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

occasion for frequenting taverns. Elites were supposed to dine in their own company, not as
tavern customers. In addition, groups of plebs lingering for long periods of time had the potential
(at least in the eyes of the elite) of spreading dissent and fostering revolt. Collegia were similarly
subject to restrictions and regulation. Some who were not of sufficient status to receive
invitations to private banquets joined collegia as a means of eating together and forming the social
associations that were the goal of commensality. Others, lacking the money or connections to
belong to a collegium, used cauponae and popinae as their own "dinner clubs". Legislation that
restricted the ability of the plebs to eat together seems clearly to have been an effort to deny them
the social power that comes from eating together. Elites attempted to restrict commensality
(which had worked so well for themselves) from the lower strata of society, fearing the plebs
might use it to undermine the traditional patron-client relationship, threaten the social order, or
even foment revolt. The laws were as ineffective as they were frequently revived; the principle of
dining in chosen company was a right too deeply ingrained in Roman culture to be repressed.
Cooking and eating inside the home
Where people ate represented a daily reckoning of the social order. And nowhere was
that reckoning more important than in the houses of the Romans. At the most basic level,
individual domestic environments in which people cooked and ate were determined by the
physical and social organization of the entire community. Roman communities were complex
and structured hierarchically; those towards the top of the hierarchy tended to possess more
wealth and relatively more political power than those towards the bottom. One way for the elite
to display its greater wealth and prestige was to have more and larger households, or to live in an
exclusive area of the city. Neighborhoods in the cosmopolis of Rome were socio-economically
stratified in this way; wealthier families lived on hills such as the Palatine, Aventine and Caelian,
and poorer families lived in the less-comfortable valleys between the hills, like the Subura,
Velabrum and Transtiberinus. 155 In a smaller town like Pompeii, residential space was not
segregated by wealth; no one neighborhood within the walls was much richer or poorer than
another. 156
155 The Palatine, long the home of many senatorial families, became even more 'exclusive' with the
construction of the imperial palaces. The imperial palace, after all, can be understood as simply the ultimate
aristocratic residence, with the whole empire as its 'extended household' (Scobie 1986, 401-405; Carandini
1990; Stambaugh 1988, 90 and n.7.; Wiseman 1987; Wallace-Hadrill 1991a, 261-263). Nero's Domus Aurea
was a neighborhood made all too exclusive, and it consequently became a source of jokes and resentment
for its size and opulence (Tac. Ann. 15.42; Suet. Ner. 31, 38-39; Plin. Nat. 36.111).
156 Demonstrated clearly by Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 1991a-c; Laurence 1994; Raper 1977, 1979.
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