Book XII, Epigram 48 (Ker)

If you serve me mushrooms and boar as your usual fare, and don't imagine that these are what I pray for, I am willing to come; if you believe I am becoming wealthy, and you want to be written down my heir in return for five Lucrine oysters, good-bye! Yet your dinner is sumptuous: I confess, most sumptuous, but to-morrow 'twill be nought, nay to-day, nay a moment hence, nought that the luckless sponge at the end of a degraded mop-stick would discover, or any dog,' or crock by the highway. Of mullets, and hares, and sow's paps, this is the result— a bilious complexion and torturing feet. No Alban revel would be worth it to me, or Capitoline and Pontifical feasts;2 should the God himself account me his debtor for nectar, it will become vinegar and the deceptive vapidity of a Vatican jar. Look out, as lord of the banquet, for other guests whom the royal magnificence of your table may attract: as for me, let my friend invite me to hasty collops. The dinner I like is the dinner I can return.