and bear it round to the guests.
Dem. What are you preparing to do? When dinner is finished, bring us some strong and generous wine. We can afterwards drink something more diluted, if we wish to take care of our health.
Sim. Thy counsel seems to me good, for it behoves us to have colder food at the end of a meal, which by its weight may thrust down the other food to the bottom of the stomach, and may restrain the vapours from escaping to the head.