Laudator Temporis Acti

Ammianus Marcellinus 28.4.4-5 (tr. John C. Rolfe):

For he [Ampelius] gave orders that no wine-shop should be opened before the fourth hour, that no one of the common people should heat water, that up to a fixed hour of the day no victualler should offer cooked meat for sale, and that no respectable man should be seen chewing anything in public. These shameful acts, and others worse than these, had, by being constantly overlooked, blazed up to such unbridled heights that not even that celebrated Cretan Epimenides, if, after the manner of myth, he had been called up from the lower world and returned to our times, would have able single-handed to purify Rome; such was the stain of incurable sins that had overwhelmed most people.

namque statuerat, ne taberna vinaria ante horam quartam aperiretur, neve aquam vulgarium calefaceret quisquam, vel usque ad praestitutum diei spatium lixae coctam proponerent carnem, vel honestus quidam mandens videretur in publico. quae probra aliaque his maiora dissimulatione iugi neglecta ita effrenatius exarserunt, ut nec Epimenides ille Cretensis, si fabularum ritu ab inferis excitatus redisset ad nostra, solus purgare sufficeret Romam: tanta plerosque labes insanabilium flagitiorum oppressit.

J. den Boeft et al., Philological and Historical Commentary on Ammianus Marcellinus XXVIII (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 176:

Eating in public was obviously in bad taste. The verb mandere is found also in 25.7.4 absumptis omnibus, quae mandi poterant and 31.8.4. As TLL VIII 270.44-45 observes "saepe subauditur notio quaedam ferinae aviditatis", which was possibly the reason why Amm. chose it here.

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