Roman Dinners

All that survives of the Roman dining room today are fine mosaic floors on mythological themes and the occasional fragment of painted fresco. To judge from the mosaics, the dining room could be a splendid affair – as indeed it had to be, since the banquet was most important social event in the wealthy villa owner’s calendar, an opportunity to get friends and political business contacts together. In addition to the frescoes, the standard triclinium would have draperies and niches far statues. Furniture would have been limited to couches placed along three sides of the dining area. Guests would recline and the food would be placed in front of them on low tables.

On the Roman menu were egg dishes, salad, and fish and meat accompanied by rich sauces. Domice were a delicacy as was garum, a sort of fish paste manufactured all over the empire. Many of the vegetables familiar worldwide today, such as the potato and the tomato were unknown. Nevertheless, wealthy Romans tended towards conspicuous consumption at the dinner table. The early Latin novel The Satyrican, composed by Petronius in the first century AD, contains a merciless dissection of nouveau riche dining habits at the home of one Trimalchio, so wealthy that he had a clock in the dining room and a special trumpeter to tell him how much longer he had to live. A magpie in a golden cage greeted guests, and before dinner Alexandrian boys washed the guests’ feet with ice cold water, performing a quick pedicure at the same time where necessary. The menu chez Trimalchio was as elaborate as the welcome, including sweet and sour hors-d’oeuvre (hot sausages on a silver gridiron with damsons and pomegranate), fish in peppery sauce and a bare with wings attached so it looked like Pegasus. Vulgarity definitely got the upper hand at the end of the meal. Trimalchio’s chef had artistic tendencies and his masterpiece for this particular banquet was a goose, surrounded by fish and game, all made out of pork. Just for the record, Italo Balbo, Italian governor of Libya in the 1930s, is said to have enjoyed mock Roman banquets in the Turkish governor’s palace in Tripoli.