Juvenal

“ One pang, one sorrow only, afflicts these exiles, that they must, for one season, miss the Circensian games! No drop of blood lingers in their cheek; Shame is ridiculed as she flees from the city, and few would bid her stay. ”

“ For feast days, in olden times, they would keep a side of dried pork, hanging from an open rack, or put before the relations a flitch of birthday bacon, with the addition of some fresh meat, if there happened to be a sacrifice to supply it. A kinsman who had thrice been hailed as Consul, who had commanded armies, and filled the office of Dictator, would come home earlier than was his wont for such a feast, shouldering the spade with which he had been subduing the hillside. ”

“ Let there be no talk of money, and let there be no secret wrath or suspicion in your heart because your wife is wont to go forth at dawn and to come home at night with crumpled hair and flushed face and ears. ”

“ Let a man take his own measure and have regard to it in things great or small, even in the buying of a fish, that he set not his heart upon a mullet, when he has only a gudgeon in his purse. For if your purse is getting empty while your maw is expanding, what will be your end when you have sunk your paternal fortune and all your belongings in a belly which can hold capital and solid silver as well as flocks and lands? ”

“ One is the son of a hardy shepherd; another of the cattle-man; he sighs for the mother whom he has not seen for so long, and thinks wistfully of the little cottage and the kids he knew so well; a lad of open countenance and simple modesty, such as those ought to be who are clothed in glowing purple. ”

“ But nowadays a rich man takes no pleasure in his dinner—his turbot and his venison have no taste, his unguents and his roses no perfume—unless the broad slabs of his dinner-table rest upon a ramping, gaping leopard of solid ivory, made of the tusks sent to us by the swift-footed Moor from the portal of Syene, [10] or by the still duskier Indian—or perhaps shed by the monstrous beast in the Nabataean [11] forest when too big and too heavy for his head. These are the things that give good appetite and good digestion ”

“ It matters much therefore who provides the feast; what is extravagant in Rutilus, gets a fine name in Ventidius, and takes its character from his means.
23Rightly do I despise a man who knows how much higher Atlas is than all the other mountains of Africa, and yet knows not the difference between a purse and an iron-bound money-box. The maxim "Know thyself" comes down to us from the skies ”

“ The greater their straits—though the house is ready to fall, and the daylight begins to show between the cracks—the more luxuriously and daintily do they dine. Meanwhile they ransack all the elements for new relishes; no cost ever stands in their way ”