Apicius
historical figure · 5 works · 6 mentions · 6 anchored passages · author page
the Apiciuses
in the texts
Letters to Lucilius
Roman proverbial for lavish dining, invoked as a standard of luxury inconstant men try to rival.
now they challenge Licinus in riches, Apicius in dinners, Maecenas in dainties.
'Friends, everything deceives me unless either Apicius or Publius Octavius buys that mullet.
Consolation to Helvia
Roman epicure notorious for his extravagance, who poisoned himself upon discovering he had 'only' a million sesterces left.
How great was the luxury for which a million sesterces was beggary!
When he had flung ten million sesterces into his kitchen, when he had swallowed at single carousals so many largesses of princes and the huge revenue of the Capitol, weighed down with debt, he was then for the first time compelled to look into his accounts.
No doubt that dictator of ours lived less happily, who gave audience to the envoys of the Samnites while with his own hand he turned the cheapest food on the hearth—that hand with which he had already so often smitten the enemy and had laid the laurel in the lap of Capitoline Jove—than Apicius lived within our own memory, who, in that city from which philosophers were once ordered to depart as cor …
On the Happy Life
A Roman figure famous for gastronomic excess, cited as an example of luxury.
Look at Nomentanus and Apicius, digesting, as those men call it, the good things of land and sea, and reviewing upon their table the creatures of every nation;
De ieiunio adversus psychicos
Proverbial Roman glutton invoked ironically alongside Montanus as what the Psychics truly deny/serve.
Why then do you delay to believe the Paraclete—whom you deny in Montanus, in Apicius?
De Pallio
Roman gastronome cited among a list of notoriously vicious figures.
I say nothing of the Neros and the Apiciuses and the Rufuses.