Athens, Greece—July, 38 C.E.
Passia, Junius, Tycho, and I came to Athens in March, afraid that Emperor Caligula’s greed would stretch its long arm toward us and demand our fortune. We were in especial danger as we were not patricians, but made rich by the inheritance Apicius left to us.
I eventually sold all of Apicius’s villas and farms, save the domus in Minturnae, where we first found each other and where so much began. I put the money away for Junius, who at twenty-five has become one of the best orators in all of Athens. He married a beautiful girl with eyes that remind me of Apicata’s. She is heavy with child and I feel such pride and hope for my grandchild-to-be.
Rúan came with us when we fled to Athens, bringing with him the beautiful woman who was once Antonia’s scribe. I bought them an expansive house nearby, down the street from us on the hill where our villa overlooks the sea. Together, Rúan and I still cook, but now we cook for our friends and our families, sharing our love of food only with those whom we love the most.
I still have my knives and I use them daily. I know not what spell Apicius had them bound with but I have yet to sharpen them. They shine as they did on that fateful morning he gifted them to me. They are sharp enough to slice papyrus and bone with equal measure and the swirl of waves has not faded from the blades.
My memory of him is as sharp as those knives, even now, so many years gone by and so many miles away.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Though it is likely that there were other gourmands in ancient Rome, Marcus Gavius Apicius is the only one known to us. Historians believe that he lived sometime in the first century C.E., during the time of Caesar Tiberius, and many of the events described in Feast of Sorrow are documented in sources dating from that time.
Apicius, who was known to be one of the wealthiest men in Rome, achieved fame as a lover of luxury and fine food. On the Luxury of Apicius, written by his contemporary, the Greek grammarian and orator Apion, is now lost, but surviving sources largely condemn Apicius as a spendthrift. In his Consolations, Seneca relays the story of Apicius’s death—it seems he really did poison himself because he feared starvation when he learned that his fortune had dwindled to ten million sestertii—and asks, “How great must the luxury of that man have been, to whom ten millions signified want?” In reference to his cooking school, Seneca also decries that Apicius “defiled the age with his teaching,” a critique commonly leveled against those who displayed their great wealth in a vulgar fashion. In the centuries that followed, Apicius became one of the most iconic examples of such flagrancy and, in fact, the very word Apician came to mean “glutton.”
Many of the other characters in Feast of Sorrow—Sejanus, Apicata, Livia, Livilla, Tiberius, Drusus, Claudius, Antonia, Pliny, to name a few—were also real people whose lives are recorded in the annals of Roman history, and I endeavored to stay true to the historical record as much as possible. In his Annals, for example, Tacitus tells us that Sejanus “had disposed of his virtue at a price to Apicius, a rich man and a prodigal.” I found that anecdote to be particularly intriguing, as some scholars believe that Sejanus’s wife, Apicata, must have been a relation to Apicius given the naming conventions of women during that time. I had to wonder what would compel Apicius to marry his daughter to a former lover. Other details, including Sejanus’s horrific downfall as well as Apicata’s and Livilla’s fates, are well documented, and those scenes are imagined retellings of what their contemporaries recorded. Still others were fabricated to add color and clarification to the text. Claudius’s son, Drusus, for example, was not nicknamed Albus; I gave him this moniker to distinguish him from his relatives with similar names, a common occurrence among the Romans.
Parricide, or the murder of a parent, considered the most heinous crime one could commit, was an act punishable by death in ancient Rome. In fact, the Romans devised a particularly cruel and unusual form of capital punishment solely for those found guilty of this crime. The poena cullei, or punishment of the sack, which was first documented in 100 B.C.E., typically involved flogging the culprit, sewing him into a leather sack, sometimes with an assortment of live animals, and throwing him into the sea. However, it is not clear with what frequency this punishment was doled out, and some ancient sources maintain that only those caught in the act of murdering a parent faced any penalty at all. Moreover, the very wealthy were often above punishment, and that’s the direction I chose to take in Feast of Sorrow.
There is no record of the slaves whom Apicius owned, but given his wealth it is probable that he owned many hundreds. None of the slaves in Feast of Sorrow were real people, though slaves did often become a cherished part of the household, could earn their freedom, be buried in the family mausoleum, and, in some cases, inherit their masters’ wealth.
When it comes to food and feasts, we know that Apicius dined with Augustus’s adviser, Maecenas, with Martial the poet, and with several Roman consuls. In his Natural History, Pliny notes that Apicius advised Tiberius’s son, Drusus, not to eat cabbage tops or any cabbage sprouts because those were for commoners and that he declared that the tongues of flamingos were of the “most exquisite flavor.” The scene where Tiberius wagers that either Apicius or Publius Octavius would buy the extraordinary red mullet was recorded by Seneca in his Letters to Lucilius. And, in his Deipnosophistae, the rhetorician Athenaeus shares the story of Apicius sailing to the coast of Africa to look for prawns.