Although you have described in brilliant discourse the pomp of a princely banquet, gleaming with delicacies of sea and land, still it is your wont to declare your affection without hesitation. For you recite so free of care, after you have dispatched the matter given you not with verses but with teeth: since at a single luncheon one belly enclosed what the backs of two mules had scarcely carried; since at table, careless of the crime, you combed with scallop-shells your stomach curdled with excess. And though it is plain that you have exaggerated this to mock me, yet I steadfastly affirm that no one—whether he hunger or eat—may deservedly be called blessed as I am.
For, to converse about the first dish which you described: you thought it but a small kind of punishment inflicted, that a peacock, enclosed in a forcemeat pie with its edible covering, shut out your appetite gaping toward the inner parts, and that your gullet, trembling with kindled throat, hung for some little delay of time upon the decision of the skilled carver. And so it came about that, drinking your food and chewing your cups, you spent the first part of the luncheon hungering with complaints, the middle part eating with plunder, the last part sated with tears. Nor would I say it profited you that I was absent. Or rather, that—as much of it as was left over for you—satisfied all of us. For since you, most delighted amid so great a bliss of banqueting, most slowly sated, can scarcely prove yourself happy;
I presume to ask what you would think of wretched me, who am not permitted the abundance of a royal table, and am not filled amid ecclesiastical frugality: who, consigned to custody under the name of honor, as though summoned to prime and forbidden the better part, am compelled to lie still lest I flee: I am filled with greens and puffed up with turnips; I abound in pulse, but such as the earth, not the sea, has sent forth. Amid these things I do not even remember what those oysters of good memory once were. If some little pale wine is set out in one very small, half-filled cup, even here the measure or rule is kept. Now I say nothing of the food: in receiving fresh produce the penalty is greater when I ask for new wine—either I suffer hunger, or I am charged with having snatched something;
with the greatest importunity I manage to take three fresh portions more than the others. Even the very bowls, which I break by contrived accidents, dwindle with daily replacement. Wherefore cease to mock a hard-pressed man in these matters: because, since for each of us the daily lot is what each has been allotted, I shall then be able to forget my familiar misery, if our lord should so bid me be present at his banquet that it should happen you are absent.