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

Where is cooking and eating done? Who cooks, serves and eats (and with whom)? The answers
are based on modern scholarship and ancient literary texts; they represent the state of current
knowledge about issues that overlap in complex ways. Their introduction is necessary to
demonstrate the scope of implications that cooking and eating had in the lives of Romans, and to
provide a socio-cultural context for the patterns that emerge from the archaeological evidence in
chapter three.
Literary sources provide much of the evidence for the reconstruction of this context; E.
Gowers warns that the representations of food in Roman literature are primarily symbols, and
symbols not easily ascertained:
"...the meaning of food in Roman literature is rarely just social or economic.
Roman writers, like the gourmets they despise, choose from a vast repertoire:
the significance of the food they use is determined not just by wider cultural
codes but also by personal manipulation; the particular connotations evoked are
specific to each context." 4
Much of the literature about food appears in the context of the satirical style. Food or lack of food
was a daily experience for everyone, a universally comprehensible medium through which
Roman satirists could make moral and poetic statements about current cultural, social and
political values. Satirists ridiculed the 'dirty' aspects of society by rearranging or misplacing the
food that social individuals ate, literally turning that food into a mess or, 'matter out of place'. 5
Chaos took the place of an orderly dinner-party, overstuffing or underfeeding the place of a truly
satisfying meal. Structural opposites of rich and poor, fresh and rotten, pretentious and humble
were juxtaposed and mixed-up. Satirists turned the resulting confusion and contrasts into
humor, lesson, or both. The plain, idealized background against which this satire played was the
menu of simple bread, cabbage, bacon and cheese of rustic Roman ancestors or barbarian
neighbors. 6 Extolling a standard menu of plain, honest and uncultured foods allowed the
satirists to emphasize a stark contrast with the expensive, overly refined, and even ridiculous
dishes consumed at the banquets of the wealthy. 7
Even on an individual level, people's social and moral images are so closely linked to the
food they reportedly consume that it is not easy to employ even personal testimony as evidence
for their actual eating habits. W. Rathje's recent study in Arizona has clearly demonstrated this
4 Gowers 1993, 35.
5 Douglas 1970, 12. Of course, not all satirists treated food in the same way; for a detailed examination of the
methods and purposes of Horace, Persius and Juvenal, see Gowers' (1993) chapter on satire, 109-219.
6 Examples of 'simple, honest peasant fare' are integral parts of the stories of Baucis and Philemon (Ov. Met.
8.620-720) or of the city mouse and the country mouse (Hor. S. 2.6); see also Ov. Fast. 4.679-712, App. Verg.
Moretum, Sil. 7.162-211 and Sen. Dial. 1.3.6.
7 On opposing rich and poor, see Hudson 1989 and Braund 1989, who quote largely from Petronius, Seneca,
Horace and Juvenal. Gowers 1993 cites in addition Plautus, Martial, and the Younger Pliny (esp. 73-76, 189-
191, 249-263, 267-279).
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