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Updated: June 26, 2025
'We cannot rival the luxuries of your English table, Captain Waverley, or give you the epulae lautiores of Waverley-Honour. I say epulae rather than prandium, because the latter phrase is popular: epulae ad senatum, prandium vero ad populum attinet, says Suetonius Tranquillus.
"We took a mouthful," says Sir William Waller, the Parliamentary general, "took a mouthful; paid our reckoning; mounted; and were off." Gustabat here meant that nondescript meal which arose at Rome when jentaculum and prandium were fused into one, and that only a taste or mouthful of biscuit, as we shall show farther on.
'We cannot rival the luxuries of your English table, Captain Waverley, or give you the EPULAE LAUTIORES of Wavery-Honour I say EPULAE rather than PRANDIUM, because the latter phrase is popular; EPULAE AD SENATUM, PRANDIUM VERO AD POPULUM ATTINET, says Suetonius Tranquillus.
That it is that meal which, upon necessity arising for the abolition of all but one, would naturally offer itself as that one. Apply these four tests to prandium: How could that meal answer to the first test, as the day's support, which few people touched? How could that meal answer to the second test, as the meal of hospitality, at which nobody sate down?
Even if this be not history, it is an impression; and at any rate, from that day to this the Germans have agreed with the dictum of Aulus Gellius: "Prandium autem abstemium, in quo nihil vini potatur, canium dicitur: quoniam canis vino caret."
'We cannot rival the luxuries of your English table, Captain Waverley, or give you the epulae lautiores of Waverley-Honour. I say epulae rather than prandium, because the latter phrase is popular: epulae ad senatum, prandium vero ad populum attinet, says Suetonius Tranquillus.
"Is this a sufficient reason for losing one's prandium?" He was obliged to say prandium, because no exhibitions ever could cause a man to lose his coenia, since none were displayed at a time of day when anybody in Rome would have attended.
That is true of many a man amongst ourselves by choice; it is true also, to our knowledge, of some horse regiments in our service, and may be of all. This meal was called coena, or dinner in the city prandium in camps. In the city it would always be tending to one fixed hour. In the camp innumerable accidents of war would make it very uncertain.
The modern luncheon or nuncheon was the archaic prandium, or under-meat, displaced by the breakfast, and modified in its character by the different distribution of the daily repasts, so that, instead of being the earliest regular meal, like the grand déjeuner of the French, or coming, like our luncheon, between breakfast and dinner, it interposed itself between the noontide dinner and the evening supper.
In the very spirit of serious truth, we assure you, that the delusion about "jentaculum" is even exceeded by this other delusion about "prandium." Salmasius himself, for whom a natural prejudice of place and time partially obscured the truth, admits, however, that prandium was a meal which the ancients rarely took; his very words are "raro prandebant veteres."
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