Ennui was an affliction unknown to the Republic. Not so to later generations. Seneca, writing in the reign of Nero, at a time when the ideals of the Republic had long since atrophied, when to be the best was to risk immediate execution, when all that was left to the nobility was to keep their heads down and tend to their pleasures, could distinguish the symptoms very well. ‘They began to seek dishes,’ he wrote of men such as Lucullus and Hortensius, ‘not to remove but to stimulate the appetite.’7 The fish-fanciers, sitting by their ponds and gazing into their depths, were tracing shadows
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