Lucullus

While this matter was much talked of in the city, as was natural, Cicero and Pompey came up to him as he was idling in the forum. Cicero was one of his most intimate friends, and although the matter of the command of the army had led to some coolness between him and Pompey, still they were accustomed to frequent and friendly intercourse and conversation with one another.

Accordingly, Cicero saluted him, and asked how he was disposed towards receiving a petition. Most excellently well, said Lucullus, and invited them to make their petition. We desire, said Cicero, to dine with you to-day just as you would have dined by yourself. Lucullus demurred to this, and begged the privilege of selecting a later day, but they refused to allow it, nor would they suffer him to confer with his servants, that he might not order any thing more provided than what was provided for himself.

Thus much, however, and no more, they did allow him at his request, namely, to tell one of his servants in their presence that he would dine that day in the Apollo. Now this was the name of one of his costly apartments, and he thus outwitted the men without their knowing it. For each of his dining-rooms, as it seems, had a fixed allowance for the dinner served there, as well as its own special apparatus and equipment, so that his slaves, on hearing where he wished to dine, knew just how much the dinner was to cost, and what were to be its decorations and arrangements. Now the usual cost of a dinner in the Apollo was fifty thousand drachmas, and that was the sum laid out on the present occasion.

Pompey was amazed at the speed with which the banquet was prepared, notwithstanding it had cost so much. In these ways, then, Lucullus used his wealth wantonly, as though it were in very truth a Barbarian prisoner-of-war.

But what he did in the establishment of a library deserves warm praise. He got together many books, and they were well written, and his use of them was more honourable to him than his acquisition of them. His libraries were thrown open to all, and the cloisters surrounding them, and the study-rooms, were accessible without restriction to the Greeks, who constantly repaired thither as to an hostelry of the Muses, and spent the day with one another, in glad escape from their other occupations.