KITCHENS AND DINING ROOMS AT POMPEII ... - Get a Free Blog

cenatio, Dining room. A general term for a room that is used for
cenatiuncula the purposes of dining, that is taking the cena, the main
meal of the day.
cenaculum Dining room. Referred early on to a dining room on the
upper floor of a house, and later was extended to
designate the whole upper floor.
oecus Hall for reception or dining which is generally more
spacious and elaborately decorated than a cenatio,
cenaculum, or triclinium.
triclinium Dining room or dining-hall in which three diningcouches
for three people each have been arranged for
the meal. The term may also refer to the three-couch
arrangement itself, within a room or outside in the open
air.
A comprehensive look at the literary sources reveals the flexibility with which these terms were
employed. This linguistic plasticity brings up three important points:
The same room can be described by more than one term. In the description of his
Laurentine villa, Pliny seems to use cenatio as a synonym for triclinium, mentioning the same
room with both words:
(Below a store-room and granary within a tower) there is a triclinium, in which
one never hears any noise from the sea even when it is stormy except a subdued
echo. It overlooks the garden and the walk around it. [description of the walk
and the garden]...This cenatio has as fine a view as if it looked out on the sea. 134
Cenatio is the more general term which refers only to function of the room, and the activity of
eating that defines that function. A triclinium, however, implies the furnishing of three couches.
In first century A.D. literature, all triclinia are cenationes, but not all cenationes are triclinia. Clearly,
terminology for rooms of a house was not indelibly fixed, but rather overlapped.
The meaning of terms can change over time. By the fourth century A.D., the word
triclinium seems to have appropriated the general meaning of "dining room", at a time when the
three couch arrangement was no longer in common use. 135 By late antiquity, most dining was
done on a semi-circular couch large enough for six to seven people, called a sigma-couch or a
stibadium. The 4th c. A.D. scholiast Servius Honoratus explains:
134 Plin. Ep. 2.17.13-15: ...sub hoc triclinium, quod turbati maris non nisi fragorem et sonum patitur eumque iam
languidum ac desinentem; hortum et gestationem videt, qua hortus includitur...Hac non deteriore quam maris facie
cenatio remota a mari fruitur. (Teubner text, author's translation).
135 Mosaic evidence for the three-couch arrangement of a dining room continues into the second and third
centuries, in Ostia, Antioch, and North Africa; the custom even survives to the late 4th-early 5th c. A.D. at
the Casa de Baco in Complutum, Spain (Dunbabin 1991, 125-128).
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