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

Satires as a social weapon: "...the fashionable science of gastronomy has taken over the lives of
the élite and become a sinister instrument of power and exclusion." 241 Dinners and dinner
invitations were an exclusive currency; they regulated status and measured social obligations.
These obligations did not cease with the end of the dinner-party; the hospes as guest was obliged
by reciprocity to play the hospes as host, and return the favor of a meal. Dinners were a kind of
gift-exchange. 242
The host's personal stake in a dinner depended partly on the quality of his guests; the
guest's stake hinged upon the host and company with whom the meal was shared. The host
attempted above all to construct a dining atmosphere that complimented his socio-economic
world:
"This [private] kind of meal was more of a licensed reorganization, the
host's choice of his own world, and this cherished right was summed up
in a well-known Pompeian graffito: 'The man with whom I do not dine
is a barbarian to me' (at quem non ceno, barbarus ille mihi est)." 243
The order of reclining at table encapsulated this world-building (Fig. 1.27). The guests' positions
carried such inherent connotations of social differentiation that not even a meal of amici was
necessarily free of social gamesmanship. The guest of honor (locus consularis) traditionally had
the choice location at table, with proximity and primary access to the host. All other guests were
placed at the discretion of the host, usually according to their rank and status from the lectus
summus on down (Figs. 1.23-1.26). Members of the host's familia, such as his wife or freedpersons,
would lie on his couch (lectus imus) in the places of lowest status (if they were present at the
meal). 244 Slaves were not normally allowed to recline at dinner or eat during dinner because
they were busy cooking and serving the meal, and were not of adequate rank to join the company
regardless. 245
241 Gowers 1993, 131.
242 D'Arms 1984, 331-334; see Gowers 1993, 8 and 225, where invitation poems are considered payment for
the dinner itself. Mart. 5.50 (see above, p. 51) is an anti-invitation poem that offers the prospective guest
lines of verse in lieu of courses of a meal.
243 Gowers 1993, 26. This exclusive world is in contrast to the freedman's dinner in the Satyricon, as Gowers
1993, 46 notes: "The grotesquely hybrid dishes of Petronius' Cena Trimalchionis... remind us that the book
itself is a bogus pastiche, as well as the society it depicts."
244 Plu. Moralia 619B-619F is our primary source on the proper arrangement of guests at dinner.
245 Petr. 70 provides the amusing picture of slaves crowding on to the guests' couches towards the end of
the meal, and the exaggeration of the passage underlines the fact that such a breach of standard social
boundaries was not normal behavior. Pl. Capt. 471 in fact describes slaves as "low bench-sitters"
(unisubselli), which suggests that slaves sometimes sat on separate furniture for their meals.
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