And guests are served the thirty-sixth change: fried nightingale tongues with spicy oriental sauce - a dish that cost incredible money.

It was some kind of cult of the womb and gluttony. They ate with attentive solemnity, according to all the rules of gastronomy, as if they were performing a sacred rite; They ate slowly, indefinitely, to prolong the pleasure of satiety. And when the stomach was full and could not contain anything else, they took an emetic to empty it and start again.

Amphitryon's home poet, one of the endless crowd of his hangers-on, appears in the banquet hall. To the sounds of the lute, he recites poems of his own composition. He is replaced by mimes and dancers. A wild, voluptuous bacchic dance begins.

But the owner is still unhappy. There is boredom and satiety on his face. I'm tired of everything! At least they would invent something new! Otherwise, it's the same thing every time!

For new entertainments, for the invention of pleasures, they paid a lot of money. But it was difficult to invent something new strong enough to excite dulled nerves. Inevitable boredom was approaching like a swamp fog full of suffocating miasma. A satiated life ceased to be life.

One of the first rich men of that time, the Emperor Tiberius himself, is perhaps the saddest example of this satiated boredom. He is on the island of Capri in a wonderful marble villa; the azure waves of the Bay of Naples splash all around; the wondrous, bright southern nature smiles at him and speaks of happiness and joy of life, and he writes to the Senate: "I die every day... And I don't know why I live."

Thus lived the Roman nobility, idle, satiated, having lost the taste for life, dissatisfied with either their wealth or their power.

The people, or rather the urban class, the crowd that filled the streets of Rome, hardly felt quite happy. True, even here life from the outside could sometimes seem like a holiday. Those golden streams of wealth and luxury that flowed into Rome from all countries, although to a small extent, reached the Roman populace. From the emperor and dignitary patricians on the days of solemn events and family holidays, sometimes significant handouts fell. Free distribution of bread was often practiced. Roman citizens, in addition, could trade their votes in elections to the Senate or to municipal offices.

For the crowd, free magnificent spectacles were arranged in circuses and theaters. All this created conditions for an easy, idle life and attracted masses of idle people from the provinces. Little by little, in Rome and other large cities, huge crowds of idle, restless, lazy people, accustomed to live at the expense of the state, whose only desire and constant cry was: "Bread and circuses!"

But when the emperor and the Roman nobility paid handouts to this crowd out of their colossal wealth, they treated them with undisguised contempt and barbarous cruelty. Sometimes it happened in circuses, where the bloody spectacles of gladiatorial fights and the baiting of people by wild beasts prevailed, all the victims intended for the beasts were torn to pieces, and the thirst for blood both in the beasts and in the spectators was not yet satisfied. Then the emperor ordered to throw into the arena to the beasts several dozen free spectators from the common people, who filled the amphitheater. And this order was carried out with loud laughter and applause from the nobility.

One day, on the eve of a horse race, in which the splendid thoroughbred stallion of a noble senator was to take part, a great crowd of curious onlookers surrounded the stall of the famous steed to admire it. In order to disperse the curious crowd that disturbed the peace of the noble animal, the senator ordered his slaves to pour out several large baskets full of poisonous snakes on the onlookers.

These small illustrations show how unsecured and unattractive was the life of the citizens of this class, in spite of the outward veil of seeming lightness and carelessness.

If we descend the social ladder still lower, into the slave class, we will find only continuous suffering and hopeless sorrow. A slave was not even considered a human. It was just a tool, a thing, a household belonging. The master could kill or mutilate a slave: he was not responsible for this to anyone, just as he was not responsible for a broken shovel or a broken pot.

The life of slaves was terrible. If we could walk in the streets of Rome at that time in the evening, we would probably hear heavy groans, weeping and dull blows coming from the cellars of rich houses where slaves were kept, where the usual evening execution of slaves for daytime offenses took place. For the slightest mistake, they were punished severely: they were beaten with whips or chains until they lost consciousness. They clamped their necks in a split log and left them in this position for whole days. The legs were hammered into the stocks. Once, during the reception of Emperor Augustus in the house of a famous rich man of that time, Maecenas, a slave accidentally broke an expensive vase. The patron ordered to throw him alive into the pool to be eaten by moray eels. At night, the slaves were tied in pairs and put on a chain, tightly riveted to a ring screwed into the wall. And during the day they were waiting for endless, stupefying, exhausting work under the whip of the overseer, almost without rest. If the desperate slaves rebelled against their master, they were crucified on crosses, an execution considered the most shameful and painful. When a slave became old or exhausted and could no longer work, he was taken to a small uninhabited island in the Tiber, where he was thrown like carrion to the mercy of fate.