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Were the Romans not as barbarous as our own ancestors at one time? Most certainly they were; in their primitive ages they took their coena at noon,[12] that was before they had laid aside their barbarism; before they shaved: it was during their barbarism, and in consequence of their barbarism, that they timed their coena thus unseasonably. And this is made evident by the fact, that, so long as they erred in the hour, they erred in the attending circumstances. At this period they had no music at dinner, no festal graces, and no reposing upon sofas. They sate bolt upright in chairs, and were as grave as our ancestors, as rabid, and doubtless as furiously in haste.

With us the revolution has been equally complex. We do not, indeed, adopt the luxurious attitude of semi-recumbency; our climate makes that less requisite; and, moreover, the Romans had no knives and forks, which could scarcely be used in that posture: they ate with their fingers from dishes already cut up–whence the peculiar force of Seneca’s “post quod non sunt lavandae manus.” But exactly in proportion as our dinner has advanced towards evening, have we and has that advanced in circumstances of elegance, of taste, of intellectual value.” That by itself would be much. Infinite would be the gain for any people that it had ceased to be brutal, animal, fleshly; ceased to regard the chief meal of the day as a ministration only to an animal necessity; that they had raised it to a far higher standard; associated it with social and humanizing feelings, with manners, with graces both moral and intellectual; moral in the self-restraint; intellectual in the fact, notorious to all men, that the chief arenas for the easy display of intellectual power are at our dinner tables. But dinner has now even a greater function than this; as the fervor of our day’s business increases, dinner is continually more needed in its office of a great reaction. We repeat that, at this moment, but for the daily relief of dinner, the brain of all men who mix in the strife of capitals would be unhinged and thrown off its centre.

If we should suppose the case of a nation taking three equidistant meals all of the same material and the same quantity, all milk, for instance, it would be impossible for Thomas Aquinas himself to say which was or was not dinner. The case would be that of the Roman ancile which dropped from the skies; to prevent its ever being stolen, the priests made eleven facsimiles of it, that the thief, seeing the hopelessness of distinguishing the true one, might let all alone. And the result was, that, in the next generation, nobody could point to the true one. But our dinner, the Roman coena, is distinguished from the rest by far more than the hour; it is distinguished by great functions, and by still greater capacities. It is most beneficial; it may become more so.

In saying this, we point to the lighter graces of music, and conversation more varied, by which the Roman coena was chiefly distinguished from our dinner. We are far from agreeing with Mr. Croly, that the Roman meal was more “intellectual” than ours. On the contrary, ours is the more intellectual by much; we have far greater knowledge, far greater means for making it such. In fact, the fault of our meal is–that it is too intellectual; of too severe a character; too political; too much tending, in many hands, to disquisition. Reciprocation of question and answer, variety of topics, shifting of topics, are points not sufficiently cultivated. In all else we assent to the following passage from Mr. Croly’s eloquent Salathiel:–

“If an ancient Roman could start from his slumber into the midst of European life, he must look with scorn on its absence of grace, elegance, and fancy. But it is in its festivity, and most of all in its banquets, that he would feel the incurable barbarism of the Gothic blood. Contrasted with the fine displays that made the table of the Roman noble a picture, and threw over the indulgence of appetite the colors of the imagination, with what eyes must he contemplate the tasteless and commonplace dress, the coarse attendants, the meagre ornament, the want of mirth, music, and intellectual interest–the whole heavy machinery that converts the feast into the mere drudgery of devouring!”