Most treasured, most relished, most savoured of all were fish. So it had always been. The Romans had been stocking lakes with spawn for as long as their city had been standing. By the third century BC Rome had come to be ringed by ponds. Freshwater fish, however, because so much easier to catch, were far less prized than species found only in the sea – and as Roman gastronomy grew ever more exotic, so these became the focus of intensest desire. Rather than remain dependent upon tradesmen for their supply of turbot or eel, the super-rich began to construct salt-water ponds. Naturally, the prodigious expense required to maintain these only added to their appeal.
The extravagance of it all was justified by the ancient principle that a citizen should subsist off the produce of his land. Roman nostalgia for the countryside cut across every social boundary. Even the most luxurious of villas also served as farms. Inevitably, among the urban elite, this tended to encourage a form of play-acting that Marie-Antoinette might have recognised. A favourite affectation was to build couches in a villa’s fruit store. A particularly shameless host, if he could not be bothered to grow and harvest his own fruit, might transport supplies from Rome then arrange them prettily in his store for the delectation of his guests. Pisciculture had a similarly unreal quality. Self-sufficiency in fish came at a staggering price. As agriculturalists were quick to point out, homemade lakes ‘are more appealing to the eye than to the purse, which they tend to empty rather than fill. They are expensive to build, expensive to stock, expensive to maintain.’3 The claim that fish-breeding had anything to do with economy became increasingly impossible to justify. In 92 BC a censor, no less, a magistrate elected to maintain the Republic’s stern ideals, had burst into tears at the death of a lamprey. He had grieved, it was reported, not for a ruined supper but ‘as though he had lost a daughter’.4
Thirty years later the craze had reached epidemic proportions. Hortensius, rather than even contemplate eating one of his beloved mullets, would send to Puteoli if he ever needed fish for his table. As one of his friends commented wonderingly, ‘You would sooner get him to let you take his carriage-mules from his stable and keep them, than remove a bearded mullet from his fish-pond.’5 In pisciculture, as in every other form of extravagance, however, it was Lucullus who set the most dazzling standards of notoriety. His fishponds were universally acknowledged to be wonders, and scandals, of the age. To keep them supplied with salt water, he had tunnels driven through mountains; and to regulate the cooling effect of the tides, groynes built far out into the sea. The talents that had once been devoted to the service of the Republic could not have been more spectacularly, or provocatively, squandered. ‘Piscinarii’, Cicero called Lucullus and Hortensius – ‘fish fanciers’. It was a word coined half in contempt and half in despair.
For Cicero, with the acuity of a man who wanted desperately all that Lucullus was busy throwing away, could penetrate to the heart of the mania for fish-ponds. It spoke of a sickness in the Republic itself. Rome’s public life was founded on duty. Defeat was no excuse for retiring from the commitments that had made the Republic great. The cardinal virtue for a citizen was to hold one’s ground, even to the point of death, and in politics as in warfare one man’s flight threatened the entire line of battle. Cicero, despite having seized Hortensius’ oratorical crown, had no wish to see his rival retire. The new man closely identified himself with the principles for which great aristocrats such as Hortensius and Lucullus had always stood. As he drew, step by careful step, ever closer to the supreme prize of the consulship, so it appalled him to see men he regarded as his natural allies sitting by their fish-ponds, feeding their bearded mullets by hand, leaving the Republic to twist in the wind.
But for Hortensius, as for Lucullus, the consciousness of having been bested, of holding only second place, was a burning agony. The orator’s retirement was not as total as the proconsul’s, but it was, in its own way, just as pointed. Increasingly, the law courts in which Hortensius had been so publicly routed by Cicero came to serve him as a stage for his eccentricities. A man who had brushed against his toga and damaged the arrangement of the folds was prosecuted for insulting behaviour. Just as flamboyantly, in the middle of a trial Hortensius moved for an adjournment, explaining that he wished to hurry back to his estate and supervise the irrigation of his plane trees with vintage wine. His opponent on this occasion, as on so many others, was Cicero. Wild extravagance was one arena in which the parvenu could hardly compete.
So it was that the ancient Roman yearning for glory turned pathological. Lucullus, splitting mountains for the benefit of his fish, and Hortensius, serving peacocks for the first time at a banquet, were both still engaged in the old, familiar competition to be the best. But it was no longer the desire for honour that possessed them. Instead it was something very like self-disgust. Lucullus, we are told, squandered his money with every appearance of contempt, treating it as though it were something ‘captive and barbarian’, to be spilled like blood.6 No wonder that his contemporaries were appalled and perplexed. Not properly understanding his condition, they explained it as madness. Ennui was an affliction unknown to the Republic. Not so to later generations. Seneca, writing in the reign of Nero, at a time when the ideals of the Republic had long since atrophied, when to be the best was to risk immediate execution, when all that was left to the nobility was to keep their heads down and tend to their pleasures, could distinguish the symptoms very well. ‘They began to seek dishes,’ he wrote of men such as Lucullus and Hortensius, ‘not to remove but to stimulate the appetite.’7 The fish-fanciers, sitting by their ponds and gazing into their depths, were tracing shadows darker than they understood.