Dining Posture in Ancient Rome

Bodies, Values, and Status

Matthew B. Roller

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691178004, 9780691124575
• eBook ISBN: 9781400888245
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

What was really going on at Roman banquets? In this lively new book, veteran Romanist Matthew Roller looks at a little-explored feature of Roman culture: dining posture. In ancient Rome, where dining was an indicator of social position as well as an extended social occasion, dining posture offered a telling window into the day-to-day lives of the city's inhabitants.


This book investigates the meaning and importance of the three principal dining postures--reclining, sitting, and standing--in the period 200 B.C.-200 A.D. It explores the social values and distinctions associated with each of the postures and with the diners who assumed them. Roller shows that dining posture was entangled with a variety of pressing social issues, such as gender roles and relations, sexual values, rites of passage, and distinctions among the slave, freed, and freeborn conditions.


Timely in light of the recent upsurge of interest in Roman dining, this book is equally concerned with the history of the body and of bodily practices in social contexts. Roller gathers evidence for these practices and their associated values not only from elite literary texts, but also from subelite visual representations--specifically, funerary monuments from the city of Rome and wall paintings of dining scenes from Pompeii.


Engagingly written, Dining Posture in Ancient Rome will appeal not only to the classics scholar, but also to anyone interested in how life was lived in the Eternal City.

Chapter One

Dining Men: Posture, Leisure, and Privilege

1. OVERVIEW

THROUGHOUT THE PERIOD OF INTEREST to this study, in all the media under examination, free adult males are represented as reclining to dine at convivia in the normal course of events. As noted in the introduction, the practice of reclining was transmitted from the Near East through the Greek world into central Italy by the late archaic period. In all these cultures, reclining marked a greater degree of social privilege and autonomy than was associated with the other possible dining postures, namely, sitting and standing.¹ In each culture that appropriated the reclining posture, however, that privilege and autonomy was articulated through locally distinctive social forms; the posture was always embedded in, and in turn helped to construct and sustain, a culturally unique regime of social values and symbols. In the Roman case, in our period, the reclining dining posture is associated with one social value in particular: otium (leisure) and the various pleasures and luxuries that Roman otium comprises. In this chapter, I examine the link between reclining dining and otium in the three media defined in the introduction: literary texts in section 2, funerary monuments in section 3, and wall paintings in section 4. I treat these media separately not only because they emerge from and address themselves to different social strata but also because each medium has a distinctive place in the spaces and rhythms of everyday Roman life. Thus, to discuss representations of reclining dining in the different media is also to discuss different producers, consumers, settings, and meanings for these representations, even though the activity represented in each case is broadly the same. These representations do allow for synthesis and cross-illumination, but only after the fundamental differences are carefully accounted for. The concluding sections of the chapter (5 and 6) discuss circumstances under which free adult males reject the reclining dining posture and its associated otium.

2. RECLINING AND ELITE OTIUM: SOME LITERARY EVIDENCE

The association of the reclining dining posture with otium is articulated most clearly in literary texts. Being produced largely by and for a Rome-oriented elite, these texts tend to articulate elite urban values, anxieties, and practices.² In such texts, conviviality is often categorized under the rubric of otium, and is implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the various negotia—the occupations or duties—by which elite Roman males occupied themselves much of the time, and indeed defined themselves as elite Roman males: their own private social and economic affairs; legal advocacy on behalf of their clients or friends; discharging magistracies or other military and administrative posts associated with government. More generally still, conviviality in these texts may symbolize or instantiate something “pleasant,” in contrast to “unpleasant” alternatives. While the association of elite conviviality with otium should come as no surprise, it seems worthwhile to cite a handful of literary passages, scattered across various genres and ranging throughout the period under discussion, that illustrate this association, and that show how the reclining posture is implicated in this schema.³

To begin with the earliest Roman literary texts, several Plautine dramas contain convivial scenes in which high-status males dine and drink while reclining in one another’s company and alongside courtesans. The convivium is thus a place where such males enjoy a nexus of pleasures: wine, food, companionship, and the prospect (at least) of sex.⁴ Meanwhile, a fragment of the historian Calpurnius Piso, dating to the late second century B.C., relates that King Romulus drank wine sparingly when invited to dinner, on the ground that he had serious work to do the next day (eundem Romulum dicunt ad cenam vocatum ibi non multum bibisse, quia postridie negotium haberet). Thus the sharp distinction between elite negotium and the activities of the convivium—along with a moral hierarchy privileging the former over the latter—is attributed to the city’s founder, and so receives strong ideological sanction.⁵ Moving into the late Republic, Catullus, in poem 50, declares that he and his friend Licinius Calvus are “at leisure” (otiosi, v. 1), playfully composing spontaneous verses and drinking wine in an atmosphere filled with eroticism.⁶ Meanwhile, Cicero, early in his treatise on the ideal orator (De Or. 1.27), contrasts convivial pleasures with more “serious” activities and concerns. He relates that, when he was a young man, the senior senator and orator Cotta regaled him with a story dating from Cotta’s own youth. Cotta said that he himself had participated one day in a gloomy and difficult discussion with certain éminences grises regarding the condition of the state. Following this discussion, however, when the party repaired to the dining couches, the host Crassus dispelled the prevailing gloom with his humanity, urbanity, and pleasantness. Cotta contrasts these differing moods as follows: “In the company of these men the day seemed to have been spent in the senate-house, but the dinner party in a villa in Tusculum.” That is, the grave affairs of state (negotia), which filled the day’s conversation, stereotypically occupied the curia at the political heart of the Roman Republican forum, while the pleasurable, cheerful reclining fellowship of the evening convivium (otium) better suited a country villa.⁷ Cicero himself, according to his biographer Plutarch (Cic. 8.4), almost never reclined for dinner before sundown, citing a bad stomach and also his ἀσχολία (i.e., negotia) as keeping him away.

Moving into the Augustan and Imperial ages, Horace contrasts otium and negotium, though not necessarily in these terms, in some of his dinner-invitation odes (e.g., Carm. 2.11, 3.8, 3.29). Here he dangles before his addressee—in each case, a magistrate busy with public affairs—the enticements of companionship, sex, and especially wine, requesting that he embrace these pleasures and abandon for the evening his anxious cares on behalf of the state.⁸ In a more mythical vein the wretched Phineus, in Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica, is finally delivered from the plague of Harpies; at last he can recline on a dining couch and consume food and drink, joyful at the forgotten pleasures of the table; he now enjoys tranquillity and indeed “drinks down forgetfulness of his long punishment” (4.529–37). Meanwhile, a declamation in the elder Seneca’s collection (Cont. 9.2) posits that a provincial governor, L. Quinctius Flamininus, executed a criminal in the midst of a convivium at a prostitute’s request. Many of the declaimers who handle this theme explore the shocking collapse of the otium/negotium distinction that this situation envisions. For judicial matters such as punishing criminals belong in the forum, not the dining room; they should be done by daylight, not at night; and so on.⁹ Finally, the younger Pliny deploys these same contrasting pairs—night versus day, dining room versus forum, country versus city—to define a realm of otium, sharply distinct from that of negotium, in which he can recite some light poetry of his own composition. In one case, for instance, Pliny decides to recite such poetry during a convivium in July, specifically because the courts are quiet in the summer and all the guests are at leisure (Ep. 8.21.1–3).¹⁰

These passages are by no means exhaustive (there are many dozens more), but they are representative in showing how elite Romans consistently slot conviviality, the reclining posture included, into the category of otium and regard it as encompassing a variety of specific pleasures: wine, food, conversation, companionship, sex. They also show how the convivium is distinguished, at least in theory, from activities or events classified as mundane, serious, or unpleasant, such as statecraft and matters of judging and punishing. Yet these idelogically clear-cut categories are in practice constantly at risk of collapse. Cicero himself, at times a vigorous purveyor of the ideology of convivial otium, nevertheless discusses politics and engages in statecraft with his peers at convivia; even in “retirement” during Caesar’s ascendancy, when he speaks in his correspondence of dining with people like Paetus, Hirtius, and Dolabella, he can be seen to be constructing new social networks that will serve him in the new political dispensation.¹¹ Caesar himself, a busy man, allowed negotia to intrude more overtly upon his conviviality: Plutarch remarks that he regularly dealt with his correspondence while reclining for dinner.¹² Indeed, Plutarch elsewhere notes (Mor. 619D–F) that the locus consularis, the position of the guest of honor on the low end of the middle couch, well suits the needs of a highranking man, who may have to conduct business during the convivium: he writes, “nobody crowds him, nor are any of his fellow diners crowded” by this man’s retinue. The tension in this formulation between allowing negotia to intrude for one diner, yet not allowing this intrusion to impinge upon the otium of the other diners, is palpable.¹³ Nevertheless, the pervasive circulation of the rhetoric of convivial otium reveals the ideological importance, for elites, of defining a realm in which they are not performing their negotia—even if in practice that realm is difficult or impossible to keep “pure.”

In early Imperial literature, the reclining posture all by itself may stand for or represent convivial otium and pleasure more generally—again, in contrast either with negotia or with things that are unpleasant or painful. The younger Seneca (Ep. 71.21) contrasts “lying in a convivium” with “lying on the rack” (i.e., for torture): the former, he acknowledges, is pleasant while the latter is unpleasant, yet the two kinds of reclining are indifferent in regard to Stoic moral value. Martial (Epig. 14.135) gives voice to an outfit of dining clothes (cenatoria), which primly defines its proper realm by contrast with “serious” business: “neither the forum nor going to bail are familiar to us: our job is to recline on embroidered couches.” Finally—the exception that proves the rule—Ovid, describing Hercules’ death, says that the hero reclined upon his funeral pyre “with the same expression as if [he] were reclining as a dinner guest among full cups of unmixed wine, [his] hair tied with garlands” (Met. 9.236–38). For only a hero of Hercules’ stature, with an abode on Olympus awaiting, would have the composure and confidence to assume the air of a reclining diner while in fact preparing to burn himself to death.¹⁴ In these three passages, the reclining convivial posture stands by synecdoche for a broad range of elite convivial pleasures—the pleasures with which it is associated more explicitly in some of the passages discussed earlier—and is contrasted with specific activities or circumstances that are considered serious or unpleasant.

The privileges and pleasures associated with elite convivial reclining are thrown into higher relief when compared with the convivial postures and roles assumed by slaves. For slaves were excluded, practically and symbolically, from the leisure and pleasures enjoyed by the reclining diners—even as they were omnipresent in the convivium, and by their presence and service made the reclining diners’ leisure and pleasures possible.¹⁵ Literary texts normally depict slaves on their feet, and often in motion as well—bringing food, pouring wine, clearing the tables, and so on. The younger Seneca (Ep. 47.3) evokes the image of wretched, hungry slaves standing all evening in silence—any noise to be punished with a whipping—attending at an imperious master’s meal. Likewise, in Trimalchio’s convivium Giton stands at the foot of Encolpius’s couch while masquerading as a slave (Petr. 58.1: ad pedes stabat). And toward the end of this convivium, Trimalchio turns around on his couch to address slaves (apparently) standing behind, dismissing them from service so that they can eat (74.6–7). Shortly before being dismissed, however, they crowd onto the couches and recline among the invited guests, at their master’s express invitation (70.10–13). This is apparently an equalizing gesture, directed by the host, himself a former slave, to those who now occupy the kind of station he once occupied (though the narrator Encolpius, disgusted by the smell and behavior of the cook whom he suddenly finds reclining next to him, seems displeased by this mixing and conflating of status groups). Martial, moreover, catalogues the actions of a troupe of slaves who stand and move about a dining room, attending to the most menial bodily needs of their master (Epig. 3.82.8–17), while Juvenal (5.64–65) describes a handsome cupbearer who disdains to serve his master’s guests, resenting that they recline while he himself stands. Each of these texts pursues a satirical or polemical aim and therefore cannot be taken as offering a direct and lucid representation of everyday social practice. But in each case the standing slaves are a prerequisite for, not an element of, the satire or polemic. The slaves who recline among the guests on Trimalchio’s couches would cause no outrage unless their presence there were unusual; in Juvenal the slave’s disdain, implying that he regards himself superior to the guests, is less pointed if it is not at odds with the hierarchy of status exhibited in posture. These texts, then, presuppose that standing and moving about are the norm for slaves in convivia, and that such posture and motion, implying instrumentality, mark slaves off as socially inferior to the reclining, stationary diners.

The social hierarchy inscribed in these postures is th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Dining Men: Posture, Leisure, and Privilege
• Chapter Two: Dining Women: Posture, Sex, and Status
• Chapter Three: Dining Children: Posture, Pedagogy, and Coming-of-Age
• Appendix: Convivial Wine Drinking and Comissationes
• Catalogue of Funerary Monuments and Wall Paintings
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• General Index