Age strongly determined one's participation at meals.

Mothers (or nurses in households with

slaves or freedwomen) commonly breast- fed their infants for six months to two or three
years, and then provided premasticated food for a time after their weaning.(2) Infants were
then fed plain food like baby's gruel and bread soup.(3) Salza Prina Ricotti compares the
food of older children to that of the poor:
"Naturalmente bambini e poveri, che non si coricavano sui letti tricliniarii per consumare i
loro pasti e sedevano attorno ad un tavolo semplice ma abbastanza ampio sul quale
potevano poggiare il loro cibo, i loro bicchieri ed i loro piatti di terracotta, potevano
permettersi zuppe fumanti, poletine, legumi di vario tipo e sugosi stufatini."(4)
Posidonius, writing at the turn of the first century B.C., agrees that children of wealthy
Romans ate simple foods and drank largely water.(5) Information about the nutrition of
children who have been weaned is, however, sparse.
Children seem to have commonly eaten in the same room as their parents.(6) Imperial
children are reported reclining on the lectus imus below their father, seated at the ends of
the couches, or seated at a separate and more rustic table with other young nobles.(7)
Imperial children were of course of the highest rank, and therefore would have been socially
acceptable company at imperial dinners. Their status as children however compelled them
sometimes to eat together and slightly separate from the adults. The point at which free
youths would be allowed to dine formally as an adult at table is not entirely clear, but it was
probably marriage for girls, and the assumption of the toga virilis for boys. Both were
considered marks of adulthood, and were celebrated by feasts.(8)
Dinners at which morally unacceptable language and behavior were expressed were not
considered suitable by some authors for children or young adults to attend.(9) Furthermore,
Juvenal warns that bad habits such as gluttony are passed on from parents to children:
[[As soon as he has passed his seventh year, before he has cut all his second teeth, though
you put a thousand bearded preceptors on his right hand, and as many on his left, he will
always long to fare sumptuously, and not fall below the high standard of his cookery.]](10)
The 'child' in this passage is satiric shorthand for persons who are not mature enough to
control their own physical desires.(11) So Seneca moralizes about the decline of youths in
terms of their dining habits:
[[You need not wonder that diseases are beyond counting: count the cooks!...The halls of the
professor and the philosopher are deserted: but what a crowd there is in the cafs! How
many young fellows besiege the kitchens of their gluttonous friends! I shall not mention the
troops of luckless boys who must put up with other shameful treatment after the banquet is
over.]](12)
"Boys" (pueri) here describe children who were attendants at meals; the term puer contains
inherent ambiguity in its meanings of "boy" and "slave". For families in which free children
were expected to wait at table as part of their daily chores, the meanings overlapped slightly
(Figs. 1.23- 1.25).(13) In the context of meals, puer usually means "slave"; young and
handsome slave boys were particularly favored to be the dispensers of wine at dinner, and
were sometimes subject to sexual service as a result. (14)
A consistent division in family food preparation according to gender does not appear in the
sources. Most authors describe poor, rustic or archaic households, in which simple foodstuffs
prepared by matrons exemplify the moral soundness of households according to literary
convention.(15) Columella claims that in the past, men worked outdoors and in public, and
domestic chores fell to women until they became 'lazy' and these duties fell to the
housekeeper; part of Columella's intent is to decry the current laxity in work and morals. (16)
From the quasi- historical past of Rome, Plutarch cites a treaty with the Sabines that forbad
the new wives of the Romans from grinding grain or baking bread. According to Pliny,
however, women at Rome baked their own bread until 174 B.C.(17) Juvenal sketches a
picture of a veteran's pregnant wife in the mid- second century B.C. making porridge (puls)
for her children.(18)
Not only women cooked meals; men appear as 'cooks' in the course of giving professional
advice. Cato, Columella, and Varro all provide recipes in their agricultural treatises, and the
most famous cook of antiquity was the wealthy M. Gavius Apicius.(19) Male cooks are
depicted as professionals, experts in fine cuisine. Other solitary males, such as the
mythological Falernus or the hero Manius Curius, cook basic fare for themselves -- a mark of
their solid, honest and 'traditional' character.(20) Women's professional cooking expertise is
considerably more sinister: the arts of poison-making or witchcraft, performed by characters
such as Medea, Canidia or Locusta (the imperial poisoner of choice).(21)

Cooperation between the sexes in cooking was another literary ideal; the stories of Baucis
and Philemon, and Simylus and Scybale depict country- women and men working
harmoniously together in the preparation of a meal.(22) Varro claims that the barbarian
Illyrian men and women were equally able to herd flocks, gather wood, keep house, or cook
food.(23) In a more urban context, Fortunata is portrayed as an equal to her husband
Trimalchio for most of the dinner-party (although she participates only briefly in the meal
proper); she is 'put in her place' only near its end.(24) All of these passages depict
households outside the mainstream of Roman elite society, outside the actual experience of
the author or reader. Heroes, mythical couples, rustic folk, foreign barbarians, and nouveau
riche freedpersons appear to have domestic gender equity. Nowhere are men and women of
the Roman elite shown working together to prepare a meal, because slaves did the job for
them.
There were apparently no strict gender divisions among servile cooks in wealthier families.
Apuleius depicts slave cooks of both sexes in his novel.(25) The celebrated cook in the Cena
Trimalchionis, or the comic cooks of early Roman theater were, however, male.(26) The only
traditionally female servile household job that involved food was the management position
of vilica, or housekeeper. Cato and Columella both describe similar duties for the bailiff's
wife: keeping adequate stores of food safe in places where they will not go bad, cleaning the
kitchen, and putting all the utensils in their proper places.(27) Columella's housekeeper does
not actually have to cook the meals herself; she has only to inspect those who do prepare
the family food.(28) The woman's role at the hearth in poorer families (or even larger
families that had slaves to cook) consistently involves managerial duties. The model is
Lucretia, who is shown in a central position of authority (in medio aedium), surrounded by
her servants; they are all busy with spinning wool even late at night.(29) Women valued this
administrative role highly; when Pomponia, the wife of Quintus Cicero, is not given the
responsibility of organizing a meal at an estate where they were to spend the night, she
complains that she is 'just a guest' (Ego ipsa sum...hic hospitia) in her own household.(30)
Later, she refuses to eat the meal in her husband's and brother-in-law's company. Cicero
does not understand her anger because he underestimates the importance of the
managerial power that she expects to wield in her house.
Roman women and men commonly dined together (Figs. 1.24- 1.26). Not all dinners included
women (several banquets described by the literary sources list only male participants). (31)
However, Richardson's recent suggestion that women regularly dined separately from men
(based on the identification of 'ladies' dining rooms' in the houses and villas of Vesuvius) is
insupportable.(32) In the early Republican period, women are said to have been seated at
dinner, but by the Empire custom dictated that both sexes recline.(33)
To what extent did women participate in the meal? Salza Prina Ricotti has conservatively
stated that women were thought to be a distraction at dinner, and that they did not make
invitations, receive guests, or conduct conversation during the meal.(34) Juvenal disagrees
in the sixth satire, rebuking the erudite woman who belittles rhetors and grammarians in her
dinner table remarks.(35) He exaggerates, but no less than to imagine that women took
absolutely no part in dinner socializing. Catullus did not consider a dinner good without wine,
wit, laughter, and the company of a lovely girl.(36) Judging by the (male) literature, men's
reasons for female company at banquets primarily concerned the opportunity of love, or at
least sexual relations.(37) Women of both high and low status were depicted as prizes at the
table, taken by powerful figures like emperors sometimes even from their own husbands.
(38) Thus the precepts written on the dining room walls of the Casa del Moralista at Pompeii
advise guests not to make eyes at other men's wives.(39) There was a clear connection
between food and sex; one course at some dinners was the women themselves.(40) Women
were also known to entertain banqueters in the roles of mimes, dancers, singers and
musicians.(41) Despite the few and biased sources, there is no doubt that many women
enjoyed formal dinners in the company of men. Only the nature and degree of their
participation seems to have differed, according to their rank and status.
Rank was socio-political standing, given initially by birthright. In the Imperial Roman world,
rank ranged from the emperor, to senators, to equestrians, to free citizens, freedpersons,
and finally down to slaves. Promotion in rank was possible through emancipation, election to
office, or acclamation as emperor. Rank was largely a matter of ascribed prestige. Status on
the other hand was a measure of power, based on achievement or influence with others of
higher rank.(42) Social standing was a complex combination of these factors combined with
wealth.

Wallace-Hadrill has remarked: "Roman domestic architecture is obsessionally concerned with

distinctions of social rank."(43) The social relations played out between people at an elite
dinner always involved aspects of rank or status. A standard satirical character is the social
parasite who angles for dinner invitations in the hope of gaining a standing invitation and
thereby eventual access to a patron. (44) One parasite, Charopinus, is depicted as
potentially violent, even murderous, when he is denied invitation:
[[As many times as I dine at home, if I have not invited you, Charopinus, straightway the
hostilities become immense, and you would run me through the middle with a drawn sword
if you perceive that my hearth has been heated up without you. Will I not even once be
allowed to play a trick? Nothing is as insatiable, Charopinus, as this your gluttony. Now quit
watching over my kitchen, I pray, and let my cook at last give you words (instead of a
meal!)]](45)
The Charopinus character underlines the importance of dining-out to one's social reputation
and worth. Charopinus the client is forced to eat his patron's poem instead of his food.
Issues of patronage were at work in every invitation to dinner from a social superior to a
social inferior:
"In Roman satire some people invite important guests to dinner seeking social advancement
(Nasidienus in Hor. S. 2.8). Others eat well or entertain those lower in the social hierarchy to
assert or confirm their own superiority (Virro in Juv. 5) or attend dinners in the hope of social
advancement (Trebius in Juv. 5)."(46)
There was considerable tension for all parties involved in the staging of a banquet.
Prospective invitees risked being uninvited. Potential hosts risked both rejection of their
invitations, and the chance that their social occasion might be a failure.(47) Refusal to dine
on the part of a guest was a sign of that guest's advancement in society, and of the host's
reduced clout. Martial complains of one Dento, who has four times refused his dinner
invitation:
[[So it is: you have been captured by a richer dinner, and a bigger kitchen has carried off the
dog! Presently -- and that soon -- when you are known and discarded, and the wealthy
eating- house (popina) is sick of you, to the bones of the old dinner you will return.]](48)
Calling the house where Dento now dines a popina is a particularly malicious insult; it
implies that Dento has no real status whatsoever. Gowers characterizes dining in Horace's
first book of Satires as a social weapon: "...the fashionable science of gastronomy has taken
over the lives of the lite and become a sinister instrument of power and exclusion."(49)
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 dinnerparty; 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.(50)
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 socioeconomic 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)."(51)
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. 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).(52) 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.(53)
"Whether the host should arrange the placing of his guests or leave it to the guests
themselves" is the subject of a dialogue in Plutarch's Quaestiones Conviviales.(54)
Participants debate how to arrange the guests at table so as to obtain the most pleasant and
satisfactory dining experience without offending anyone's social pride. Plutarch's father is in
favor of dinners as strictly ordered as an army, while his brother Timon argues that dinners
should not be contests for social pre-eminence (and thereby shows himself to be naively

idealistic).(55) Plutarch himself pleads for order. But in cases where rivals attended the same
dinner, he argues that the place of honor should harmlessly be afforded to relatives with
special personal connection to the host. The guest Lamprias finally declares that the
individual character of each diner must be carefully considered, and guests should be placed
next to others of opposite demeanor, so that each might learn from the other. None of these
procedures is proclaimed preferable in the end. The point of the dialogue is to show diverse
possibilities, and to discuss the difficulties in pleasing all the participants when their couch
positions inherently carry so much social weight. The end goal of all is to foster a relaxed
atmosphere of conviviality and friendship; ironically they cannot agree on how to go about it.
(56) Hosts of formal dinners in nineteenth century England faced strikingly similar problems:
"The host and hostess circulated discreetly to make sure that the appropriate gentlemen
were paired off with ladies of appropriate status and then arranged in order of precedence
for purposes of the formal promenade in to dinner. This, since it often involved very tricky
questions of status and rank, was probably in many cases the hostess's most nerve-racking
moment during the whole evening, and, if she were uncertain, she would be well advised to
consult Debrett's or Burke's [published guides to peerages] at this point to get her ranks
straight."(57)
Knowledge of proper social ordering at banquets was a necessary and powerful tool to run a
successful affair, and if properly wielded, could advance or solidify the status of the host
himself.
Slaves cooked and served the free family and guests of wealthy households. Slaves have
been called "the human props essential to the support of upper-class Roman convivial
comforts".(58) Consider Seneca's comment: "Look at our kitchens, and the cooks, who
bustle about over so many fires; is it, think you, for a single belly that all this bustle and
preparation of food takes place?"(59) The larger and more elaborate a dinner affair, the
more and more specialized slaves were needed. Household slaves had their own social
hierarchy, and this hierarchy was expressed nowhere as clearly as in a formal dinner. (60)
Vocatores and nomenclatores worked on invitations and overall management; store-masters
(cellarii) made sure that groceries had been purchased. Kitchen slaves (focarii and focariae)
and specialized cooks proceeded to transform dirty, raw food into clean, cooked food, which
they then served in the dining room. Their cooking might be compared in jest to poison in
the Pseudolus, but the danger of poisoning in the imperial household was ever-present,
requiring a special food-tasting slave for the emperor.(61) Cicero ridicules L. Calpurnius Piso
for (among other things) not having a full-service dinner staff:
[[The servants who wait are filthy and some of them decrepit; one man doubles the parts of
cook and steward. He does not keep a baker or a properly stocked larder, and sends out for
his bread and his wine (from the barrel).]](62)
Slaves provided 'dinner-theater' entertainment for the guests while they served: singing,
playing musical instruments, reciting verse, dancing, acrobatics, and playing farce.(63)
Serving boys or girls dispensed the wine and offered sexually attractive appearances.(64)
While slaves were accepted as part of the banquet's course and (sometimes) admired for
their entertainment, they were simultaneously segregated from the real camaraderie of the
meal. In a sense, they were performing puppets, subject to derision, degradation, abuse and
punishment.(65)
The hard work of slaves in the smooth operation of the meal was not often noticed, and their
proximity to the bathed and relaxed guests was not always appreciated. Trimalchio says as
much at the start of his cena:
[[We complimented our host on his arrangements. 'Mars loves a fair field,' said he
[Trimalchio], 'and so I gave orders that every one should have a separate table. In that way
these filthy slaves will not make us so hot by crowding past us.']](66)
Slaves were filthy because they had to 'slave' over a burning stove in ill- lit kitchens filled
with smoke, blood and food remains, sweat to keep the meal in proper synchronization, and
periodically clear the table of dirty dishes and clean the floor of trash.(67) Horace gives a
graphic sermon on the virtues of hosting a clean dinner through the mouth of the
philosopher Catius:
[[It really makes you sick to see a slave with greasy paws, from licking at some food he
thieved, pick up a cup, or to find a coating of old filth inside an antique bowl. Plain brooms,
place mats, sawdust -- just how expensive are these simple things? Not to have them is a
great disgrace. Do you scrape mosaic floors with a muddy palm whisk and throw dirty wraps
on couches covered with fine cloth? You forget that since neatness is both cheap and easy,

you're more justly blamed for lacking that one quality than any fancy item found only on the
tables of the rich.]](68)
Slaves were socially as well as physically dirty. Except for the Saturnalia, they tended not to
dine in a well-decorated room with nice furnishings and service of their own; they are
pictured instead snacking in the kitchen.(69) Some slaves were allowed only the leftovers of
the leftovers of the meal, taking what the guests left behind after filling their own napkins.
Slaves on some country estates are shown receiving rations from the bailiff and eating them
around a fire.(70)
Slaves, the original 'nobodies' and lacking social identity, were not allowed to eat what, how
or when they liked. That picture is given by their masters; how true is it? Were slaves
scavengers, eating off the plates as they cleaned them, fighting for scraps? Or did slaves
have their own place and time for rations during which they could enjoy the social
interaction of their peers? Did slaves of differing status within a household eat differently?
There must have been considerable variation in domestic arrangements, depending upon
the mind and resources of their master, the size of the house and the size of the staff.
Customs and attitudes changed continually over time, and from place to place. Households
and their houses fluctuated in size, in the makeup of their families, and in their fortunes.
Literary sources offer anecdotal evidence from the point of view of Roman elites, evidence
that does not often cut across rank, status, age and gender. Fortunately, the archaeological
evidence at Pompeii in the first century A.D. represents a broad band of the socio-economic
spectrum. A systematic exploration of cooking and eating arrangements, from the one-room
shop to urban mansions, follows. I will show that the archaeological evidence confirms and
complements the picture of a hierarchical society outlined above. I begin with definitions
and typologies for cooking and dining areas in chapter two.
-------------------------