Beyond the triclinium: the variety of Roman dining

Roman dining practices have been a source of fascination for scholars since the Renaissance.The rich evidence of the ancient literary sources has been mined repeatedly to provide accounts and analyses of the Roman convivium, notably in the classic studies of Marquardt-Mau and Friedländer. 1 Following in this tradition in the 21st c. from modern and more critical standpoints, several German scholars have produced exhaustive studies based on the Latin texts, which between them leave little room for further progress on this basis. 2But the textual evidence offers only a very partial view, limited chronologically, geographically, and socially.We have a very large number of references to dining, of very varied nature, from the Late Republic and first century and a half of the Principate; after the opening decades of the 2nd c., it dries up to a trickle of references for the next 300 years.Moreover, the Latin writers of the earlier centuries refer overwhelmingly to the city of Rome and regions of Italy within its immediate influence; they offer little information about dining practices in the expanding Empire.Greek writers of the 1st to early 3rd c. -Plutarch, Lucian, Athenaeusintroduce a different standpoint, though a complicated one in view of their indebtedness to earlier material, especially the tradition of Hellenistic symposiumliterature. 3 And all these authors were writing for an elite audience and discussing subjects of interest to that audience; they have little concern for the practices of other social groups.Attempts today to fill any of these gaps must draw on all the other sources of evidenceepigraphy, visual depictions, the material recordwhich have been largely neglected in the traditional text-based accounts; these sources have a vast amount of information to offer, but it is disparate and complex to handle and assess.