Dining Posture in Ancient Rome: Bodies, Values, and Status 9781400888245

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter One. Dining Men: Posture, Leisure, and Privilege
Chapter Two. Dining Women: Posture, Sex, and Status
Chapter Three. Dining Children: Posture, Pedagogy, and Coming-of-Age
Appendix: Convivial Wine Drinking and Comissationes
Catalogue of Funerary Monuments and Wall Paintings
Bibliography
INDEX LOCORUM
GENERAL INDEX

Citation preview

Dining Posture in Ancient Rome

Dining Posture in Ancient Rome bodies, values, and status Matthew B. Roller

princeton university press princeton and oxford

Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press. All Rights Reserved First paperback printing, 2018 Paper ISBN 978-0-691-17800-4 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows: Roller, Matthew B., 1966– Dining posture in ancient Rome : bodies, values, and status / Matthew B. Roller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12457-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-691-12457-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Dinners and dining—Rome—History. 2. Posture—Rome—History. 3. Social classes— Rome—History. 4. Rome—Civilization. 5. Rome—Social life and customs. I. Title. DG101.R65 2006 394.1'2086210937—dc22 2005029438 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Printed on acid-free paper. press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America

For Alan Shapiro and Ralf Von den Hoff Best of colleagues

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1

Chapter One Dining Men: Posture, Leisure, and Privilege 1. Overview 2. Reclining and Elite Otium: Some Literary Evidence 3. Reclining and Social Integration: Subelite Funerary Monuments 4. Reclining and Self-Reflection: Pompeian Mural Decoration a. Casa del Fabbro (I.10.7) b. Casa dei Casti Amanti (IX.12.6–7) c. VI.16.36 d. Casa del Triclinio (V. 2.4) e. Provisional Conclusions: Subelites and Self-Reflection f. Grand Houses

5. Alternative Postures and the Rejection of Otium 6. Conclusion: The Popina Chapter Two Dining Women: Posture, Sex, and Status 1. Overview 2. Women’s Dining Posture, Ideology and Practice: Literary Representations a. Republican Period b. Augustan Period c. Imperial Period

3. Women’s Dining Posture and Family Values: Subelite Funerary Monuments

15 15 16 22 45 49 61 69 70 77 80 84 92

96 96 98 99 112 118 123

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CONTENTS

4. Women’s Dining Posture and Self-Reflection: Pompeian Mural Decoration 5. Conclusion: The Ideology and Practice of Women’s Dining Posture Chapter Three Dining Children: Posture, Pedagogy, and Coming-of-Age 1. Overview 2. Sitting Children 3. Reclining Children 4. General Conclusions

139 153

157 157 159 169 175

Appendix: Convivial Wine Drinking and Comissationes

181

Catalogue of Funerary Monuments and Wall Paintings

189

Bibliography

197

Index Locorum

209

General Index

215

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures Figure 1. Urn dedicated by Domitius Primigenius (S458), first century a.d. Figure 2. Altar dedicated by Orpheus (B833), second century a.d. Figure 3. Alter dedicated to Calpurnius Beryllus (B830), second century a.d., overview Figure 4. Altar dedicated to Calpurnius Beryllus (B830), second century a.d., detail of dining relief Figure 5. Uninscribed urn (S515), second century a.d. Figure 6. Urn dedicated to Titulenus Isauricus (S282), first century a.d. Figure 7. Kline monument dedicated by Flavius Agricola (K5), second century a.d. Figure 8. Dining panel (P15), casa di Giuseppe II (VIII.2.38/39), Pompeii Figure 9. Ground plan, casa del Fabbro (I.10.7), Pompeii Figure 10. Ground plan, VI.16.36, Pompeii Figure 11. Ground plan, casa del Triclinio (V.2.4), Pompeii Figure 12. Altar dedicated to Attia Agele (B8), first century a.d. Figure 13. Altar dedicated to Iulia Capriola (S516), second century a.d., detail of dining relief Figure 14. Urn dedicated to Hermeros (S276), first century a.d. Figure 15. Altar dedicated to Vitellius Sucessus (B327), first or second century a.d. Figure 16. Altar dedicated to Pedana (B775), first century a.d. Figure 17. Altar dedicated to Socconius Felix (B852), first century a.d., detail of dining relief Figure 18. Uninscribed loculus cover (?), second century a.d. (Catalogue I.3) Color Plates (following page 112) Plate 1. Dining panel (P3), casa del Fabbro (I.10.7), Pompeii, north wall of room 8 Plate 2. Dining panel (P4), casa dei Casti Amanti (IX.12.6–7), Pompeii, west wall of triclinium

3 28 32 33 39 40 44 50 54 70 71 125 127 128 132 134 150 168

x

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate 3. Dining panel (P6), casa dei Casti Amanti (IX.12.6–7), Pompeii, east wall of triclinium. Detail Plate 4. Dining panel (P8), casa del Triclinio (V.2.4), Pompeii, north wall of room (r) Plate 5. Dining panel (P9), casa del Triclinio (V.2.4), Pompeii, east wall of room (r) Plate 6. Dining panel (P21), Herculaneum, exact provenance unknown Plate 7. Dining panel (P5), casa dei Casti Amanti (IX.12.6–7), Pompeii, north wall of triclinium Plate 8. Dining panel (P19) from somewhere in Campania, exact provenance unknown

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

this book came about by accident. It was conceived, in the spring of 2000, as an article examining the representations of reclining diners found in some literary texts and on a handful of funerary monuments. I expected that article to be about twenty-five pages long and to require two or three months to write. But the pertinent texts and funerary monuments turned out to be far more numerous and complex than I had foreseen; in due course I also discovered the corpus of Campanian wall paintings depicting conviviality. Meanwhile, the theoretical difficulties of combining the analysis of texts and images were impressing themselves upon me. Only after three years’ work, and some 250 pages of manuscript, did I feel that the project had developed to a point that did justice to the original idea. When one underestimates a project by a factor of ten, one might expect to be stigmatized with the blackest of marks by granting agencies—and the more so if that project is not even the one for which the grants were issued. I am therefore grateful to the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which awarded me a Solmsen Fellowship for academic year 2000–2001 to work on an entirely different project. Paul Boyer and the other fellows provided the extraordinarily collegial and stimulating working environment in which I laid the foundations for this project, and they did not demand that I return their money even though I came nowhere near finishing the project originally proposed. I owe an equal debt of gratitude to the American Council of Learned Societies, which granted me a Junior Fellowship to help fund the same year of leave. Indeed, the president of the ACLS, the late John D’Arms, took an active personal interest in the early stages of this project, being himself a student of Roman dining and foodways. Many further individuals and organizations contributed intellectually or logistically to the development of this project. Audiences at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Loyola College of Maryland, the Johns Hopkins Villa Spelman in Florence, and at the 2002 meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America/American Philological Association provided valuable comments and observations on various segments of the project. John Clarke, Ellie Leach, and Sharon James generously provided manuscripts of works in progress, in addition to much helpful conversation and commentary (the former two works have since appeared in print, cited in the bibliography as Clarke 2003 and Leach 2004). In June 2003 I spent two unforgettable and indispensable days in Ellie’s company in Pompeii, as we visited houses of interest for our projects and discussed Roman culture, space, and painting. Liz Bartman, Tony Corbeill, Jens-Arne Dickmann, Tom Habinek, Barbara Kellum, Michael Koortbojian, Ann Kuttner, Deborah Lyons,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Andrew Riggsby, Celia Schultz, Erica Simon, Hérica Valladares, and Raymond Westbrook, along with two extraordinarily engaged anonymous referees for Princeton University Press, all offered comments or suggestions that improved the final product. Chuck Myers of Princeton University Press encouraged this project throughout, and indeed recognized that it was a monograph (rather than a very long article or series of articles) before I did. I also thank two anonymous referees for the American Journal of Philology, who provided comments on an article entitled “Horizontal Women: Posture and Sex in the Roman Convivium,” which appeared in vol. 124 (2003), pp. 377–422, of that journal. Material from that article is included here in revised and expanded form by kind permission of the journal. For technical assistance on various matters I thank Pier Massimo Forni, Macie Hall, Allison Surtees, and Jay Van Rensselaer. None of these generous colleagues, of course, is responsible for the interpretations proposed here, or for the inevitable errors and infelicities that remain. I am grateful to a number of museums and photographic archives for supplying photographs and permissions to publish them; they are acknowledged in the captions to the images printed in this book. In particular I thank Dr. Fausto Zevi of the Museo Nazionale Romano di Napoli for permission to visit that museum’s prodigious storerooms and to examine and photograph paintings that now reside there; to Dr. Pietro Giovanni Guzzo of the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompei for permission to visit and take photographs in eight Pompeian houses that are not normally open to the public; and to Dr. Alexandra Villing of the British Museum for permission to view objects in galleries that are normally closed. The Dean’s Office of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University underwrote a trip to Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii in the summer of 2003 during which I examined, photographed, or procured photographs of many of the objects I discuss. That eight of the photographs so obtained are published here in color, for greater legibility, is due to the generosity of Dr. Gary Ostrander, Dean of Research, who furnished a subvention for the color plates. My greatest debts of gratitude are owed to three people: Rhonda Van Roekel, who has supported me in every imaginable way throughout this project and even saw fit to marry me in the middle of it; and Ralf Von den Hoff and Alan Shapiro, who at a crucial moment in 1999 encouraged me to engage more seriously with visual material. They offered continuous advice and encouragement, while exemplifying in their own scholarship a standard of creativity, versatility, and rigor that I aspire to achieve myself. It is literally true to say that this book would not exist without their both having said to me, “Well, why not talk about images in conjunction with texts? Here’s what you should read: . . .” To them, then, this book is dedicated.

ABBREVIATIONS

standard abbreviations, sometimes slightly expanded or compressed, are used for authors and works cited in the notes, or parenthetically in the main text. For these see the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, Oxford 1996, xxix–liv; the Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. Glare, Oxford 1968–82, ix–xxiii; and A Greek-English Lexicon, eds. H. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. Jones, 9th ed. with supplement, Oxford 1968, xvi–xxxviii. I use the following abbreviations for scholarly journals and reference works: CIL DNP JRA MNR PPM RE TAPA TLL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum Der neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike (ed. H. Cancik and H. Schneider, Stuttgart, 1996–) Journal of Roman Archaeology Museo Nazionale Romano (Soprintendenza archeologica di Roma, Rome, De Luca, 1979–) Pompei: Pitture e Mosaici (ed. G. Pugliese Carratelli, Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, Rome, 1990–99) Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (ed. A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll, Stuttgart, 1894–) Transactions of the American Philological Association Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Leipzig, 1900–)

Abbreviations for objects listed in the Catalogue of Funerary Monuments and Wall Paintings and referred to elsewhere in this book: A B K MNN P S Sp

Amedick 1991 (followed by her catalogue number) Boschung 1987 (followed by his catalogue number) Kline monument (followed by author’s number, as in Catalogue I.4) Museo Nazionale Romano di Napoli (followed by inventory number) Painting (followed by author’s number, as in Catalogue II) Sinn 1987 (followed by her catalogue number) Speidel 1994a (followed by his catalogue number)

Dining Posture in Ancient Rome

Introduction

the reader who takes this volume into her or his hands may marvel to behold a book-length study of posture in the Roman convivium—a topic that may appear, even to students of Roman social and cultural history, overly abstruse and specialized. Can the results of such an investigation really fill so many pages productively? Some preliminary justification seems worthwhile, lest anyone decide out of hand that the answer is no and abandon the book on principle. I therefore open with three brief examples, two literary and one visual. The first, a passage from Suetonius’s fragmentary De Poetis, relates an anecdote about the comic playwright Terence. As a young poet on the verge of producing his first play (the Andria, staged in 166 b.c.), Terence was instructed by the aediles to submit the work to the venerable playwright Caecilius Statius for approval. He duly called upon the great poet, by chance arriving at his house while he was dining. Terence was admitted but was made to sit on a bench “because he was poorly clothed,” while Caecilius himself reclined on a couch. But upon reading the opening verses, Terence so impressed his host that he was invited to recline on a couch and share the meal, after which he read off the remainder of the play to Caecilius’s great admiration.1 For current purposes, this anecdote makes two important points. First, it indicates that, among the parties who were present at this meal, at least two different postures could be assumed simultaneously: reclining and sitting. Second, it suggests that these postures were differently marked for status. Terence’s “poor clothing”—“poor,” one assumes, in the eyes of his host Caecilius, and in relation to the clothing that Caecilius himself (and his other guests, if any) wore—is given as the reason that he was initially required to sit on a bench, near but apart from the host’s couch. And since it was only after making a good impression with his verses that Terence was invited to recline on a couch like his host and share the meal, it seems clear that the reclining posture is correlated with higher status and privilege, and the seated posture with lower. Thus, Terence’s two postures objectify and make visible the social status(es) ascribed to him by his host: first, he sits apart from the other diners as a social inferior; then he reclines among them as a social equal. The transition from the one posture to the other, and from the margin to the center of the convivium, marks a social promotion that he earns by the quality of his poetry. Yet even 1 Suet.

Poet. fr. 11, pp. 28–29 Reifferscheid: scripsit comoedias sex. ex quibus primam Andriam cum aedilibus daret, iussus ante Caecilio recitare ad cenantem cum venisset, dicitur initium quidem fabulae, quod erat contemptiore vestitu, in subsellio iuxta lectulum residens legisse, post paucos vero versus invitatus ut accumberet cenasse una, dein cetera percucurrisse non sine magna Caecilii admiratione.

2

INTRODUCTION

when he sat, Terence was probably not at the bottom of the social hierarchy, even in this dining room. For any Roman reader of this anecdote would assume that household slaves were also present, attending to the needs of the host (their master) and his guests. As we shall see, such slaves would normally have been on their feet, either discharging their various tasks—pouring wine, clearing the tables, bringing food, and the like—or awaiting orders from the diners. To stand at dinner, then, and to be in motion, constitutes a third convivial posture marking a condition inferior even to that of a seated diner, let alone a reclining one. The second example is a passage from Isidore’s Etymologiae, written in the seventh century a.d., which cites M. Terentius Varro, the polymath of the first century b.c., as an authority on archaic Roman dining practice. Isidore writes (Etym. 20.11.9), “Sedes [‘seats’—i.e., places on the dining couches] are so called because among the old Romans there was no practice of reclining, for which reason they were also said to ‘take a seat.’ Afterward, as Varro says in his work On the Life of the Roman People, men began to recline and women sat, because the reclining posture was deemed shameful in a woman.”2 In asserting that men’s dining posture changed from sitting to reclining, while women’s posture did not, Isidore and Varro suggest that Roman bodily practice in convivial settings had both a diachronic dimension (change occurred over time) and a gendered dimension (men’s practice diverged from women’s). This latter dimension, moreover, is implicated with social hierarchies and moral values in an ideologically potent way. For we may suspect, given the hierarchy of postures observed in Suetonius, that women who dined seated were thereby marked as socially subordinate to men who reclined. And Varro’s remark that the reclining posture was “shameful” for women, but not for men, indicates that a given posture had a different moral valence depending on the sex of the person who assumed it. The third example is a funerary urn from the city of Rome, now in New York, dating to the Flavian period (a.d. 69–96; fig. 1). The relief that decorates the front of this urn shows a woman reclining on a couch. A small dining table sits before her, holding drinking vessels and items of food. Sitting in the middle of the couch is a smaller male figure wearing a toga (probably), his feet resting on a small podium; he and the woman are turned toward one another and extend their arms in reciprocal gestures. As I will argue in chapter 3.2, the inscription accompanying this scene, together with the overall form of the monument, gives us good grounds for supposing that the woman shown here is a freedwoman. The intimacy suggested by these figures’ gestures and proximity might further lead us to suppose they are a mother and son, the latter probably freeborn. At the head and foot of the couch stand figures bringing food and wine for the table— certainly slaves, seemingly represented as small children. This scene calls to 2 Isid. Etym. 20.11.9: sedes dictae quoniam apud veteres Romanos non erat usus adcumbendi, unde et considere dicebantur. postea, ut ait Varro de Vita populi Romani, viri discumbere coeperunt, mulieres sedere, quia turpis visus est in muliere adcubitus (Var. fr. 30a Riposati).

INTRODUCTION

3

1. Urn dedicated by Domitius Primigenius (S458), first century a.d. New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1927 (27.122.2 ab). All rights reserved, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

4

INTRODUCTION

mind the hierarchy of postures observed in the passages of Suetonius and Isidore. Here, however, the hierarchy of free persons is apparently based on age, not gender or status at birth: a freedwoman reclines, presumably because she is an adult, while a freeborn male sits, presumably because he is a child. Moreover, the fact that a woman is shown reclining suggests that the norm described by Varro—that women in the good old days “properly” sat to dine—is not observed here. But why not? Should we infer that women’s dining posture had changed over time? If so, would the associated norms also have changed so that reclining was no longer deemed “shameful” in a woman? Alternatively, might the practices and values of different social strata be different? For Varro probably refers to elite practices, while the people commemorated in this monument are not elites. These three examples adumbrate some of the interrelationships between status, values, and social practice that this book will examine; they also point toward some broader scholarly debates—in Roman studies proper, and among other humanists and social scientists—that this book engages. Let us take these in turn. Most obviously, this book participates in the upsurge of scholarly interest, over the past fifteen years, in Roman dining practices and foodways. The concerted attention of historians, archaeologists, and literary critics—most notably in the collections edited by Oswyn Murray (1990, 1995) and William Slater (1991), and in the work of particular scholars such as John D’Arms and Katherine Dunbabin—has greatly enhanced our understanding of the physical environments, social dynamics, and symbolic operations of the Roman convivium. One significant strand of this scholarship has examined how power relations among the diners are asserted, displayed, and contested. The positions assigned to the guests, the kinds of food and entertainment on offer, and even the give-and-take of convivial conversation all participate in the construction and maintenance of social hierarchies.3 Being concerned with how bodily bearing relates to social hierarchy, this book pursues this sociocultural approach. Yet we must characterize more precisely its contribution to this discussion, for scholars have long recognized that dining posture and social position are connected. Since the foundational work of Joachim Marquardt and August Mau in the 1870s and 1880s, culminating in the still-indispensable second edition of Das Privatleben der Römer (1886), a broad scholarly communis opinio has held that dining posture is correlated with gradations in age, sex, and social status, and that this correlation is as follows: free adult males—the most empowered and privileged social group—reclined on couches to dine; free adult women—“respectable” ones, at any rate—sat during the Republic but reclined 3

John D’Arms has been a major exponent of this approach: see D’Arms 1999, 1991, 1990; also Booth 1991; Bradley 1998; Roller 2001: 129–73.

INTRODUCTION

5

during the Empire; free children, if present at all, sat; and slaves, at the bottom of the social scale, stood in service and at attention. This account of how posture, privilege, and participation are interrelated can be found, with small variations, in most handbook-style overviews of “everyday life” to which one might turn for basic information on Roman dining, and is repeated in many other studies by historians, literary critics, and archaeologists who rely upon these “handbook” discussions.4 There are at least three reasons, however, to be discontent with this schematization, reasons that are interrelated but distinguishable. First, it is based upon a very limited body of literary texts: the same dozen or so citations recur in the footnotes of every “handbook” discussion. In fact there are hundreds of texts providing representations of Roman convivial posture, and collectively they enormously complicate this simple view. The first passage cited here, for instance—in which Terence first sits separately to dine, then reclines along with his host—shows immediately that not all free adult males ipso facto dined reclining; under some circumstances, it appears that different postures, and different spatial relationships among bodies, articulated social hierarchies within the class of free adult males. I will adduce many texts that represent free adult males sitting or standing in the convivium, as well as reclining; also texts that represent slaves reclining or sitting, as well as standing; free children reclining as well as sitting; and free adult women reclining during the Republican period, when the handbooks say they sat. The complexity of this evidence taken as a whole will require us to seek explanations other, or further, than those that simply correlate posture with sex, gender, and age. A second reason for dissatisfaction with the communis opinio is that it ignores visual material. Images, like literary texts, provide crucial evidence for posture as a social practice, and for the values and ideologies associated with that practice. Their scope is also much broader than that of literary texts, which were mostly produced by, and primarily intended for the consumption of, a highly literate, predominantly male elite that was located in, well connected to, or socially and intellectually oriented toward the city of Rome. The visual material, in contrast, was mostly produced by, and intended primarily for the consumption of, subelites; its geographic provenance is also much broader.5 This material tells a quite different story from the mostly elite literary material, and it significantly alters 4 For this communis opinio in handbook-style formats or general overviews, see Marquardt and Mau 1886: 300–301 (the earliest articulation of this view I know); Ihm, “cena,” RE 3 (1899) 1895.63–67; Balsdon 1962: 272; Carcopino 1964: 265; Dentzer 1982: 432–47 (with further bibliography); Weeber 1995: 125 (s.v. “Gastmahl”; likewise id., “Freizeitsgestaltung,” DNP 4 (1998) 659); and Bradley 1998: 46–48. Binder, “Gastmahl,” DNP 4 (1998) 804 is more cautious. 5 By “elite” I mean any member of the senatorial-equestrian aristocracy of the city of Rome, along with municipal aristocrats of other towns—those who had the wealth, birth, and acculturation to compete for magistracies and participate in government, whether they actually did so or not. With Hopkins 1983: 44–45, 110–11, I take this group as a single social entity, one largely unified (from

6

INTRODUCTION

our overall view of the practice and ideology of dining posture at Rome. Thus the funerary monument offered as the third opening example (fig. 1) raises a host of questions about Roman dining posture that could never emerge from literary representations. For example, even if this scene in certain respects “looks like” situations described in texts, is it valid to project the meanings and values associated with literary representations of elite dining onto the subelite diners commemorated in this monument? Does it matter that the people who commissioned this monument probably did not, in reality, have the economic resources to dine in the leisured, luxurious, elite style that this image portrays? And why put such a scene on a funerary monument in the first place? That is, why would an image of dining, with participants reclining, sitting, or standing, be used as a vehicle for commemorating a deceased freedperson? Because it brings subelites onto the agenda, the visual material raises many questions, and offers answers as well, about the practices and values associated with dining posture that literary texts do not on their own raise or answer. The third and perhaps most important reason to be discontent with the communis opinio will already be clear from the foregoing discussion. This is its failure to notice how dining posture is linked with social values and to consider what these linkages mean. The second example discussed here—the passage of Varro, asserting that early Roman women normatively dined seated, because reclining was deemed shameful—well illustrates the problem. This is one text that handbooks regularly cite, and on the basis of which they assert that Roman women in general dined seated during the Republic. But Varro is not simply describing social practice; he is also, or rather, linking dining posture with sexual mores. The suggestion that this antique social practice is an outward sign of antique moral virtue—which, by implication, is absent in the morally fallen present—is part of a “good old days” discourse, which should make us chary of accepting as historically true the practice so characterized. Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 2, many texts contradict this one (at least as it is usually interpreted) by representing Republican-era women reclining to dine just as men do, and indeed reclining right alongside the men. Conversely, early Imperial funerary monuments often show women dining seated, at a time when the handbooks say they reclined. It will become clear that women’s dining posture is used in all periods, in both visual and literary media, as an index of moral status. What underlies many specific representations of women reclining (typically alongside men) or seated (at a distance from the reclining men) is not acthe first century b.c. if not earlier, at least in Italy) by economic interests, acculturation, and socialization, whatever its internal rifts. By “subelite” I mean anyone else. A clear line is all but impossible to draw, for modern scholars as also for the Romans themselves. In this book, however, the individuals to whom I apply the term “subelite” are in most cases far removed from elites on all three standards of birth, wealth, and acculturation (on which see Weaver 1967: 4–5).

INTRODUCTION

7

tual practice but profound anxieties about women’s capacity for, and inclination toward, transgressive sex, which is inferred from their juxtaposition with male bodies and their proximity to wine. The broader point, moreover, holds true for men and children as well as for women. Dining posture in general—for diners of every status, age, and sex—is profoundly intertwined with key social values. Thus, upon assuming a particular posture and a particular relationship to other bodies, a diner associates certain values with herself or himself; conversely, a person to whom certain values are ascribed is thereby authorized to assume a particular dining posture. Consequently, the basic historical question of who assumed what posture when, cannot be answered by simply accepting at face value what the texts say or the images show. This is because most representations of dining posture in every medium are ideologically fraught: the postures that people are represented as assuming while dining have more to do with the values they seek to claim for themselves than with giving an authentic “snapshot” of actual social practice. To lack awareness of this ideological dimension, or to ignore its intricacies, vitiates any attempt to recover actual social practice. Yet at the same time, these ideological effects themselves presuppose that certain social practices do exist, or can plausibly be imagined to have existed at some time and place; thus ideological analysis requires a parallel analysis of practice, just as no analysis of practice can proceed in ignorance of ideology. The two dimensions refer to, presuppose, and symbiotically require one another. In this book, I develop an ideological analysis of representations of convivial posture at the same time as I develop an account of actual social practice—but the latter, being constructed in light of the former, will turn out quite differently from the account offered by the handbooks. A word on the specifically convivial form of dining, which is my focus here. The term convivium labels a late afternoon or evening meal taking place in a domestic dining room or garden, hosted by the proprietor of the residence, involving some combination of family members and guests numbering anywhere from a very few up to perhaps a dozen (nine is an ideal but not necessarily standard number), and ordinarily employing a single triclinium, the three-sided arrangement of couches commonly used for dining during the period of this study. I do not systematically investigate “civic” dining, which occurred on special occasions such as festivals, was publicly sponsored or paid for by a single donor, and might involve large numbers of people spread over many triclinia in the public spaces of cities and towns; or, alternatively, involved a college of priests or magistrates whose meals might be paid for publicly or by an endowment, and might occur in specially designated spaces. The evidence for civic dining is partly literary but primarily epigraphic. Certain social dynamics associated with the different postures are shared by civic and convivial dining. However, many of the dynamics I investigate here arise out of the relationship

8

INTRODUCTION

between invited guests and host, the intimacy of the gathering, its domestic setting, and the mixing of the sexes. These elements are usually absent from civic dining, where there is no host, participation depends upon group membership, the numbers may be large, the setting is usually not domestic, and women (apparently) were normally excluded or segregated.6 I do, however, survey popina dining (i.e., purchasing and eating food in taverns) in chapter 1.6, which shares with convivial dining a relatively small scale, high frequency, and mixing of classes and sexes, but differs in lacking a host and the associated social dynamics. Besides participating in the recent discussion of Roman conviviality, this book seeks to contribute to a second area of burgeoning scholarly interest: the history of the body, and specifically of the ways in which a Roman’s social position and subjectivity were expressed in and constructed through bodily dispositions and movements. Recent monographs by Gunderson and Gleason, for example, have demonstrated that Roman rhetorical theory and practice were profoundly concerned with the “manhood” of elite males who spoke in public. How orators modulated their voices, and positioned and moved their bodies, determined whether they succeeded or failed to insert themselves into the valorized category of “men” (viri). Rhetorical treatises therefore attempted to inculcate students with techniques by which they could vindicate and perform their elite status and manhood while speaking in public.7 Through their dining practices as well, I will argue, and especially through the associated bodily attitudes, Romans in general claimed for themselves (and ascribed to others) particular locations within the hierarchies of gender and status. To be sure, dining—unlike rhetoric—was not formally theorized: at any rate, no treatises survive, nor are any attested, that offer a systematic theory (ars convivalis) of convivial behavior and bearing. Even general treatises on manners are unknown until the high Empire.8 Likewise, dining practices were subject to less scrupulous surveillance and regulation regarding proper bearing, clothing, ges6

Our understanding of Roman civic dining has been transformed by two recent, complementary studies: Donahue 2004, emphasizing the epigraphic evidence; and Dunbabin 2003a: 72–102, emphasizing the (limited) archaeological and visual evidence. 7 See Gunderson 2000: 59–86 (esp. 73–80 on Quintilian’s anatomization of the orator’s body in the quest to secure his masculinity, and 81–82 on his voice); Gleason 1995: 55–81, 103–30. 8 Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales (Mor. 612C–748D) discusses the origins and meanings of particular dining practices but does not systematically organize, prescribe, or regulate convivial behavior in the manner of a rhetorical treatise. Other works are attested as discussing aspects of conviviality (see Plin. Nat. 28.26; Mart. Epig. 9.77; Gell. 13.11 [= Var. Men. fr. 333–41 Astbury]; also D’Arms 1990: 317), but these attestations leave unclear whether the works in question are systematic treatises. Regarding “manners,” various texts of the late Republic and early Empire comment on proper bodily deportment. Cicero’s De Officiis, for instance, contains some general injunctions (e.g., 1.126–31), but none referring to dining in particular; likewise in certain Senecan treatises. But no surviving text prior to Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus (ca. a.d. 190) makes what we would call “manners” its main focus; on Clement see ch. 3 n. 16.

INTRODUCTION

9

ture, movement, speech, and so on. Such matters were indeed of concern in the dining room, as we shall see, but not to the extent observed in rhetorical treatises. That rhetorical performances were scripted more minutely than convivial ones may reflect not only the stricter formal constraints governing oratory but also its higher social stakes, since it occurred in the most important civic venues, and before audiences both larger and more socially distinguished than would ordinarily be found even in an elite dinner gathering. The dining performance, however, compensated by its greater frequency and flexibility, and especially by its broader social purchase. Romans of every age, sex, and status must have participated regularly in convivial dining as defined above, whether as host, guest, or servant, in groups of varying size that were also variously constituted by sex, status, and degree of social intimacy. Every participant, moreover, was simultaneously a performer and a spectator for every other. Thus, even elite males no doubt spent much more time performing their gender, status, and overall subjectivity in the convivium than before the courts, senate, or people. And for Romans who did not engage in public oratory—subelite males, along with women and children of every status—the convivium must ordinarily have been the premier venue for such performance. We have come to understand, then, how Roman bodies in their oratorical deportments were repositories of social information and sites of social contestation. I suggest here that Roman bodies in their convivial deportments function similarly, since the triclinium too was an arena of social representation and performance. The differences between these two arenas, however, mean that dining bodies will entail their own distinctive social meanings and contestations. From another perspective, this book is concerned with the body as an instrument of nonverbal communication. The study of nonverbal communication in the past fifty years has been dominated by psychologists and anthropologists, who have established and defined it as a subfield of social psychology. Historically, however, certain kinds of nonverbal communication have been of great interest to classicists. Gesture in particular has long engaged historians of ancient art, who have sought to understand what the bodily movements depicted in ancient images signify. Gesture has also attracted scholars of ancient rhetoric, since Roman rhetorical treatises discuss in detail the movements of limbs and appendages that are appropriate in different rhetorical situations.9 Very recently, Roman cultural historians have begun to examine the social means and ends of gesture, and of other bodily techniques, in contexts ranging far beyond oratory; some of this work is inspired, at least in part, by Pierre Bourdieu’s (and ultimately Marcel Mauss’s) comparative studies of 9 Andrea de Jorio arguably pioneered the field in his famous 1832 study of Neapolitan gestures, which he thought would help him to understand gestures depicted in ancient art. The modern landmark study of gesture in ancient art is Brilliant 1963, which remains foundational for the broader study of Roman bodily techniques as signifiers of status. For oratorical gesture see n. 7 above; also Aldrete 1999; Graf 1991.

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INTRODUCTION

bodily techniques.10 Posture, on the other hand, has been almost entirely neglected by classicists. Yet the study of posture cannot simply be subsumed into that of gesture. For while posture and gesture are clearly akin as nonverbal communicative techniques, they are in fact different techniques and tend to have different social effects. Gesture can be defined as a continuous and temporally restricted movement of a bodily appendage, while posture involves maintaining the body as a whole in a relatively motionless, stable state for an indefinite period. And while gestures are significant in an enormous variety of social situations, posture tends to matter especially in situations where social hierarchies are being constructed and displayed. Indeed, anthropological and psychological studies have found that posture, along with how bodies are positioned in relation to one another and to other significant objects (“proxemics”), are the principal nonverbal signifiers of social dominance in a number of different cultures.11 In this book, then, I mobilize certain insights and categories derived from the field of nonverbal communication as I investigate what dining postures signify, how bodies in convivial contexts relate to one another and to other significant objects, and how these bodily techniques construct and display relations of social dominance and subordination.12 Dining posture, then—abstruse as the topic may seem—is situated at the junction of several questions and methodologies that engage contemporary scholars. And the remarkable richness with which dining practices are documented and illustrated in both textual and visual media makes possible a 10

Bourdieu’s work on bodily hexis and habitus (e.g., 1990 [1980]: 66–79) is well known to classicists, many of whom have productively adapted and applied these frameworks to Greek and Roman society, or critiqued such applications. Roman cultural historians who study bodily techniques and who engage Bourdieu include Gleason 1995: xii, xx–xxvi; Gunderson 2000: 9–12, 67–73 (etc.); Corbeill 2004: 1, 70–71, 109–10, 135 (and passim for gestures generally in Roman society). Mauss 1979 [1950]: 97–123 is the seminal work on “body techniques.” 11 Schwartz, Tesser, and Powell (1982) offer historical and anthropological perspective on nonverbal signifiers of social dominance, along with an experimental study. Apart from posture, the main signifiers they identify are lateral opposition, precedence, and elevation (pp. 115–17). All these are matters of proxemics, and all figure in my later discussion. Firth 1978 [1970] is the classic anthropological study of posture and proxemics in relation to dominance and submission. Also helpful are the overview of the field by Harper 1985; a droll analysis of gendered ways of sitting in postwar Germany by Woesler de Panafieu 1982; and a survey of ancient Greek posture by Bremmer 1991. 12 I know only a few discussions of posture and/or proxemics in a Roman context. Bartman 2002 discusses the gender implications of the sinuous, hip-shot posture assumed by youthful male figures in a class of ideal sculpture she terms the “sexy boy” type; Newbold 2000 shows how Imperial historians articulate social hierarchies through descriptions of posture and interpersonal proximity; Dickmann 1999: 281–87 discusses bodily bearing and social status in the Roman aristocrat’s morning salutatio; Hall 1998 surveys a variety of social transactions that he calls “deference-greetings”; and Barghop 1994: 80–87, 91–95 considers how the toga, by its weight and drapery, constrains its wearer to assume a socially appropriate bearing.

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correspondingly nuanced, textured analysis of these issues. Let me now describe how the material for analysis has been selected, and how the book itself is organized. Earlier, I listed three reasons to be dissatisfied with the accepted account of how dining posture relates to social hierarchy. Two of these reasons involve the omission of evidence: errors arise from surveying only a small number of pertinent literary texts, and from neglecting visual material altogether. To correct these errors I have sought to collect and examine as much evidence as possible, both literary and visual. The value of a large body of evidence, of course, is that it provides a degree of control over the interpretation of any given passage or image. When working with only a few representations, one can offer little more than description. But in the context of a fuller collection of evidence, one can determine whether a particular representation is frequently or rarely paralleled, routine or surprising, normal or deviant. One can then begin to consider what values are associated with any given representation, and what relation that representation may have to actual social practice. At the same time, however, the enormous volume of pertinent material in many different media, covering much of the geographic and chronological span of the Roman world, makes a truly comprehensive collection of evidence impossible, and would render this study unreadable even if it could be achieved. Limits on the collection of evidence, therefore, are just as necessary to the success of this project as is the full and systematic collection of evidence within those limits. The limits I have chosen are as follows. I have gathered as many literary texts as I could identify that cast light on dining posture, from the beginnings of Roman literature proper (Plautus, ca. 200 b.c.) to approximately a.d. 200. Relatively few texts illuminate the first 130 years of this period aside from Plautus himself, and some observations in later historical or antiquarian writers.13 This meager material warrants considerable attention, however, because later Roman writers (along with modern scholars) make claims about ancestral Roman dining postures that are not supported by—indeed, are contradicted by—such evidence as there is, and the resultant misunderstandings have colored scholarly interpretation of practices and values in later, better-attested periods. Literary representations become more numerous and rich in the age of Cicero, and remain so through the late second century a.d. Most of these texts, though not all, were written by and for elites who resided in, or at least had a strong social and cultural orientation toward, the metropolis of Rome itself. The year a.d. 200 provides a reasonable end point, since a rich vein of antiquarian and imaginative texts that illuminate contemporary (or earlier) dining practices 13 The two texts with which I opened are antiquarian in this way: Suetonius describes events that supposedly took place in the 160s b.c., and Varro purports to describe the dining practices of the remote past.

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INTRODUCTION

disappears at about this time.14 I have collected texts within this range principally by searching the Packard Humanities Institute and Thesaurus Linguae Graecae databases for the core vocabulary of reclining.15 Regarding visual material, since I seek here to integrate literary with visual evidence and to exploit their potential for cross-illumination, I focus on images that coincide with the texts as much as possible. A significant corpus of funerary monuments showing images of diners in various postures (like the object in fig. 1) survives from the city of Rome and its immediate environs, including Ostia, and dating from the early first century a.d. onward. This material coincides geographically with the literary representations, and overlaps chronologically for almost two centuries; it diverges in being produced by and for subelites. The monumental forms bearing this imagery in our period are principally grave stelae, loculus covers, ash urns, funerary altars, and kline monuments. Modern and systematic catalogues exist for the latter three types; I have attempted to collect and survey all dining images that appear among these better-documented monumental forms.16 Mural decoration is another visual medium in which representations of diners in various postures appear—specifically, paintings from sites in Campania, especially Pompeii, that were buried and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79. These paintings, executed mostly in the Pompeian third and fourth styles, date from approximately 10 b.c. to a.d. 79. They are found principally in the dwellings of local elites and prosperous subelites. Thus they overlap chronologically with both the literary texts and the funerary monuments discussed previously, while socially the occupants of these dwellings, and also the likely viewers of these paintings, ranged from persons like those represented on the Roman urban funerary monuments to persons who probably had more in common with the highly literate and literary urban elites. The divergence in this case is geographic, yet it may be relatively unim14 The latest authors I have examined thoroughly are Gellius, Athenaeus, Apuleius, and Lucian. Occasionally I draw upon still later authors and texts, such as Cassius Dio, the Historia Augusta, Servius, and Macrobius, that depict dining practices of the period before ca. a.d. 200. 15 Latin texts were collected primarily by searching the full Packard Humanities Institute database for cubo, *cumbo, and their compounds in ad-, de-, dis-, and re-; also forms of reclino. This is the core Latin vocabulary for the reclining dining posture. Iaceo, sto, and sedeo are also regularly used for convivial posture, but all have semantic ranges extending widely beyond conviviality, and it was not worthwhile to look through every occurrence of these verbs in search of convivial contexts. Likewise, I did not survey the full vocabulary of dining (cena, convivium, triclinium, lectus, etc.) because only a minority of passages in which dining, its spaces, and its furniture are mentioned say anything about posture. In Greek, the vocabulary for reclining to dine is generally limited to the verbs κατακλνω, κατα´κειµαι, and α να´κειµαι. I employed the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database to search for these verbs in authors who write at length on Roman or Graeco-Roman cultural practices in our period: Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Philo, Josephus, Appian, Plutarch, Lucian, Athenaeus, Herodian, and Cassius Dio. In all, through these and other means, I collected several hundred passages in which dining posture is specified, problematized, or discussed. In this book I discuss many but not all of these passages. 16 See Catalogue I.1–4 (including some loculus-covers at I.3); also chs. 1.3 and 2.3 for further discussion.

INTRODUCTION

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portant: for it is likely that Campanian mural decoration in this period was similar to contemporary Roman mural decoration both stylistically and thematically. For these reasons, I have sought also to be comprehensive in collecting images of dining in Campanian mural decoration.17 While these are the limits—chronological, geographic, and formal—within which I have collected material systematically, I remain aware that a great many representations of dining (hence of the associated postures) exist from times, places, and media outside these limits. Within our period, for example, funerary monuments with scenes of dining are known from other areas of Italy and the provinces; also, images survive in media other than funerary sculpture and wall paintings. Beyond the end of our period, numerous images of dining are found on sarcophagi and in mosaics from Rome and elsewhere. And while few if any visual representations of dining that can reasonably be called “Roman” survive from Rome itself or anywhere else prior to the Augustan age, a large number of Hellenistic Greek and Etruscan images of dining do survive from Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, from funerary and sympotic contexts, that predate most of the Roman representations studied here. While I do not collect and analyze this material systematically, I occasionally use such objects as comparanda— when, for instance, they show an illuminating contrast or continuity with the Roman texts and images being discussed more comprehensively; or when they show a different way of solving a representational problem. These Hellenistic Greek and Etruscan objects themselves participate in a longer tradition of representations of reclining and seated dining—some in relief sculpture, some painted—which extends back through the classical and archaic periods, in both Italy and Greece, and into the ancient Near East. Most scholars agree that the practice of dining reclining had broad social purchase among the aristocrats in these various societies, and that all images depicting this activity, across their entire chronological and geographic range, convey a nexus of values: privilege, leisure, autonomy.18 This is true for Roman examples, too, even though at Rome the practice (and imagery) of reclining was not limited to elites, at least in the period of this study. However, the iconography of dining has local variations—sometimes subtle, sometimes substantial—in every locale where it appears, variations that are created by and in turn reveal the differences in social context.19 The Roman examples discussed here are built on a framework of inherited iconographic forms that were filtered, selected, and 17

See Catalogue II; also chs. 1.4 and 2.4 for further discussion. 2003a: 11–35 for a survey of pre-Roman dining imagery; in greater detail for particular cultures, Dentzer 1982: 76–126, 431–37; Fehr 1971: 7–61 (both discussing archaic and classical Greek and Near Eastern images); Rathje 1990 (Italic/Etruscan); Bonfante 1996; Small 1994 (both Etruscan); Fabricius 1999 (Hellenistic Greek). 19 Local differences: Small 1994: 87 on what is distinctive about Etruscan dining scenes (and the associated practices and values); Dentzer 1978: 65–69 on a distinctive Egyptian example; Fabricius 1999: 338–39 on the differences among examples from four Hellenistic cities. 18 E.g., Dunbabin

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INTRODUCTION

supplemented so as to turn that tradition to distinctively Roman cultural uses, thereby causing Roman dining imagery to appear and function differently from dining imagery found elsewhere.20 In this book I undertake iconological analyses, in something like the Panofskian sense, at a level of iconographic detail where meanings that are distinctively Roman emerge in the context of specifically Roman social structures, values, and practices. At certain points in the chapters that follow, I will argue explicitly that contemporary Roman values and practices, and not the inherited iconographic tradition, provide the most appropriate matrix for interpreting certain motifs or details. In the organization of the following chapters, categories of gender and age provide the overarching structure: chapters 1 and 2 examine the practices and values associated with various dining postures for free adult males and for free adult females, respectively; chapter 3 discusses freeborn children. The convivial deportment of slaves is considered throughout but receives no separate chapter. This structure seems necessary, since Roman representations of convivia normally notice slaves only insofar as they support and facilitate the dining of higher-status persons, and also because the convivial behavior, bearing, and relative privilege of each category of free person (men, women, children) is articulated, at least in part, by contrast with what slaves do in the same setting. I handle slaves, then, as the Romans’ own textual and visual representations do: denying them an autonomous convivial existence, yet making them essential for sustaining and indeed defining the conviviality of free persons. Free adult males were juridically the most empowered and privileged demographic sector in Roman society. While status differences within this sector obviously mattered a great deal, with the result that some such males were clearly superior to others (as Suetonius’s anecdote about Terence shows), nevertheless the convivial practices of this group broadly speaking, including the postures they assumed and the values associated with these postures, provided the benchmark of privilege with respect to which the dining postures and practices of others were defined. We turn first, then, to an examination of such males and their dining postures. 20

This description also applies to the Roman appropriation and transformation of Greek poetic traditions (consider, e.g., Horace’s remaking of archaic Greek sympotic poetry in a Roman mold, or Vergil’s transformation of Greek epic). Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 30 puts the general point succinctly: “[T]o demonstrate an ‘origin’ for an artistic phenomenon is not adequate to account for its social function. The Romans constantly borrowed new cultural goods from the eastern Mediterranean as new areas opened up to them, but they turned them to their own social ends.” Likewise Zanker 1994: 281–84, on the virtues of contextualizing art objects in the “lived life” of any given moment. Beyond ancient literature and art, recent anthropological investigations of how objects move across cultures have shown in general that such objects, always and necessarily, are endowed in the culture of reception with meaning and value different from what they had in the culture of origination: Appadurai 1986: 26–29, 45–46, 51–53 (and passim); Spooner 1986: 199–200, 214–18, 220–25 (and passim).

Chapter One Dining Men: Posture, Leisure, and Privilege

1. Overview throughout the period of interest to this study, in all the media under examination, free adult males are represented as reclining to dine at convivia in the normal course of events. As noted in the introduction, the practice of reclining was transmitted from the Near East through the Greek world into central Italy by the late archaic period. In all these cultures, reclining marked a greater degree of social privilege and autonomy than was associated with the other possible dining postures, namely, sitting and standing.1 In each culture that appropriated the reclining posture, however, that privilege and autonomy was articulated through locally distinctive social forms; the posture was always embedded in, and in turn helped to construct and sustain, a culturally unique regime of social values and symbols. In the Roman case, in our period, the reclining dining posture is associated with one social value in particular: otium (leisure) and the various pleasures and luxuries that Roman otium comprises. In this chapter, I examine the link between reclining dining and otium in the three media defined in the introduction: literary texts in section 2, funerary monuments in section 3, and wall paintings in section 4. I treat these media separately not only because they emerge from and address themselves to different social strata but also because each medium has a distinctive place in the spaces and rhythms of everyday Roman life. Thus, to discuss representations of reclining dining in the different media is also to discuss different producers, consumers, settings, and meanings for these representations, even though the activity represented in each case is broadly the same. These representations do allow for synthesis and cross-illumination, but only after the fundamental differences are carefully accounted for. The concluding sections of the chapter (5 and 6) discuss circumstances under which free adult males reject the reclining dining posture and its associated otium. 1 Varro (apud Isid. 20.11.9), as noted earlier, asserts that Roman men dined seated rather than reclining in a very early period, and Servius interprets various passages of Vergil in this light: see Ihm, “cena,” RE 3 (1899) 1895.60–67 for references. As part of a “good old days” discourse, this information is historically questionable, but it reveals much about the values of the author’s own day, as we shall see.

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2. Reclining and Elite Otium: Some Literary Evidence The association of the reclining dining posture with otium is articulated most clearly in literary texts. Being produced largely by and for a Rome-oriented elite, these texts tend to articulate elite urban values, anxieties, and practices.2 In such texts, conviviality is often categorized under the rubric of otium, and is implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the various negotia—the occupations or duties—by which elite Roman males occupied themselves much of the time, and indeed defined themselves as elite Roman males: their own private social and economic affairs; legal advocacy on behalf of their clients or friends; discharging magistracies or other military and administrative posts associated with government. More generally still, conviviality in these texts may symbolize or instantiate something “pleasant,” in contrast to “unpleasant” alternatives. While the association of elite conviviality with otium should come as no surprise, it seems worthwhile to cite a handful of literary passages, scattered across various genres and ranging throughout the period under discussion, that illustrate this association, and that show how the reclining posture is implicated in this schema.3 To begin with the earliest Roman literary texts, several Plautine dramas contain convivial scenes in which high-status males dine and drink while reclining in one another’s company and alongside courtesans. The convivium is thus a place where such males enjoy a nexus of pleasures: wine, food, companionship, and the prospect (at least) of sex.4 Meanwhile, a fragment of the historian Calpurnius Piso, dating to the late second century b.c., relates that King Romulus drank wine sparingly when invited to dinner, on the ground that he had serious work to do the next day (eundem Romulum dicunt ad cenam vocatum ibi non multum bibisse, quia postridie negotium haberet). Thus the sharp distinction between elite negotium and the activities of the convivium—along with a moral hierarchy privileging the former over the latter—is attributed to the city’s 2

Some texts, of course, describe the practices of nonelites, or of people elsewhere than in Rome; or they overtly aim to reach audiences beyond a narrow elite. Petronius’s cena Trimalchionis purports to describe the convivial behavior of a group of subelites in Campania. Plautus, whatever his social origins (traditionally subelite), does not—unlike his successor Terence—seem to privilege elite concerns and viewpoints, nor do his dramas speak predominantly to the elites within his audience. However, see Habinek 1998: 45–59 on how early Latin literature functions in part to consolidate and acculturate the mid-Republican aristocracy; also Gruen 1992: 202–22 on Terence. 3 A bibliography on Roman leisure is just emerging. For sociological references and a survey of the Roman social categories of otium, negotium, and labor, see Toner 1995: 11–21, 22–33 (and passim); pertinent discussion also in Edwards 1993: 173–206. Leach 1999 offers an excellent, culturally engaged study of a particular aspect of elite otium. Less useful for my purposes are André 1966 and André, Dangel, and Demont 1996: 229–451, which focus on the literary and philosophical activities associated with otium. 4 E.g., Plaut. Asin. 828–32; Bacch. 1188–1206; Most. 308–47. On these reclining males, and on the “Greekness” or “Romanness” of the practices so represented, see ch. 2.2a.

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founder, and so receives strong ideological sanction.5 Moving into the late Republic, Catullus, in poem 50, declares that he and his friend Licinius Calvus are “at leisure” (otiosi, v. 1), playfully composing spontaneous verses and drinking wine in an atmosphere filled with eroticism.6 Meanwhile, Cicero, early in his treatise on the ideal orator (De Or. 1.27), contrasts convivial pleasures with more “serious” activities and concerns. He relates that, when he was a young man, the senior senator and orator Cotta regaled him with a story dating from Cotta’s own youth. Cotta said that he himself had participated one day in a gloomy and difficult discussion with certain éminences grises regarding the condition of the state. Following this discussion, however, when the party repaired to the dining couches, the host Crassus dispelled the prevailing gloom with his humanity, urbanity, and pleasantness. Cotta contrasts these differing moods as follows: “In the company of these men the day seemed to have been spent in the senate-house, but the dinner party in a villa in Tusculum.” That is, the grave affairs of state (negotia), which filled the day’s conversation, stereotypically occupied the curia at the political heart of the Roman Republican forum, while the pleasurable, cheerful reclining fellowship of the evening convivium (otium) better suited a country villa.7 Cicero himself, according to his biographer Plutarch (Cic. 8.4), almost never reclined for dinner before sundown, citing a bad stomach and also his α σχολα (i.e., negotia) as keeping him away. Moving into the Augustan and Imperial ages, Horace contrasts otium and negotium, though not necessarily in these terms, in some of his dinner-invitation odes (e.g., Carm. 2.11, 3.8, 3.29). Here he dangles before his addressee—in each case, a magistrate busy with public affairs—the enticements of companionship, sex, and especially wine, requesting that he embrace these pleasures and abandon for the evening his anxious cares on behalf of the state.8 In a more mythical vein the wretched Phineus, in Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica, is finally delivered from the plague of Harpies; at last he can recline on a dining couch and consume food and drink, joyful at the forgotten pleasures of the table; he now enjoys tranquillity and indeed “drinks down forgetfulness of his long punishment” (4.529–37). Meanwhile, a declamation in the elder Seneca’s collection 5 Piso fr. 8 Peter = Gell. 11.14.2. Nevertheless, the king’s companions can chide him for failing to embrace otium in a convivial setting, the place most appropriate for it: the passage continues, ei dicunt: “Romule, si istuc omnes homines faciant, vinum vilius sit.” his respondit: “immo vero carum, si quantum quisque volet bibat; nam ego bibi quantum volui.” 6 Gunderson 1997: 203–11. 7 Cic. De Or. 1.27: tantam in Crasso humanitatem fuisse ut, cum lauti accubuissent, tolleretur omnis illa superioris tristitia sermonis; eaque esset in homine iucunditas et tantus in iocando lepos ut dies inter eos curiae fuisse videretur, convivium Tusculani. See also De Or. 1.31–33, where otium is distinguished from the activities of the forum, subsellia, rostra, and curia; also Mur. 74, and Var. Men. fr. 336–40 Astbury (= Gell. 13.11.3–5). 8 On otium and negotium in Horatian dinner-invitation poems, see La Penna 1995: 268–70 (with Putnam’s remarks following, pp. 280–82); and Murray 1985: 45–48. More generally on drinking, drunkenness, and the otium/negotium distinction, see D’Arms 1995: 305–8.

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(Cont. 9.2) posits that a provincial governor, L. Quinctius Flamininus, executed a criminal in the midst of a convivium at a prostitute’s request. Many of the declaimers who handle this theme explore the shocking collapse of the otium/negotium distinction that this situation envisions. For judicial matters such as punishing criminals belong in the forum, not the dining room; they should be done by daylight, not at night; and so on.9 Finally, the younger Pliny deploys these same contrasting pairs—night versus day, dining room versus forum, country versus city—to define a realm of otium, sharply distinct from that of negotium, in which he can recite some light poetry of his own composition. In one case, for instance, Pliny decides to recite such poetry during a convivium in July, specifically because the courts are quiet in the summer and all the guests are at leisure (Ep. 8.21.1–3).10 These passages are by no means exhaustive (there are many dozens more), but they are representative in showing how elite Romans consistently slot conviviality, the reclining posture included, into the category of otium and regard it as encompassing a variety of specific pleasures: wine, food, conversation, companionship, sex. They also show how the convivium is distinguished, at least in theory, from activities or events classified as mundane, serious, or unpleasant, such as statecraft and matters of judging and punishing. Yet these idelogically clear-cut categories are in practice constantly at risk of collapse. Cicero himself, at times a vigorous purveyor of the ideology of convivial otium, nevertheless discusses politics and engages in statecraft with his peers at convivia; even in “retirement” during Caesar’s ascendancy, when he speaks in his correspondence of dining with people like Paetus, Hirtius, and Dolabella, he can be seen to be constructing new social networks that will serve him in the new political dispensation.11 Caesar himself, a busy man, allowed negotia to intrude more overtly upon his conviviality: Plutarch remarks that he regularly dealt with his correspondence while reclining for dinner.12 Indeed, Plutarch elsewhere notes (Mor. 619D–F) that the locus consularis, the position of the guest of honor on the low end of the middle couch, well suits the needs of a highranking man, who may have to conduct business during the convivium: he writes, “nobody crowds him, nor are any of his fellow diners crowded” by this man’s retinue. The tension in this formulation between allowing negotia to in9 E.g., Sen. Cont. 9.2.4

(Hispo), 9–10 (Capito), 14 (Montanus), 22 (Argentarius), 24 (Latro); esp. 27 (Murredius): serviebat forum cubiculo, praetor meretrici, carcer convivio, dies nocti, where negotium is the category governing the first term in each pair, while otium governs the second. Further discussion in ch. 2.2a, c. 10 Roller 1998: 273–76 with n. 23 (and passim). 11 Stein-Hölkeskamp 2001: 365–70 astutely discusses the politics of Cicero’s conviviality, both before and during his “retirement”; also Leach 1999. 12 Plut. Caes. 63.7: Μα´ρκου Λεπδου δειπνζοντο ατν τυχε µν πιστολα πογρα´φων, σπερ ε!"θει, κατακεµενο. Cicero does likewise, at least when dining with a social inferior named Vestorius: Att. 14.12.3, 21.4.

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trude for one diner, yet not allowing this intrusion to impinge upon the otium of the other diners, is palpable.13 Nevertheless, the pervasive circulation of the rhetoric of convivial otium reveals the ideological importance, for elites, of defining a realm in which they are not performing their negotia—even if in practice that realm is difficult or impossible to keep “pure.” In early Imperial literature, the reclining posture all by itself may stand for or represent convivial otium and pleasure more generally—again, in contrast either with negotia or with things that are unpleasant or painful. The younger Seneca (Ep. 71.21) contrasts “lying in a convivium” with “lying on the rack” (i.e., for torture): the former, he acknowledges, is pleasant while the latter is unpleasant, yet the two kinds of reclining are indifferent in regard to Stoic moral value. Martial (Epig. 14.135) gives voice to an outfit of dining clothes (cenatoria), which primly defines its proper realm by contrast with “serious” business: “neither the forum nor going to bail are familiar to us: our job is to recline on embroidered couches.” Finally—the exception that proves the rule—Ovid, describing Hercules’ death, says that the hero reclined upon his funeral pyre “with the same expression as if [he] were reclining as a dinner guest among full cups of unmixed wine, [his] hair tied with garlands” (Met. 9.236–38). For only a hero of Hercules’ stature, with an abode on Olympus awaiting, would have the composure and confidence to assume the air of a reclining diner while in fact preparing to burn himself to death.14 In these three passages, the reclining convivial posture stands by synecdoche for a broad range of elite convivial pleasures—the pleasures with which it is associated more explicitly in some of the passages discussed earlier—and is contrasted with specific activities or circumstances that are considered serious or unpleasant. The privileges and pleasures associated with elite convivial reclining are thrown into higher relief when compared with the convivial postures and roles assumed by slaves. For slaves were excluded, practically and symbolically, from the leisure and pleasures enjoyed by the reclining diners—even as they were omnipresent in the convivium, and by their presence and service made the reclining diners’ leisure and pleasures possible.15 Literary texts normally depict slaves on their feet, and often in motion as well—bringing food, pouring wine, clearing the tables, and so on. The younger Seneca (Ep. 47.3) evokes the image of wretched, hungry slaves standing all evening in silence—any noise to be 13 A

similar tension is visible at Nep. Pel. 3.3 and Suet. Aug. 45.1. Ep. 71.21: “quid ergo?” inquis “iacere in convivio et torqueri paria sunt?” illud licet magis admireris: iacere in convivio malum est, iacere in eculeo bonum est, si illud turpiter hoc honeste fit. Cf. Ep. 66.18–19. Mart. Epig. 14.135: nec fora sunt nobis nec sunt vadimonia nota: / hoc opus est, pictis adcubuisse toris. Ov. Met. 9.236–38: . . . imposita clavae cervice recumbis, / haud alio vultu quam si conviva iaceres / inter plena meri redimitus pocula sertis. 15 In general on slaves in convivia, with abundant literary sources, see D’Arms 1991; also Foss 1994: 53–56. 14 Sen.

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punished with a whipping—attending at an imperious master’s meal. Likewise, in Trimalchio’s convivium Giton stands at the foot of Encolpius’s couch while masquerading as a slave (Petr. 58.1: ad pedes stabat). And toward the end of this convivium, Trimalchio turns around on his couch to address slaves (apparently) standing behind, dismissing them from service so that they can eat (74.6–7). Shortly before being dismissed, however, they crowd onto the couches and recline among the invited guests, at their master’s express invitation (70.10–13). This is apparently an equalizing gesture, directed by the host, himself a former slave, to those who now occupy the kind of station he once occupied (though the narrator Encolpius, disgusted by the smell and behavior of the cook whom he suddenly finds reclining next to him, seems displeased by this mixing and conflating of status groups). Martial, moreover, catalogues the actions of a troupe of slaves who stand and move about a dining room, attending to the most menial bodily needs of their master (Epig. 3.82.8–17), while Juvenal (5.64–65) describes a handsome cupbearer who disdains to serve his master’s guests, resenting that they recline while he himself stands. Each of these texts pursues a satirical or polemical aim and therefore cannot be taken as offering a direct and lucid representation of everyday social practice. But in each case the standing slaves are a prerequisite for, not an element of, the satire or polemic. The slaves who recline among the guests on Trimalchio’s couches would cause no outrage unless their presence there were unusual; in Juvenal the slave’s disdain, implying that he regards himself superior to the guests, is less pointed if it is not at odds with the hierarchy of status exhibited in posture. These texts, then, presuppose that standing and moving about are the norm for slaves in convivia, and that such posture and motion, implying instrumentality, mark slaves off as socially inferior to the reclining, stationary diners. The social hierarchy inscribed in these postures is thus not a matter of bodily elevation. On the contrary, the heads of the lowest-status persons—the standing slaves—must typically have been higher than the heads of the more privileged reclining persons, and also higher than anyone who happened to be seated. A different hierarchical principle is at work here: the body that must move or take action in response to another body or bodies is inferior, while the body that does not move or act in response to others is superior; likewise, if one body must remain in a state of poised tension (e.g., “standing at attention”), hence ready to act, when in proximity to another body that is more relaxed, the former is inferior and the latter superior. This hierarchical principle can be observed elsewhere in Roman social practice. For instance, magistrates often sat, at ease and immobile (though sometimes also on elevated platforms), to receive petitioners who approached on foot; and in the aristocrat’s morning salutatio, the great man waited in his own house—whether standing or seated, at any rate relatively immobile—to be approached by clients who had left their own houses to call upon him. More generally, as Jon Hall has shown, the protocol for encounters in the street between social unequals was that the inferior

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normally offered his greeting first, and the superior greeted only in return.16 There is undoubtedly a tension between these two principles for displaying social dominance—that is, “the superior is higher” versus “the superior expends less energy, hence is seated or reclining.” This tension can be observed crossculturally and has been studied by anthropologists and social psychologists.17 In regard to Roman dining, certain complications arising from these competing principles will be discussed later; however, the fundamental norm that slaves stood in the presence of reclining or sitting superiors will receive abundant corroboration. Yet slaves might sometimes assume other convivial postures as well. They are represented as reclining to dine, for instance, in their own milieu, when no free persons are present. Thus Plautus stages several all-slave convivia where both male and female slaves recline to dine together, while Columella prescribes that the vilicus (the slave overseer on a villa-farm) be permitted to dine reclining only on festival days, and should then invite other particularly deserving slaves to his table as an honor (Rust. 11.1.19).18 That Columella expresses this recommendation as a restriction reveals his underlying assumption that the vilicus would gladly dine reclining at other times too, left to his own devices—just as the Plautine slaves are represented as doing. These hints from Plautus and Columella that slaves too might dine reclining, at least when they could get away with it, have a prima facie social plausibility: perhaps they wished to envelop themselves in the pleasures, well-being, and feeling of social integration that they perceived to be associated with elite dining. Certainly freedmen and subelite freeborn persons appropriated the image of reclining dining for exactly this reason, as we will see later (§§3–4). Yet some slaves might even dine reclining or sitting in the company of (reclining) free adult males, if they thereby contributed significantly to the atmosphere of convivial pleasure and otium. Thus, as noted previously, female slave-prostitutes in Plautine comedy recline with the elite males to whom they provide sex (Asin. 830–32; Bacch. 79-81, 16 For these and further examples, see Newbold 2000 passim; Dickmann 1999: 283–85; Hall 1998 passim; Barghop 1994: 86 and n. 31. For explicit Roman theorizing about posture and precedence, see Gell. 2.2. 17 Schwartz, Tesser, and Powell 1982: 115–16, 118–19; Firth 1978 [1970]: 93–98. 18 All-slave convivia in Plautus: Persa 767–68; Stich. 696, 750–52. Vilicus in Col. Rust. 11.1.19: nec nisi sacris diebus accubans cenet festosque sic agat, ut fortissimum quemque et frugalissimum largitionibus prosequatur, nonnumquam etiam mensae suae adhibeat et velit aliis quoque honoribus dignari. It is unclear whether these invited, lesser slaves are imagined to dine reclining or in some other posture. A painting has also been interpreted as showing slaves reclining to dine in their own milieu: a small, sketchy image, on a kitchen lararium in Pompeii, showing six figures reclining in pairs on three couches, surrounding a three-legged table that holds drinking implements (Catalogue II, P29). The painting’s location may suggest that its viewers would mostly have been slaves, though whether such viewers would therefore have regarded the diners in the image as slaves is perhaps debatable (Fröhlich 1991: 179–81 and Taf. 48.1; cf. Dunbabin 2003a: 56–58 and fig. 27). On painted dining scenes generally, see §4 below.

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139–42, etc.); and the controversia involving the governor L. Flamininus portrays him reclining in a convivium with a slave-prostitute, a male in some versions and a female in others (see ch. 2.2a). Meanwhile, at Trimalchio’s convivium (Petr. 68.4–8) a youthful slave recites passages of Vergil while sitting on the foot of the couch where his master Habinnas reclines. This boy, as subsequent comments reveal, is Habinnas’s pet educational project (hence the recitation), as well as the object of his sexual attentions.19 Such cases confirm the essential point that a slave’s role in the convivium was instrumental. Slaves were there to enhance the otium and pleasure of the privileged, reclining diners in any way required. They were not entitled to enjoy that privilege, otium, and pleasure themselves, except incidentally (though perhaps they could do so when and if they reclined together in their own milieu). This essential instrumentality demanded in most cases that slaves stand in service, but permitted reclining or sitting under those circumstances where assuming such a posture particularly enhanced the pleasure of one or more of the privileged diners. These literary representations illustrate how the reclining dining posture is associated with leisure, pleasure, and privilege, at least for the elite males who are portrayed in such texts as assuming this posture; they also show how these meanings contrast with those of the standing posture, which is regularly assumed by slaves and is associated with service, subordination, and instrumentality. We turn now to visual representations of dining, which have a different social provenance, to discover whether and to what extent these dining postures have iconographically emergent meanings and associations that differ from their literary ones.

3. Reclining and Social Integration: Subelite Funerary Monuments We begin with images of reclining dining sculpted in relief on early Imperial funerary monuments from the city of Rome. These scenes require close comparison with the literary texts discussed earlier. For while they express (as I will argue) generally the same links among reclining, otium, and associated convivial pleasures that we found in the literary representations, the fact that these links are appropriated and expressed by subelites, and on funerary monuments in particular, gives them an altogether different social purchase. The aim of this section is to examine the social meaning of this dining imagery in its subelite, funerary context. 19 Cf. Petr. 64.13, where

all the slaves are said to be sitting at Trimalchio’s feet (omnibus servis qui ad pedes sedebant)—perhaps momentarily at rest, since he offers them wine; also 70.10–13, where the slaves crowd onto the couches to recline (discussed earlier). A visual counterpart to Habinnas’s slave (though much younger) is perhaps seen in fig. 18 (see Catalogue I.3, Chamay and Maier 1989 no. 104). Amedick 1991: 20 argues plausibly that the baby in the long tunic, seated on the couch’s foot, is the reclining woman’s pet slave—present here as a mark of luxury and source of pleasure to the diner. On this relief see ch. 3.2.

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Monuments from the city of Rome and its suburbium bearing convivial imagery first appear in the early to middle first century a.d. and persist through the late second century, though with a distinct peak in the later first and early second centuries. Here I will examine four monumental forms in particular: the marble ash-urn, the grave altar, the loculus cover, and the kline monument. Well-illustrated, modern catalogues or surveys exist for each of these forms except the third; thanks to good photographs and descriptions of most of the pertinent objects, along with consistent application of dating criteria, it is possible to collect, analyze, and compare objects with dining scenes more or less comprehensively. Moreover, since these catalogues provide an overview of each monumental type as a whole, we can understand the place of dining scenes within that whole.20 I list all pertinent objects of these forms in my own Catalogue I. Convivial scenes are not especially common: only 11 out of 698 urns in Sinn’s collection that date before a.d. 200 bear dining scenes (Catalogue I.1); and 19 out of 708 altars in Boschung’s catalogue datable to before a.d. 200 (Catalogue I.2). Even the kline monuments, all of which by definition portray a couch, generally show the deceased as being asleep or dead on it; only 5 out of perhaps 30 examples datable to our period show the deceased reclining in the standard dining posture (Catalogue I.4).21 Nevertheless, this corpus of dining scenes is large enough (44 certain instances in Catalogue I. 1–4) to offer a solid basis for addressing the questions of interest to this study. Indeed, other monuments of which I am aware that bear dining scenes do not substantially change the conclusions I reach on the basis of the objects selected for study here.22 These monumental forms are listed in more or less ascending order of size and elaboration, hence ascending order of expense, hence ascending order of 20

The catalogues are Sinn for marble ash-urns and Boschung for grave altars (though Altmann 1905 remains valuable, and Speidel 1994a contains some altars not found in Boschung); Wrede 1977 and 1981 together provide a general survey of kline monuments (upwards of thirty total), though are not formal catalogues. Amedick 1991: 12–14 discusses loculus covers of the second century a.d. from Ostia that show convivial scenes. Hers is a catalogue of images of “private life” on sarcophagi, and her discussion of dining scenes on Ostian loculus covers is a preliminary to her discussion of such scenes on third- and fourth-century sarcophagi. There are no certain examples of sarcophagi bearing dining scenes from the second century, but for possible instances see A68, K3, and A35 (the latter not in Catalogue I.3). Toynbee 1971: 253–70 provides an overview of several of these types of funerary monument; also Dunbabin 2003a: 109–20. 21 In addition, Catalogue I.3 contains five examples of loculus covers from our period with dining scenes. But since no comprehensive catalogue or survey exists for this monumental form, it is impossible to estimate the frequency of dining scenes relative to other scenes. 22 In our period, dining scenes also occur in some quantity on simple grave stelae, for which no comprehensive catalogue exists. A number of such objects from Rome are described, but not illustrated, in CIL VI (see comparanda listed by Altmann 1905: 191 no. 256; also, e.g., 195 no. 266). In particular, the grave stelae of equites singulares Augusti often include dining scenes: Speidel 1994a: 4–5 and passim. I count 53 such scenes among the 201 stelae or fragments of stelae that Speidel dates to before a.d. 193, and it is a safe bet that most of the rest of these stones originally included them. In addition

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the wealth and status of the deceased—or rather, the wealth and status of those who paid for the monuments, though often dedicator and deceased are closely related by blood or marriage, and are sometimes one and the same. The marble ash-urns, in their most common rectilinear form, seldom exceed a half meter in width, which is usually the largest dimension, and are often considerably smaller. The block is hollowed out to receive the cremated remains of the deceased. Urns were typically inserted in niches in family tombs or columbaria and are therefore usually designed to be seen frontally—though some certainly stood alone, and indeed a variety of modes of display are known.23 A few of the very earliest marble urns, dating to the Augustan period or even earlier, are highly decorated and may have been made for use by members of the senatorialequestrian elite. From the mid–first century a.d., however, marble urn burials overwhelmingly commemorate freedmen, freeborn persons of undistinguished family whose nomenclature often suggests descent from slaves (e.g., Greek cognomina), and the occasional slave. Such persons were by no means impoverished, as the ashes of the truly poor were more commonly interred in simple clay pots. By the same token, however, they cannot have been among the city’s most wealthy inhabitants: for the survival or attestation of urns in precious materials like alabaster, porphyry, and gold, along with the overall dearth of senatorial-equestrian interments in sculpted marble urns, suggests that those of great wealth and high status typically employed more grandiose monumental forms, or at least richer materials than marble.24 A large majority of marble urns date to approximately a.d. 50 to 150; the form goes into decline and virtually disappears by the end of the second century. This decline coincides with the decline of cremation generally, which was progressively displaced by inhumation in the course of the second century.25

to stelae, these horse troopers also employed funerary altars; those with dining scenes datable before a.d. 193 are included in this study (B379, 380, 382, 383; Sp80, 85, 86; see Catalogue I.2). Dining scenes are also widely distributed on funerary monuments beyond Rome, in Italy and the provinces, within and beyond our period. Publication is scattered and partial. While I have not sought to collect these objects systematically, I occasionally bring examples into the discussion. For examples from northern Italy, see Compostella 1992: 660–61, 686–87; from the Rhine, Galsterer and Galsterer 1975 nos. 196, 219, 228, 245–56 (etc.) and Gabelmann 1972: 70, 115–22; from Yorkshire, Rinaldi Tufi 1983 nos. 40, 42, 43; for Gallo-Roman examples, Vendries 2001: 130–34. In the photographic archive of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome are several boxes (R. 390, 392, 400) containing many further examples from Italy and the provinces. 23 On the form and typical siting of these objects, see Sinn 11–14. 24 On the status of those commemorated on marble urns, see Sinn 84–87; also 7–9 on urn-burials in materials other than marble, and the status implications of these materials. Early marble urns possibly commemorating aristocrats include those from the tomb of the Platorini (esp. S164, cf. S25, 26, 45, 51, 52; CIL VI 31761–68a; Altmann 1905: 44–48); aside from these, only S209 and S691 (commemorating equestrians) seem to involve elites. 25 For a frequency chart of marble urns, see Sinn, table I (following p. 314). For the second-century transition in Roman burial rites from cremation to inhumation, see Morris 1992: 42–68.

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Grave altars, meanwhile, have a somewhat broader social purchase. While varying considerably in size, altars are typically larger than and proportioned differently from the urns: they average about 80 centimeters in height, which is usually their largest dimension; they are hence narrower, and not as deep as they are tall. Altars are often designed to stand alone—whether in a tomb structure, as part of a family grave precinct, or entirely by themselves in open air: for, while emphasizing the frontal, they usually bear simple decoration on the sides as well, and sometimes on the back. Some include a receptacle for the ashes of the deceased, but others do not: these latter are therefore only markers, the actual interment being elsewhere.26 The great majority of grave altars, like the urns, commemorate freedmen or fairly low-status freeborn persons. Nevertheless, this larger monumental form seems to have appealed to at least some elites; a handful of altars commemorate senatorial or equestrian aristocrats.27 The earliest altars date to the early first century a.d., though (like urns) the great majority date from approximately a.d. 50 to 150, and the form declines thereafter; only a very small number are firmly datable after 200.28 The third category of monument examined here, the loculus cover, has not been systematically catalogued and only recently has begun to receive serious study. By “loculus cover” I mean a flat, rectangular marble panel designed to cover the opening to a niche—either a smaller one in which an ash-urn has been deposited or a larger one accommodating an inhumation. Objects of the latter sort may be 200 centimeters or more in width and perhaps 50 centimeters high, as they must cover a niche in which an adult corpse has been laid. In their proportions and decoration these objects are akin to the front sides of 26 On

the form and siting of grave altars, see Kleiner 1987: 19–30; Boschung 12–13, 37–41; for ash receptacles, see Boshung 38. Of the twenty-three altars in Catalogue I.2, three have such receptacles. 27 E.g., from the tomb of the Calpurnii Pisones comes a series of large altars commemorating the consul ordinarius of a.d. 27 (B643), his sons (B1, 287) and daughter (B657), a later consul (B856), and other members of this distinguished family (see Altmann 1905: 36–43; CIL VI 1445, 31721–27, 14235; also B13, 593, 745, 857). This tomb also produced a group of spectacular third-century sarcophagi. Kleiner 1987: 70–71 discusses some other first-century altars commemorating young equestrians. In general on the social status of the dedicators and dedicatees of altars, see Kleiner 1987: 28–29, 59–71; Boschung 55. Grave altars are twice attested as costing 50,000 sesterces, and once as costing more than 10,000. As Boschung 39 observes, however, we cannot know whether such numbers represent the cost of the altar alone, or include other commemorative elements now lost (such as a tomb structure). We have no information whatsoever about the cost of a sculpted marble ash-urn (Sinn 85), nor that of a loculus cover or kline monument. In general on the costs of burial and commemoration, see Duncan-Jones 1982: 127–31 (for Italy outside of Rome); Saller and Shaw 1984: 127–30. 28 See Boschung 53 for a discussion of frequencies. Two highlights: out of 727 datable altars in his catalogue, 451 are Flavian, Trajanic, or Hadrianic, and only 19 postdate a.d. 200. Speidel’s (1994b) catalogue of equites singulares Augusti shows a similar pattern of decline: he records 28 altars out of 271 total monuments prior to a.d. 193 (see p. 109); but only 4 altars out of 147 total monuments after 193 (p. 285). Reasons for the decline of altars are obscure to me: since most do not contain ash receptacles and were therefore mere markers, they would seem capable of performing this function as well for inhumations as for cremations.

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sarcophagi. As it happens, the known examples from the area of Rome all come from Ostia, where the production of these objects began in the reign of Hadrian and continued through the fourth century a.d.29 Their emergence, parallel to that of sarcophagi, accompanied the rise of inhumation in the second century, in counterpoint to the decline of ash urns (and cremation) in the same period. Absent a comprehensive catalogue, it is impossible to analyze systematically the status of dedicators and dedicatees. Yet these are large objects with substantial decoration, so seem to require that the dedicator was reasonably prosperous. Of the five loculus covers included here (Catalogue I.3: four Ostian, for inhumations; one perhaps urban, for a cremation burial), only one is inscribed (A68); the names are undoubtedly those of freedpersons. Finally, the so-called kline monuments, on average the largest and most elaborate of the forms under discussion, represent sculpted couches (klinai, or better, lecti) upon which recline life-size or near-life-size figures worked in very high relief or in the round. These monuments, the earliest of which date to the Augustan era, were probably freestanding objects within family tombs, though it is unclear in many cases exactly how they may have been exhibited, and how they related to the actual remains of the deceased. Being presumably the most expensive of the monumental forms discussed here, one might expect to find a higher proportion of elites among their dedicators and dedicatees. The accidents of survival, however, have left few inscriptions to illuminate the social status of anyone involved; and the inscriptions that do survive all point, as it happens, to freedmen and freeborn persons of modest lineage—though presumably of some wealth, as the relative grandeur of this type of monument suggests.30 In general, then, the dedicators or dedicatees of these four monumental forms belonged typically, if not exclusively, to a subelite social stratum, which was heavily populated by freedmen and their freeborn immediate descendants. This generalization holds true also for the subset of these monuments that bear representations of reclining dining, as we will see later. While members of this stratum no doubt varied widely in wealth, with some being quite well-to-do and others less so, as a whole they were neither impoverished nor probably, in most cases, outstandingly wealthy. In contrast, the representations of reclining diners found in literary texts from the late Republic to the high Empire generally portray the city’s elite in the full flower of its immense wealth and grandeur. 29 For

overviews of this monumental form and discussion of definitional difficulties, see Franken 2001: 295–96; Agnoli 1999: 208–9. The clear kinship of loculus cover decoration to that of sarcophagus fronts accounts for why these objects have never received separate study. Amedick, however, includes some in her collection of sarcophagi with convivial imagery (1991: 11–45; see also Himmelmann 1973: 15–25). I do not systematically examine convivial sarcophagi, because the earliest certain instance from Rome dates to ca. a.d. 220 (A62), and the rest are later still. One possibly second-century sarcophagus with a small stibadium scene is known from Ostia (A35). 30 See Wrede 1977: 403–5 for a social analysis of some of the names found on kline monuments.

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These different forms of representation, with their different social provenance, converge in many respects but diverge significantly in others. The iconography of these funerary monuments, and the values they engage, are best approached through examples. I begin with a small grave altar (ca. 50?
40
26 cm—the upper part is lost)31 dating to the early second century a.d., now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome (B833, fig. 2). A relief at the bottom of this altar shows a man reclining on a lectus that has turned legs, straight high boards at the head and foot, and a backboard that features a rectangular pattern, perhaps representing upholstery or inlay; actual lecti of this form have been recovered archaeologically.32 This man is propped upon his left elbow so that his torso is upright; his right knee is elevated while his left leg rests upon the mattress. This bodily attitude I call the “standard dining posture.” He wears a tunica, visible on his torso, and also a mantle wrapped in a bundle of fabric around his hips. Perhaps this mantle is a toga, and the bunching represents its sinus: in this case, the man is being conspicuously presented as a Roman citizen, wearing the citizen’s characteristic garb. However, poor preservation of the stone, combined with the artisan’s schematic (at best) rendering of the drapery on this small, reclining figure, make a precise identification of his costume impossible. In his left hand he holds a drinking vessel. Before the couch, within his easy reach, stands a small table with three legs carved in (probably) feline form; this table holds several objects that here cannot be made out but are presumably items of food and/or vessels for water and wine (such as are more clearly visible in comparable reliefs, discussed later). Seated on the couch at the foot-end is a female figure, who touches the reclining man’s right hand with her left; her costume cannot be identified. At either end of the couch stands a male figure in a short tunica; both figures are of smaller stature than the man and woman on the couch. The one at the foot holds a vessel (presumably for wine); the one at the head, heavily damaged, may be walking toward the center of the scene and carries an unidentifiable object, again probably a vessel or item of food. Comparison with the literary representations discussed earlier—some of which are roughly contemporary with this altar—reveals that these standing, moving figures are undoubtedly slaves, tending to the wants of the immobile persons on the couch. Above this tableau is an inscription, broken across the middle so that most of the first two lines are lost. What can be read indicates that 31 The

preserved (lower) part is 39 cm high, but at least 10 cm must be missing from the top, since the break is probably in the second line of the inscription (viz., D M in the first line, while the second line, containing the dedicator’s name, starts with the M whose bottom is visible at the break). If this altar had a pediment, it would have been taller yet. 32 For wooden couches with high boards (whether straight or curved) recovered from Herculaneum, see Mols 1999: 35–42, 124–27, with cat. nos. 1–13; no. 13 (with figs. 87–93) features a backboard inlaid with a rectangular pattern. At Tac. Ann. 14.5.1 a couch with high boards is mentioned: its “projecting walls” (eminentibus lecti parietibus) save Agrippina from a roof collapse.

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2. Altar dedicated by Orpheus (B833), second century a.d. Rome, Museo Capitolino. Courtesy of the Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Capitolini, inv. no. 2108 = NCE 2944, photo Natale.

Marcus Orpheus (his nomen is lost), freedman of Marcus, arranged before he died to have this monument erected in his own memory: M [-c.8-] / M libertus / Orpheus / fecit sibi / dum vixit. It seems reasonable to identify this free adult male, who is both the dedicator and the deceased, with the reclining (hence privileged) adult male depicted in the relief: thus, Orpheus commemorates himself in the guise of a reclining diner, attended by slaves and having for a companion the seated woman who touches his hand, and who might be suspected—for this and other reasons, discussed further in chapter 2—to be his wife or wife-equivalent (i.e., a concubina or contubernalis).33 33 CIL

VI 36015. See also Mustilli 1939: 45 no. 30 and pl. 31.126 on this altar. For the varieties of quasi-marital unions, see ch. 2.2a and n. 22.

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This relief displays a number of features that we will see are typical of convivial iconography. First, the figures are distinguished by a hierarchy of postures: the man reclines at leisure and the slaves stand in service, while the seated woman occupies an intermediate posture, hence perhaps an intermediate status, between them. Second, the reclining diner is surrounded by objects that are probably to be regarded as carrying high prestige, signaling a distinctively elite form of dining luxury and pleasure. One such object may be the three-legged table. Such tables, as we shall see, commonly appear in these scenes and are often depicted (like this one) with carefully rendered zoomorphic legs and feet. Literary descriptions suggest that dining tables of various sorts could be made of precious materials, and as such might contribute to the host’s display of his status and wealth. Even the smallish, round, three-legged variety such as this one (unambiguously called tripes or mensa delphica in literary texts, though probably also included under the generic term mensa) could be extremely luxurious in its carving and material.34 The couch, too, with its turned legs and upholstery or inlay, is perhaps to be thought of as a prestigious piece of furniture. More certainly prestige objects are the slaves themselves, who stand in service left and right of the couch, wearing short, girded tunics. Their very presence implies that the diner’s household has a degree of wealth—enough, at any rate, to purchase and maintain a couple of domestic slaves—and many of the convivial scenes discussed later feature slaves in this same costume bringing food and attending to the comfort of the persons on the couches.35 Moreover, these particular slaves are depicted as being of smaller stature than the man and woman on the couch. A familiar feature of ancient iconography is “hierarchical scaling,” where slaves are represented at smaller scale than other figures to indicate their lesser importance; examples abound on Hellenistic Greek funerary monuments bearing dining scenes, as well as Romano-German ones from the first century a.d. In this case, however, and for other monuments from Rome and its environs discussed later, I do not 34

For dining tables of rare and precious materials, especially with tops made of exotic veined woods, see Hor. Serm. 2.8.10–11; Sen. Tranq. 1.7, Ben. 7.9.2; Plin. Nat. 13.91–102; Stat. Silv. 4.2.38–39; Mart. Epig. 14.89–90; Plut. fr. 180 Sandbach. These tables are all apparently larger than the small three-legged ones in question here. However, Mart. Epig. 12.66.7 describes a high-prestige top attached to a three-legged table, and makes this table part of a luxurious set of dining equipment. Such tables in prestigious materials like marble and bronze have been recovered archaeologically (Richter 1966: 111–12); even the simpler wooden ones found in Herculaneum are at least made of hardwoods, to accommodate decorative carving: see Mols 1999: 129; also 44–52, 127–29 (and 77 on citrus wood; cf. Amedick 1991: 23). Conversely, three-legged tables are very modest at Hor. Serm. 1.3.13 and Ov. Met. 8.660–63. Further remarks on dining tables and luxury in Courtney 1980, ad Juv. 1.75, 1.137–38, 7.11, 11.117–21. 35 In literary texts, persons who serve food, whether juridically slaves or not, are often called succincti (or the like)—i.e., wearing a short tunic girded at the waist: see, e.g., Plaut. Rud. 411; Hor. Serm. 2.6.106–12, 2.8.10–13; Ov. Met. 8.660; Philo Vit. Cont. 51; Petr. 60.8; Sen. Brev. 12.5; Juv. 6.446. Cf. Philo Vit. Cont. 72, where servants who are not slaves wear ungirt tunics, precisely so as not to appear slavish.

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see hierarchical scaling at work.36 Rather, these slaves are proportioned appropriately as juveniles relative to the adults on the couch. In my view, they are intended to be recognized as adolescents, and specifically as beautiful, sexually desirable slave boys. Literary texts indicate that adolescent males of this description were among the most highly prized and expensive of slaves, and in elite households they were commonly used as wine servers in convivia (note again the vessel held by the slave at the left); as such they were among the beautiful, expensive, luxurious accoutrements that the elite host exhibited in an effort to impress and delight his guests.37 Indeed, our reclining male diner may enjoy the prospect of an eventual sexual encounter, since the owner of such slaves could be expected to make sexual use of them following the convivium or at any other time.38 Yet the woman, too, probably being a wife or wife-equivalent, represents another current, socially acceptable sexual connection; we will see in chapter 2 that she likewise might be expected to retire to bed with him following the convivium. Thus, the privileged, reclining, free adult male represented in this scene is the focal point of a number of pleasures. He enjoys food and wine, kept in good supply on a conveniently located table by valuable, high-prestige slaves standing in attendance. The table and couch are probably to be understood as showy, expensive items of furniture. He also enjoys the companionship of the woman, and the prospect of sexual pleasure that she and the slave boys provide. These are precisely the sorts of pleasures manifested in literary representations of leisured elite conviviality, as discussed previously.39 36 Clear instances of

hierarchical scaling on Romano-German reliefs in Galsterer and Galsterer 1975 nos. 196, 219, 228; also on funerary dining scenes from the Hellenistic Greek east: Fabricius 1999: 93–94. From Rome and its environs, only one object listed in Catalogue I—an Ostian loculus-cover (A68)—seems to show hierarchical scaling. Here the woman standing at the foot of the couch, presumably the wife named in the inscription, is represented at a distinctly smaller scale than the reclining man and the male figures seated on chairs to the left and right. 37 For the sexual desirability and expense of adolescent male cupbearers (the Ganymede figure) in elite convivia of the late Republic and early Empire, see, e.g., Philo Vit. Cont. 50–52; Sen. Ep. 47.7, 95.23–24; Petr. 92.3–5 (downscale version); Mart. Epig. 1.58, 9.25, 10.98, 11.70, 12.66.8 (etc.); Juv. 5.56–63; Suet. Iul. 49; and D’Arms 1991: 175–76. Slaves not fitting this profile make for less refined convivia: see Cic. Pis. 67, servi sordidati ministrant, nonnulli etiam senes; also Juv. 5.52–55. The iconography and social history of these beautiful slave boys has recently attracted scholarly attention: see Dunbabin 2003b: 454–57 for our period (passim for the third–fifth centuries); Pollini 2003: 152–59; Schörner 2002; Fless 1995: 37–43; Amedick 1991: 19–22 (for a later period, but with continuities from our period). 38 For the master having sex with his handsome slave boys directly following the convivium, see Sen. Ep. 47.7, 95.24 (similar implication at Petr. 92.3–4, 94.1–6; perhaps also 74.8–9). On slaves of both sexes as sexual objects, see Pollini 2003; Williams 1999: 30–38; Bradley 1984: 116–18; and Neraudau 1984: 353–62. 39 Zanker 1992: 354–56 likewise interprets Roman funerary dining scenes as symbols or models of prosperity, good fortune, and pleasurable living; also Fabricius 1999: 86–95 for analysis of “luxury” features in Hellenistic funerary dining scenes.

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Many similar features, and some significant differences, appear on another, slightly larger grave altar (B830, >59
50
40 cm) of the early second century, also in the Capitoline Museum.40 Here again, a relief under the inscribed tabula shows a man reclining on a lectus in the standard dining posture, with a cup in his left hand and a crown in his right (figs. 3 and 4). The lectus again has high boards at the head and foot—S-shaped rather than straight—and likewise a high back, though here without patterned upholstery or inlay. Before the diner stands a small three-legged table, which is depicted with simple curved legs and appears serviceable rather than luxurious. Upon it rest a ladle and a cake or loaf of bread, sketchily depicted. This diner, like Orpheus, wears a mantle around his hips and legs, but unlike him does not wear a tunica, and his torso is consequently bare (more on such nudity later). Left and right of the couch, again, stand figures of smaller stature than the diner, wearing thighlength tunics girt at the waist, the one on the left holding a vessel. These again I interpret as sexually desirable adolescent male slaves. Here this identification is further supported by their slightly bulky hairstyle. “Long hair” is a common attribute of youthful, desirable slaves in literary texts and has also been identified on numerous young male figures in Roman art.41 No woman is present here. The inscription identifies the deceased as C. Calpurnius Beryllus, freedman of Gaius, age twenty-one.42 Here again, then, as on the Orpheus monument, a freedman is commemorated in the guise of a reclining diner enjoying certain pleasures and luxuries that, as the literary texts show, are associated with elite conviviality. If the simpler furniture and absence of a woman leave the impression that Beryllus’s convivial experience is somewhat more ascetic than Orpheus’s, surely this impression is misleading. Rather, the iconography of this monument is a reduced, “shorthand” version of the more extensive representation found on the Orpheus monument: the relief evokes a set of pleasures associated with elite reclining dining, without depicting them all explicitly. What do such images mean? Why might deceased freedmen be commemorated in the guise of diners reclining amid the trappings (or allusions to the 40 Only the portion from the foot of the columns to the cornice above the capitals (height 59 cm) is ancient; the altar’s base and crown are modern. In its ancient configuration it undoubtedly had both a base and a pediment, increasing its height considerably. 41 The leftmost slave has his original bulky hair; the hair and upper face of the rightmost slave are restored (the diner’s hair, admittedly, is similar). This hair is not “long” in the sense of reaching their shoulders or beyond, but is also not closely cropped; it is comparable to that of the (younger) slaves on the Primigenius monument (fig. 1) or on S462. On the Orpheus monument, the slaves’ heads are too poorly preserved for their hairstyle to be described. In literary texts, desirable slave boys are sometimes labeled by their hairstyles: criniti, capillati, comati, etc. For the connection between slaves’ hair and sexual desirability, with discussion of iconographic and literary evidence, see Pollini 2003; Fless 1995: 56–63; Amedick 1991: 21–22. 42 D M / C Calpurnius / C lib Beryllus / hic situs est / vix ann XXI (CIL VI 14150). See also Altmann 1905: 152, and Jones 1912: 353–54.

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3. Altar dedicated to Calpurnius Beryllus (B830), second century a.d., overview. Rome, Museo Capitolino. Courtesy of the Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Capitolini, inv. no. 1967 = NCE 2550, photo Natale.

trappings) of elite conviviality? To begin to answer these questions, let us make several observations about “realism” in these scenes. First, since these scenes show convivial practices and equipment that are recognizable from literary depictions, it seems difficult to doubt that these practices and equipment were actually employed by elite Roman diners; details found in both representational forms seem likely to be details of “real” elite dining. But to what extent do such scenes reflect the “real” dining practices of the specific men who are commem-

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4. Altar dedicated to Calpurnius Beryllus (B830), second century a.d., detail of dining relief. Rome, Museo Capitolino, inv. no. 1967. Author photo.

orated on these monuments? Undoubtedly Orpheus and Beryllus dined reclining, at least after gaining freedom and citizenship. Yet could either have afforded the luxurious accoutrements—the valuable slaves, the furniture—that are depicted or alluded to iconographically? Assuredly neither man was impoverished: as discussed earlier, grave altars are a substantial form of commemoration. On the other hand, these particular altars are smallish examples of the form, and not of outstanding workmanship; they are not the sorts of objects one might expect a very wealthy Roman to have chosen.43 While it is hazardous to judge the wealth and status of a dedicator from the type and quality of a single funerary monument, it is striking in these cases that the “realistic” imagery of luxurious, elite dining seems to make a claim to wealth and status that the inscriptions, dimensions, and workmanship of the monuments themselves do not support.44 43

With heights of ca. 50 cm (perhaps more) for the Orpheus monument and upwards of 59 cm for the Beryllus monument, both probably are less than the average height of grave altars; a survey of one hundred altars in Boschung’s catalogue whose pediments are preserved (I examined nos. 200–299, of which seventy-seven have measurable heights) yields an average height of 80 cm. More generally on humble persons mimicking the dining practices of the lofty, see D’Arms 1999: 311. 44 While a large, elaborately decorated monument likely implies that the deceased (or dedicator) was wealthy and of high social status, the reverse claim—that a modest monument implies modest

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In other respects, however, these scenes seem to speak more directly to the social situation of Roman freedmen. It is especially poignant, for example, that these freedmen are portrayed as being attended by their own (standing) slaves, while they themselves dine reclining. The slaves call to mind the freedmen’s former, enslaved selves; through the contrast in postures these freedmen starkly distinguish the social condition they ultimately achieved from that in which they began (and others remain).45 Likewise, the presence of a wife or wifeequivalent on the Orpheus monument emphasizes that the deceased had attained the legal capacity to form such a partnership, in contrast to his earlier legal incapacity. These images need not be illustrating the biographies of these specific men: neither Orpheus nor Beryllus need actually have owned such slaves; nor did Orpheus necessarily have a female companion just because one is shown (nor did Beryllus necessarily lack one, just because none is shown). Instead, the slaves and woman in these dining scenes, like the reclining posture and the elite-style dining equipment, represent the social and juridical horizons that these former slaves’ free status opened up for them—conditions to which they could at least aspire, and in light of which they wished to be remembered, regardless whether or to what extent they actually attained them. On the other hand, these scenes also contain decidedly “unrealistic” details. For instance, there is no literary evidence that elite Roman males ever dined with torsos bare and wearing only mantles at their hips, as Beryllus is shown doing. On the contrary, in literary texts ranging from the mid–first century to early second century a.d.—the period of the two monuments discussed here— we hear of an ensemble of garments, the synthesis or cenatoria (whose exact composition is unknown) that men normally wore while dining, and several texts suggest that any exposure of flesh in a convivial context was exceptional and transgressive.46 The point of this depiction, however, is hardly to suggest social status—is more problematic. For example, some of the altars of the Calpurnii Pisones (e.g., B1 and B287, commemorating extremely lofty aristocrats) are large but austere, and based on their form and decoration alone might not be expected to belong to men of such status. Indeed, an altar by itself may not reflect the overall material level of a burial, for we seldom know its original context— whether it sat in isolation in the open, or in a precinct with other monuments, or perhaps in a richly decorated family tomb (as, in fact, the altars of the Calpurnii Pisones did). Still, given the Romans’ penchant for self-advertisement, it seems probable that smaller altars with poorer decoration on average, if not in every case, indicate lower status and wealth than larger altars with richer decoration. 45 This interpretation finds a literary parallel in Petr. 74–75, where Trimalchio kisses one of the slaves serving at his convivium—a puer non inspeciosus (74.8)—spurring his wife, Fortunata, to accuse him of failing to restrain his libido. In reply he describes how he himself, as a youthful slave, performed sexual services for his master and mistress, and so began his rise in the world. Other monuments depicting slaves who attend upon a reclining male diner: B243, 852 (fig. 17), 966; also regularly on the altars of the equites singulares Augusti: B379; Sp80, 85 (also on most of their stelae: Speidel 1994a passim). 46 For the synthesis as dining garb, see Mart. Epig. 5.79, 14.1.1; CIL VI 2068.8; for cenatoria, see Petr. 21.5, 56.9; Mart. Epig. 10.87.12, 14.136. For conjectures about the composition of this ensemble

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that Beryllus is an outrageously rude diner. Rather, scholars often compare such nudity (which, as we shall see, is fairly common in dining scenes) with the nudity that often costumes gods and heroes in Greek iconography. On this basis they deem it a “heroizing” motif: a positive attribute, which also removes the reclining figure from the realm of the ordinary and places him a somewhat elevated sphere.47 But the “hero” in the Greek sense—one of the powerful dead, an entity of superhuman status who receives cult honors—does not translate readily into a Roman context, and need not be invoked as a paradigm for interpreting Roman funerary practice. Yet the idea that nudity “idealizes” can, perhaps, be translated into culturally Roman terms—creating not a hero but an exemplum. Beryllus’s nude torso can then be seen as signaling an abstraction: it divorces the image from any specific, actual convivium and instead enlarges the image’s frame of reference, inviting viewers to think in general terms about the social values articulated by the image. Through idealizing abstraction, the specificity of the particular instance is converted into the generality of the exemplum, which aspires to transcend contingency and to embody a universal, diachronically valid canon of behaviors and values.48 Another “unrealistic” but idealizing motif is the toga Orpheus wears (if that is what it is), since the toga is unlikely to be part of the “proper” dining costume, the synthesis/cenatoria.49 For a freedman, the point of the “unrealistic” toga in a funerary dining scene would again be to create an idealization, but of a different sort from that created by the nude torso: here, the effect is to assert his achieved status of Roman citizen by putting him in the distinctive garb of the citizen. And if we look beyond these two monuments to other funerary dining scenes, we find still further “unrealistic” motifs that seem to have idealizing aims. For instance, on two altars (B243, B852 [fig. 17]) winged erotes fly above the reclining figures on the couches, and on two loculus covers of the wide type designed for inhumation (A84 and A92) erotes are among the attendant figures that fill the spaces to the and a collection of sources, see Brewster 1918; McDaniel 1925; and Schuppe, “synthesis,” RE 4A (1932) 1459–61; recent observations by Slater 1997: 414. Other garments: Mart. Epig. 11.23.12 presents the pallium as a unisex dining costume, and Plin. Nat. 14.139 seems to imply that a tunica is (part of?) a standard male dining costume; for the toga see n. 49 below. On the transgressiveness of convivial nudity, see Cic. Ver. 2.3.24, Cat. 2.23, Pis. 22, Deiot. 26 (with Heskel 1994: 136–39); Vell. Pat. 2.83.2; Suet. Tib. 42.2; Plin. Nat. 34.11–12. 47 For the nude torso in dining scenes as a “heroizing” motif, see Amedick 1991: 13; Ghedini 1990: 38; and Himmelmann 1973: 18. Fabricius 1999: 69 discusses this same tension between “heroizing” nudity and actual social practice (i.e., wearing a chiton) in dining scenes on Hellenistic funerary monuments. But cf. Osborne 1998 (next note). 48 For “unrealistic” elements in Roman art signaling an abstraction, see Koortbojian 1995: 29–30; Hölscher 1987: 50–54. Osborne 1998: 84–86, 100 argues that, even in archaic and classical Greek art, nakedness “generalizes” rather than “heroizes.” 49 Two texts from the late Republic (Cic. Vat. 30–32; Sal. Hist. fr. 2.70M) describe outrage at persons who dine in togas. In context, however, it is not clear whether the objections are to the toga per se or to the specific type of toga worn.

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left and right of the dining couch.50 Finally, I suggest here—but will argue further in chapter 2.3—that the seated posture of the woman in the Orpheus relief (and found in other scenes as well) is another “unrealistic” motif with an idealizing, abstraction-signaling quality, which constitutes a claim by the deceased to have embraced certain values. These reliefs, then, are not “snapshots” of Orpheus and Beryllus as they actually dined, reclining on their actual couches attended by their actual slaves and, in the former case, by his female companion. Rather, these men are shown as the central figures in scenes whose specific details—both realistic and unrealistic—serve two distinct purposes that are generally but not entirely compatible. First, these details evoke high-style elite conviviality, focusing the viewer’s attention on the values and ideals associated with such dining: otium, privilege, luxury, and various specific pleasures such as wine, food, companionship, and sex. Romans across a range of social classes could have regarded such dining, and its associated values, as refined, cultured, and indeed characteristically Roman precisely because of its elite associations, since elites were the persons in society who quintessentially “belonged.” The deceased is therefore commemorated as “belonging”: he embraces such values himself, and he exemplifies them for anyone who examines his monument. Second, certain details assert a freedman’s achieved status and belonging in ways that go beyond the claims of elite conviviality, with varying degrees of compatibility. The presence of standing slaves, marking the reclining freedman’s upward social trajectory, is perfectly compatible with the image of luxurious elite dining. The toga, marking his attainment of citizenship, is less compatible, since it was (apparently) never standard dining garb. Thus it decreases the verisimilitude of the dining scene. The representations of seated women, which also communicate freedmen-specific values (as we shall see later), are likewise incompatible with regular Roman dining practice, yet do emerge from the social dynamics and anxieties of actual dining. The message for the viewer, correspondingly, is one of both social differentiation and social integration. On the one hand, the monuments declare that the deceased transcended his erstwhile slavish condition, and achieved a position of social and legal empowerment and privilege relative to others. On the other hand, they say that the deceased was—or at any rate should be remembered as being—a refined, cultured, exemplary Roman (as his style of dining attests). Moreover, true to their idealized, exemplary quality, there is also the implicit injunction: “. . . and you too should be such a person, as he was.” Such messages had particular point for slaves and freedmen, since these are the status groups represented in the social order displayed on these reliefs. For slaves, these mon50 Erotes

are common in convivial imagery on Roman sarcophagi of the third and fourth centuries. Generally they attend on the reclining diners while flying about (e.g., A14, 113, 246, 287; Amedick 1991: 20–21), though sometimes they themselves dine (e.g., A62). Dining erotes are also found in Pompeian wall paintings and are discussed in §4f below.

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uments suggested that freedom, social integration, and cultural refinement were achievable, or had been achieved by some. For freedmen and their descendants, being new or recent entrants into the ranks of Roman citizens, such iconography affirmed that persons like themselves had achieved social and cultural belonging—had embraced and immersed themselves in central Roman values and practices through their appropriation of this key elite artifact, namely, a certain style of dining.51 My interpretations of these monuments do not presuppose any particular position in the hoary debate about what kind of meal, exactly, a dining scene on a funerary monument represents. There are three standard views: that such scenes depict earthly meals (the deceased in a pleasant moment from his life in the past), or heavenly meals (the deceased in a blessed afterlife that he currently or prospectively enjoys), or, in a different vein, ritual funerary offerings to the dead (hence a representation of cult practice). In fact, any or all of these views may have been available to Roman artists, patrons, and viewers, perhaps along with still other views; it is dangerous to connect this imagery with any specific eschatology.52 For my purposes, what matters is that these scenes, whatever they may be thought to depict, must make sense to viewers in terms of contemporary dining practices. This is obviously true if the scenes are thought to show the deceased doing what he enjoyed doing, or aspired to do, in life. But it is equally true if the scenes are taken to depict the hereafter: for as Dentzer observes (1982: 18–19), a blessed existence hereafter can only be conceptualized in terms of the pleasures of this world. And even if one holds that these scenes depict ritual offerings to the dead, they still manifestly show features of “real” dining—the deceased depicted as alive and taking part, reclining on a couch, served by slaves, and so on. Thus these scenes always refer to real-world elite conviviality, whatever a Roman (or modern scholar) may think the scenes depict, and it is the practices and values associated with that reference that interest me here. Funerary sculpture showing reclining male diners, with or without other figures, can be found on thirty-one additional urns, altars, loculus covers, and kline monuments from the vicinity of Rome and dating to our period; on another ten, a woman reclines to dine without a reclining male.53 When 51 On

how elite habits, objects, and values provide models for subelites who are striving to belong, see Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 169–74 (and ch. 7 passim); Dexheimer 2000: 82; D’Arms 1999: 311. 52 For summary of the debate see Dunbabin 2003a: 125–27, 131–32; and Dentzer 1982: 1–20. Dentzer points out (11) that the third view is, strictly speaking, the proper domain of the term Totenmahl, though this has become a generic term for funerary dining scenes and is used even by scholars who do not subscribe to this view. For interventions in this debate, see Mols and Moormann 1993/1994: 41–42 (probably correct); Ghedini 1990: 45–48 (probably incorrect); Engemann 1982: 248–50 (helpful observations). Fabricius 1999: 74–79 and 83, discussing Hellenistic funerary dining scenes, likewise insists that no single, specific eschatology can be inferred from them. 53 These ten are S276, 300, 458, 462, 516, 682; B8, 551; CIL VI 24673; Chamay and Maier 1989 no. 104 (another is B551 in Catalogue I.5, undatable due to poor preservation); see ch. 2.3 for further

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sufficiently informative inscriptions survive on these monuments, they consistently suggest that the deceased was a freedperson or, if freeborn, probably the child or grandchild of a freedperson—hence the demographics of monuments with dining scenes accords with the demographics of these monumental forms more generally. Furthermore, their iconography can generally be interpreted along the lines advanced for Orpheus and Beryllus: this iconography implies adherence to and integration into essentially Roman values and practices by persons who, as new or nearly new citizens with perhaps a tenuous hold on Roman identity, have a particular stake in making such a claim.54 Within this corpus of monuments, those of Orpheus and Beryllus are among the richest iconographically, since these display a number of the specific motifs that constitute the iconographic repertoire of leisured elite dining. More typically, however, such monuments display only a few of these motifs. Consider an uninscribed Trajanic urn in the Terme Museum in Rome (S515, fig. 5), where a male assumes the standard dining posture on a couch of the familiar form. His torso is bare, but he wears a mantle around his hips and holds a cup or item of food in his left hand; before him stands a table with leonine legs holding further comestibles. In these respects this monument resembles Beryllus’s. Yet here the slaves are lacking, as is the convivial crown in the right hand. The iconography of elite convivial luxury is even more compressed on a Flavian urn in London (S282, fig. 6) showing a man in the standard dining posture on the standard couch, again with a bare torso and mantle at the hips, clutching a vessel in his left hand. There are no other figures, and no crown or garland; even the characteristic table is lacking. Yet the presence and form of the lectus, together with his posture and the vessel he holds, unambiguously imply conviviality; moreover, the nude torso seen on this and the previous monument (fig. 5) serves the same abstraction-creating, exemplifying function it serves on the Beryllus monument. Again, the man commemorated on this monument—the inscription names him as T. Titulenus Isauricus—was likely a freedman, or at least shared the freedman’s social world.55 A bare iconographic minimum, on the other

discussion. A reclining male is found on every other item in Catalogue I, except for B815, a reclining skeleton of indeterminate gender (the inscription commemorates a girl). A total of thirtythree monuments in Catalogue I.1–4, then, feature reclining males. 54 The equites singulares Augusti, the horse troopers first enrolled by Trajan, are somewhat different demographcially. They were largely recruited from frontier provinces, and many seem to have gained full citizenship or Latin rights during or after their service (Speidel 1994b: 81–87). As we have seen, these troopers almost always include on their funerary monuments (whether altars or stelae) a pedimental relief of a man reclining to dine, sometimes accompanied by a seated woman and one or more slaves. Here, then, is another group of newly arrived Romans, for whom the image of elite dining provides a vehicle by which they stake their claim to social belonging and integration. 55 Dis Manibus / T Tituleni Isaurici / Iulia Tyche / coniugi bene merenti (CIL VI 27537). While neither husband nor wife here is explicitly identified as a freedperson, the wife’s Greek cognomen likely implies servile birth, and her husband is probably of similar status.

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5. Uninscribed urn (S515), second century a.d. Rome, Museo Nazionale Romano delle Terme. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut neg. 74.235, photo Rossa.

hand, is represented on the slightly later altar of M. Blossius Felix in the Vatican (B397). A man swathed in one or more long garments—perhaps a tunica and toga, though the details of the clothing are unclear—reclines in the standard dining posture holding a vessel in his left hand; in his right he apparently holds a garland. No other figure appears in the scene, nor does a table or even a couch—he reclines atop the sculpted molding that frames the tabula bearing the inscription. Still, the posture, garland, and vessel probably suffice to signal conviviality, though this is at the limit.56 Beyond that limit, perhaps, is an urn dating to the mid–first century in Florence (S170), where a man reclines in the standard posture on the standard couch, with a garland in his right hand. In his left he holds an unidentifiable object, which is apparently not a drinking vessel; 56 D

M / M Blossi Felicis / viatori trib Pal / corpore August / Pacuvia Soteris / coniugi suo et / M Blossius Speratus / patri patrono / b m fecer (CIL VI 10216). Blossius died free and a citizen, as he flaunts his tria nomina and his tribal affiliation; his garment, if a toga, would further underscore his achieved status (Boschung, along with Amelung 1903: II 153 no. 59, identifies his costume as a toga

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6. Urn dedicated to Titulenus Isauricus (S282), first century a.d. London, British Museum. © Copyright the Trustees of The British Museum. Neg. LXXVII B-25.

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there is no table. Absent concrete indications of food or drink, this should perhaps not be interpreted as a convivial scene.57 In the iconography of these reliefs, then, the reclining posture in conjunction with just one or two further convivial motifs (e.g., a cup in the left hand, or a table) suffices to evoke elite conviviality and its associated leisure, pleasures, and values; there is no need to employ the full array of these motifs, as the Orpheus monument does. Thus the synecdoche that we observed in certain literary representations, where the reclining posture virtually by itself could stand for convivial leisure and pleasure in general, is also operative in the visual sphere. Further conjunctions and disjunctions in the “rhetoric” of literary and visual representations of conviviality will be discussed later. The minimal convivial iconography of these latter urns and altars closely resembles that of the kline monuments, the largest and most elaborate monumental form under consideration here. Commonly about a meter and a half long and a meter deep, these monuments are essentially sculptures in the round: they show approximately life-size figures reclining upon a low base whose surface is usually sculpted to represent the mattress of a lectus, and whose corners are often carved to represent the couch’s legs. Most surviving kline monuments do not represent conviviality but rather portray the reclining figure as asleep or dead. In at least five cases from our period, however, this figure is represented as animated and in the standard dining posture, with a vessel in the left hand and (in four cases) a crown or garland in the right.58 The other iconography of conviviality remains minimal: tables and slave attendants are not represented, perhaps because such additions, necessarily also sculpted in the round, would have to project inconveniently from the front, sides, or back of the monument or stand as separate pieces.59 Nevertheless, the vessels and tunica). Viatores were typically freedmen, though this one’s nomenclature does not clearly mark him as such; perhaps he is a freedman’s son. His own son Speratus was certainly born into slavery, since Blossius is his patronus as well as pater; Speratus presumably inherited that status from his mother, Pacuvia Soteris, who must have been a slave herself when the son was born. Cf. S560, an urn top of the mid–second century, showing another reclining dining viator (as the rod in his right hand suggests). 57 Further limiting cases in Catalogue I.6. 58 Catalogue I.4. 59 A woman’s kline monument in the Terme museum in Rome (not a dining scene) does show a slave, sculpted in the round, issuing from the mattress of the couch behind the woman’s knees. Whether he is imagined to be standing on the couch or behind it is unclear (Dayan, MNR I/2 162–64). For comparison, Giglioli 1935: 74 and pl. 403.1 illustrates an Etruscan ash urn whose lid represents a reclining figure (perhaps not dining) on a couch, at the head of which a slave attends. The slave’s torso issues from the pillow at the reclining figure’s left shoulder, though he is presumably to be imagined as standing on the floor. In contrast, a very large Hellenistic kline monument from the mausoleum at Belevi may have been accompanied by separate, freestanding pieces representing a seated wife, a table, and a slave attendant (Fleischer 1979: 147, 152–53).

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that all these figures hold, along with their postures, couches, and garlands, make it clear that the deceased is represented in each case in convivial guise. Because these monuments are sculpted in the round at about life size, they offer a different purchase on the ideology of convivial reclining from that of the small reliefs discussed so far. For instance, because these monuments reproduce the physical presence of an actual diner reclining on a couch, they create a particularly vivid mimesis of conviviality: the viewer can move around a kline monument and observe it from different vantage points in much the same way he or she might move among the diners in an actual convivium. One such monument, dating to the early second century and now in Copenhagen (K3), not only exploits this visual and spatial mimesis of conviviality and its associated pleasures but strikingly augments that mimesis by inviting the viewer to mime convivial actions as well. This monument represents a man reclining on a couch in the standard dining posture, with a drinking vessel in his left hand and a garland in his right. The original form of the couch is unclear, due to later alterations at the foot end. This man wears a tunica and perhaps a toga as well, since the curve of fabric around his hips may represent the sinus of the Imperial toga. The remains of the deceased must have been deposited beneath this monument, either in some kind of urn or perhaps in a sarcophagus: for a hole is bored through the bottom of the cup in the man’s left hand, indicating that libations to the dead were poured into the vessel; these libations would have drained through the hole and onto the remains below. It follows that, when a visitor to the tomb performed rites for the dead by pouring a libation, he or she entered into a living, enacted mimesis of conviviality and its associated pleasures. Precisely in pouring a libation, the visitor poured wine into the cup held by the sculpted diner, who must be imagined to be preparing to raise the cup for a sip (while his mortal remains simultaneously “drink” this wine as it flows downward); moreover, the visitor thereby mimed the role of the slave who stands in attendance with the wine jug. The sculpted, reclining drinker and the living, standing pourer of wine thus work together not only to provide a ritual offering to the dead but to enact mimetically a convivial scene that provides the template for the remembrance of the deceased as a socially integrated, essentially “belonging” Roman. A second kline monument bears a remarkable inscription that strikingly corroborates some of the interpretations of convivial iconography offered earlier.

Etruscan urn-tops of the sort catalogued by Giglioli (see his pls. 391–405) are sometimes considered to be the formal source for Roman kline monuments. However, Hellenistic Greek examples are also known, including the Belevi monument just mentioned and a monument of the second century b.c. from Rhodes (Pfuhl-Möbius 1977 no. 1847 = Fabricius 1999: 176 and Abb. 29). All such objects probably share with the Roman ones a general evocation of leisure and luxury but cannot, in my view, illuminate the culture-specific meanings of the Roman objects in any detail; for this, we have to look to the Roman context.

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The monument in question (K5, fig. 7), dated to approximately a.d. 160, is now in Indianapolis. It takes the form of a lectus with the familiar high boards at the head, foot, and back. In the surface of the mattress, at the foot end, is a circular depression to hold cremated remains. Upon the couch a man is depicted as reclining in the standard dining posture. His torso is bare, but a mantle envelops his hips and legs, and is draped over his left shoulder as well. He holds a drinking vessel in his left hand and touches his head with his right hand; a seventeenthcentury drawing of this monument shows that he is holding a crown of flower blossoms that originally encircled his head but is now largely lost. This drawing further shows that the mattress upon which he reclines once rested on a low plinth, also now lost, the corners of which were worked to represent the legs of the lectus. This plinth had a further noteworthy feature: inscribed on its front, between the legs, was a fifteen-verse poem in imperfect hexameters, fortunately recorded before the plinth disappeared.60 In this inscription the deceased speaks in his own voice. He announces that he is Flavius Agricola from Tibur, and that he is the person shown reclining on this couch, just as he reclined to drink wine while he lived (vv. 1–4); he goes on to speak of his wife of thirty years, Flavia Primitiva, and his stepson.61 The concluding four verses of the poem are most significant for my purposes, as Agricola addresses any passersby who should happen to examine the monument and read its inscription: amici qui legitis moneo miscete lyaeum et potate procul redimiti tempora flore et venereos coitus formosis ne denegate puellis cetera post obitum terra consumit et ignis.

12

15

Friends who read this, I urge you, mix the wine and drink at a distance, your brows bound with flowers and do not refuse sexual intercourse to pretty girls: after death, earth and fire devours what remains.

As Wrede observes (1981: 103), these four verses provide an interpretation of the monument’s iconography. In the first place, verses 12 and 13, offered as an exhortation to the viewer, neatly describe the monument itself in its original configuration. In urging the viewer to don a crown of flowers and drink wine, Agricola verbally recommends doing what the monument portrays him as doing himself (and he hardly needs to point out that the viewer should recline, as he 60 CIL VI 17895a and 34112; Buecheler 1895 no. 856. Wrede 1981: 103 illustrates the Dal Pozzo drawing showing this monument intact, and at 101–4 describes the object’s vicissitudes following its excavation from the Vatican Necropolis in 1626; the plinth with its inscription may have been destroyed by Vatican officials displeased by the pleasures recommended in the last four verses. 61 Verses 1–4: Tibur mihi patria, Agricola sum vocitatus, / Flavius idem ego sum discumbens ut mi videtis. / sic et aput superos annis quibus fata dedere / animulam colui nec defuit umqua Lyaeus. The wife’s cognomen, typically a slave name, places her (and hence probably her husband, too) in the freedman stratum of society: see Wrede 1977: 404 and n. 180.

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7. Kline monument dedicated by Flavius Agricola (K5), second century a.d. Indianapolis Museum of Art, gift of Alan Hartman.

himself does, in order to drink: this goes without saying). Through words, then, he offers himself as an example to others. But this verbal self-exemplification neatly meshes with the object’s iconography. We saw earlier that the nude torso and hip mantle, being an “unrealistic” dining costume, marks this kind of image as an idealizing abstraction, thereby signaling that the values implied in the image are more widely applicable—hence that the viewer should, through this image, reflect upon his own values and behavior. Agricola thus presents himself as exemplary by verbal and iconographic strategies that are mutually reinforcing. Then, in verse 14, Agricola urges the viewer to enjoy the pleasures of sex. Nothing in the iconography of this monument appears particularly sexual: no woman or slaves are depicted, who might serve as objects of his desire. Yet this verbal link between dining and sex supports the idea, proposed earlier, that an image like this one is actually an iconographic shorthand. That is, even minimal convivial iconography—in this case, just the reclining posture, a drinking vessel, and a crown—can imply a range of associated pleasures, such as sex, beyond the few it explicitly represents. Finally verse 15, with its carpe diem sentiment, links these convivial pleasures of wine and sex to earthly existence and denies that they are available in the hereafter. Other monuments may suggest other eschatologies. But Agricola, in this verse and also in verses 2 through 4, encourages the viewer to interpret his monument as an image of dining in this world, which in turn implies that the scene should be generally comprehensible in terms of contemporary dining practices.62 62 Further

discussion of this monument by Dunbabin 2003a: 103–4; Wrede 1981: 101–9.

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In the discussion so far, we have seen that some subelites, notably freedmen, from the city of Rome and its near environs selected funerary monuments on which they were represented in the guise of elite diners, enjoying the leisure and pleasures that were associated in Roman culture with such dining. But they put this image to quite different cultural use from the elites themselves. Elites, as we saw in the literary texts, brought conviviality under the sign of otium, the complement of the negotia by which they defined their essential social being (advocacy for clients, office holding, and the like). Otium, including reclining to dine, was what they did precisely when they were not inhabiting and constructing their essential social identity. The subelite funerary monuments, however, reverse this mapping of conviviality. Far from symbolizing the withdrawal from or relaxation of “what we quintessentially are,” conviviality on these monuments symbolizes precisely “what we quintessentially are (or at least aspire to be).” For these subelites, it was the leisured image, not the publicly engaged one, through which they formulated their fundamental social identity.

4. Reclining and Self-Reflection: Pompeian Mural Decoration Visual representations of men and women dining in luxurious, leisured settings survive not only on funerary monuments but also in an entirely different social context: namely, as painted mural decoration in the townhouses of the cities of Campania, 200 kilometers south of Rome. Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August, 79 a.d., these cities have been excavated more or less systematically by archaeologists in the modern era. The paintings, coming from domestic settings, offer a different purchase on the cultural meanings of reclining dining from those offered by literary texts and funerary monuments. For the interpretive frameworks that a Roman deployed while confronting a wall painting in a domestic context were different from those he or she deployed when confronting a literary text or funerary monument. One can also identify different patterns in the usage of these scenes depending on the social pretension of the houses in which they are found—differences that further illuminate how the meanings of dining posture may vary with social status. First, an overview of the images in question. I am aware of some thirty-one painted scenes from Campania of figures reclining to dine: they include one tomb painting, one vignette, three scenes from lararia, five scenes from friezes, and twenty-one scenes painted in rectangular fields on walls—the “panel paintings” characteristic of the Pompeian third and fourth styles of wall decoration (see Catalogue II for a full listing). The great majority of these thirty-one paintings are stylistically datable to the middle decades of the first century a.d., though at least one dates as early as the thirties b.c. Within this diverse collection of images the panel paintings constitute the largest and most significant group; these will be my primary focus here (Catalogue II, P1–21). Most of these panels were excavated in the

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eighteenth or nineteenth century, when it was standard practice to detach such paintings from the walls and to transport them to what is now the Museo Nazionale, in Naples. For a few such paintings, the provenance (i.e., the specific unit, room, and wall from which they were removed) is not recorded, so that nothing is known about their original context. For most, an exact or at least approximate provenance was recorded, allowing scholars to reconstruct something of the original context. Still other panel paintings—especially those excavated during the twentieth century—have been left in situ, where they can be studied directly in their original context. For the paintings whose context is known, most (as we shall see) come from units that probably served primarily residential functions, as opposed to commercial or industrial functions—though in Pompeii these functions were not always spatially segregated, and we cannot always be certain how a given space was intended to be used, let alone how it was actually used. Let us now consider the social status of the people who occupied the units in which such decoration appears. In the first place, almost all the friezes and panel paintings come from units whose ground areas are well above the median size. The ground area of Campanian townhouses can serve as a rough indicator of the wealth and status of their inhabitants, as Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has argued: for it stands to reason, and in fact is explicitly asserted in literary texts, that wealthier persons could afford, and also required, larger spaces in which to house their larger numbers of slaves, receive their substantial clienteles, and so on (e.g., Cic. Off. 1.138–40; Vitr. 6.5.1–5). Using a sample of 234 units from Pompeii and Herculaneum, Wallace-Hadrill (1994: 72–82) has determined four quartiles based on ground area, as follows. The first (smallest) quartile comprises units with ground areas of 10 to 45 square meters; most such units have been identified as shops or workshops, though we cannot rule out the possibility that the proprietor also lived in the unit, or perhaps on an upper floor. Units in the second quartile range from 50 to 170 square meters; many of these units were likely shops or workshops as well, but certain unambiguously “residential” features—like the atrium, the quintessential domestic reception space—begin to appear at the upper end of this range. The median unit in Wallace-Hadrill’s sample, then, has an area of approximately 170 square meters. Units in the third quartile range from 175 to 345 square meters; in this range, atria and other reception rooms become common, and some units have gardens in the back. Some still include commercial, industrial, or agricultural spaces within them, along with the residential spaces. Finally, units in the fourth (largest) quartile are upwards of 350 square meters. In this quartile the majority have atria and colonnaded peristyles, as well as other reception spaces. While a few of these units include large horticultural plots, most are substantial houses with predominantly residential functions.63 Other indicators of wealth and status, such 63

Because Wallace-Hadrill’s (1994) quartiles are derived from a sample, the numbers may not be exactly right for all of Pompeii but are liable to be close: see pp. 66–72 on his selection of units for

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as elaborate, prestigious forms of decoration and ambitious architectural features, tend to cluster in the units with the largest ground area (though are not found exclusively in these units), and so tend to confirm the general supposition that ground area is correlated with inhabitant wealth.64 Because of this marked clustering of status indicators, Wallace-Hadrill plausibly suggests (169–73) that it is in the upper reaches of the fourth quartile that we should generally look for the local elites—decurions, Augustales, wealthy landowners, and so on. Of the eighteen panel paintings of dining scenes that can be attributed to specific units, nine (P10–18) come from units 700 square meters or larger, which places them in the top quartile of the fourth quartile, among the largest 6 percent or so of all houses.65 Later, I examine how these paintings were displayed in these grand houses, and consider what they may have meant for their viewers and (elite) owners or occupants. On the other hand, units with ground areas lower in the fourth quartile or in the third are less likely to have been occupied by elites. Yet these houses were hardly hovels, being above the overall median size and often having a luxurious feature or two. The remaining nine of the eighteen attributable panel paintings (P1–9) come from units in the third and lower fourth quartiles. Their occupants were likely freedmen, or freeborn persons of no distinguished family, who achieved a middling to high level of prosperity as craftsmen, traders, suppliers of various goods and services, and so on. These are precisely the sorts of people commemorated on the urns, altars, and kline monuments from the city of Rome that were discussed previously. Having considered already why such persons sometimes represented themselves on funerary monuments in the guise of leisured, elite diners, I consider next why they should have decorated their houses with images of such dining, or found it amenable to live in houses so decorated.

sampling, and pp. 75–79 on the sample’s representativeness. Indeed, Robinson 1997 applies a modified form of Wallace-Hadrill’s method to Pompeii as a whole, generating qualitatively and quantitatively similar results. When discussing units included in Wallace-Hadrill’s sample, I use his measurement of their ground area; for other units, I measured the ground area myself using the scale maps in Van der Poel 1977. Such measurements are approximate at best and may err by 10 to 20 percent in either direction. But errors of this scale only marginally affect any given estimation of an occupant’s status and wealth based on ground area. 64 This general correlation has two provisos: (1) As Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 74–75 points out, total floorspace would be a better indicator of the occupant’s wealth and status than ground area alone. But the poor preservation of upper stories in Campanian townhouses, especially in Pompeii, makes their contribution to the total floorspace of most houses difficult to assess. (2) In general, the size of a unit and the elaboration of its decoration should be related to the occupant, not necessarily the owner. No doubt the occupant was often the owner, too; but many occupants were certainly renters, occupying spaces that were appropriate to their financial circumstances and social requirements, while the owners, likely of higher status, lived elsewhere (see Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 103–10 on the complexities of ownership vs. occupancy). 65 For comparison, Carandini 1986: 264–66 has calculated that the houses of the late Republican aristocracy on the north slope of Palatine in Rome were constructed on plots with a modular size of

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Indeed, it is worth stressing that these Roman and Campanian subelites were likely the same kinds of people—not only in regard to their social status but also culturally. There is good reason to believe that, at least by the Augustan period and probably earlier, Campania and much of the rest of Italy partook of a widely diffused cultural koine that found expression in similar cultural forms throughout the region (though with numerous local variations and particularities). The social, political, and cultural integration of Italy under the aegis of Rome from the fourth to the first century b.c., and in particular during the first century b.c. following the Social War, is a vast topic, which I cannot broach here in any general way. But a few remarks on wall painting in particular are pertinent. First, the mural decoration that survives in Rome itself from the Augustan and early Imperial period is closely comparable to instances of Pompeian third- and fourthstyle painting, which held sway in Campania at the same time.66 Insofar as Pompeian and Roman styles resembled one another, however, sweeping innovations more likely issued from the great metropolis than from the small town on the bay of Naples; that is, even allowing for considerable autonomy by local artists, Pompeian painting styles probably broadly tracked the styles of Rome. Second, the occurrence of multiple versions of certain scenes in Campanian painting has been interpreted to mean that painters and their clients employed patterns—whether “Greek originals,” sketched mock-ups, or simply assemblages of iconographic building blocks that the painters kept in their heads. Such patterns are assumed to have been used by painters in the large market of metropolitan Rome, no less than in the small towns of Campania. This “patterns” thesis is now much debated. But if correct, its consequence would be that scenes of which we have multiple, similar versions from Campania, and no doubt other scenes besides, could be found in similar forms on the walls of houses in Rome itself.67 Third, members of the senatorial-equestrian elite of the city of Rome owned luxury villas and townhouses in Campania from the second century b.c. onward, and of course decorated these residences to suit their own

700 to 900 m2—some houses being this size, and others being multiples of this size. By Pompeian standards, this module is very large but not enormous. But no doubt Palatine property was vastly more expensive per square meter than Pompeian property. 66 For instance, the paintings from the Villa under the Farnesina in Rome, dating to perhaps 20–10 b.c., resemble the Pompeian transitional second–third style, while those of Nero’s domus aurea from the 60s a.d. are palpably the Pompeian fourth style (see Clarke 1991: 54–57, 69–72 on these stylistic links between Rome and Campania). Yet local variations may be significant: the styles distinguished in Pompeii as “third” and “fourth,” for instance, are indistinguishable just a few kilometers away in Herculaneum. Were more mural decoration from Rome itself preserved (or if more should ever come to light), no doubt it would be possible to identify specifically Roman features not found in Campania, and vice versa. 67 For recent discussion of patterns, copies, and multiples in Roman painting, see Trimble 2002: 246–47 and passim; Bergmann 1995: 80–81 and passim (both on “local” reasons for replication, eliminating the need to invoke a “Greek original”); Allison 1991.

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tastes and social needs. Perhaps, especially in the early years, they absorbed south Italian, Hellenizing architectural and decorative practices from the Campanians, while they also no doubt introduced to Campania practices from the city of Rome; at any rate, their presence should help account for a convergence in cultural forms between the city of Rome and the Bay of Naples, especially in the first two centuries b.c. It seems very likely, then, that the decorative styles of the Roman urban elite were available in Campania during our period, and were appropriated and deployed by local artists and owners not only in grand, eliteoccupied houses (whether the vacation homes of the Roman elite or the principal residences of the local elite) but also in more modest houses. Again, however, this specific decorative continuity was just one aspect of a larger, more systematic cultural continuity in Italy, including Rome and Campania, in the first century a.d. Thanks to this larger continuity, it seems reasonable to attempt to interpret Campanian paintings of reclining diners in light of the meanings and values that we have seen associated with such imagery in Rome itself: elite leisure, pleasure, and luxury.68 I turn, then, to a series of dining scenes found in Campanian wall painting, examining each scene in its architectural, decorative, and social context with a view to establishing its social functions and ideological entanglements. In some cases the scene under discussion will raise broader questions about ancient and modern modes of viewing and interpreting painted decoration; these questions will be addressed as they arise. a. Casa del Fabbro (I.10.7) First we consider a dining scene that exists in two similar but not identical versions from Pompeii. One comes from a very grand house, the other from a more modest one. First I discuss the iconography of the scene itself, turning subsequently to the different physical and social contexts of the two versions. Both are illustrated here (fig. 8, P15 and pl. 1, P3, respectively), since the differing states of preservation make both essential for a good understanding of the scene as a whole. For in one case (pl. 1), while almost the entire panel survives, paint loss has effaced many of the details, leaving only the broad outlines across much of the image; in the other case (fig. 8), while significant portions of the panel are lost, the surviving portions are quite well preserved and show many details invisible in the other version. A man and a woman recline together on a couch. The man—dark skinned and bare chested, though with a mantle around his shoulders—reclines at the 68 On the relationship between Roman and Campanian wall decoration, see the brief remarks by Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 15, and Fredrick 1995: 270–71. On elite Romans and their dwellings in Campania from the first century b.c. onward, see D’Arms 1970. For introductions to the topic of the Romanization of Italy, see the general yet lucid overview of the second century b.c. by David 1996 [1994] chs. 4–6, and Torelli 1995 for the period following the social war.

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8. Dining panel (P15), casa di Giuseppe II (VIII.2.38/39), Pompeii. Courtesy of Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici delle province di Napoli e Caserta, neg. 4736.

couch’s head, while the light-skinned woman, wearing an undergarment and mantle (visible on her right shoulder), reclines immediately next to him, so that her back is supported by his chest. Both are propped on their left elbows. The woman bends her right knee upward and so assumes the standard dining posture familiar from the funerary monuments. The man presumably maintains this posture, too, though the position of his right knee is obscured by the woman’s body. Both wear crowns that appear to be made of flowers, a convivial motif familiar from Agricola’s monument (fig. 7). The woman’s garment leaves her left shoulder bare—an erotic motif, discussed later—and the man seemingly holds her close, resting his right hand on her right shoulder and touching her left arm with his left hand. She holds a gleaming silver vessel in her right hand (unusually, since vessels are typically depicted in the diner’s left hand). Regarding the couch, in neither version is the head or foot visible, so its form is not clear—however, there is no suggestion of a high back such as is seen on the funerary monuments. Hanging over the front side of the couch is a colorful drapery. As we shall see, this scene is typical of painted dining scenes in that a woman is depicted as dining and drinking while she reclines alongside a man. This is in striking contrast to the woman’s seated posture on the Orpheus monument (fig. 2) and on other funerary monuments depicting a man and woman

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dining together (see ch. 2.3). For now, regarding this scene, suffice it to say that all the same iconographic markers of privilege and leisure adhere to the reclining woman as to the reclining man: she too assumes the standard posture, she holds a drinking vessel similar to those that men often hold, she wears a crown similar to his, and—to judge from his bare chest and her bare shoulder—he is no less her erotic object than she is his. Around the foot of the couch stand four further figures, at least three of whom are certainly slaves: the heavily muscled, dark-skinned man at the far left, who wears a loincloth and holds a tray, and also the two women with their heads together in the back. The identification and significance of the male standing second from the left has been debated; more on this figure later.69 Finally, in the background of the scene are a number of architectonic details. The photograph printed here as figure 8 is unfortunately cropped so as not to show the open window above the slave at the left, with the architecture visible beyond; nor does it show the statues of Bacchus and Apollo, depicted as being made of bronze and silver, that stand above the diners. Some elaborate drapery in the background is visible to the right, as is a large column rising above the reclining male’s shoulder. This column, along with the open window, implies that the convivial event takes place indoors; whether the statues and drapery should be imagined as freestanding elements of the room’s decoration, or as images painted on the wall behind, is unclear, but these details collectively imply a grand, luxurious room.70 In the other version (pl. 1), windows or other architectural features of unclear form seem to be visible high above the diners. These paintings therefore display a complex of features that are broadly familiar, from literary texts and funerary monuments, as indicators of luxurious, leisured, elite conviviality: the reclining postures of the (privileged) diners, the attentive standing slaves, and indications of a sexual connection between the man and the woman. They differ from the funerary monuments, or those discussed so far, in the woman’s posture, in the details that emerge from the use of color, and in the depiction of the architectural and decorative details of the room in which the event unfolds.71 The fact that the two versions of this scene come from strikingly different houses—one very grand, one more modest—raises several questions. How did the architectural and decorative contexts for these paintings differ? Who were the patrons and viewers in each case, and how did they differ? Was the scene’s meaning or significance in each context the same or different? Let us take up 69

Elia 1934: 284 and 1955: 154 also describes a child with curly hair kneeling near the couch’s foot. I have not been able to discern such a figure in either version of this scene, though one does appear in P17—a kneeling child slave attending to the diners’ needs. 70 A photo showing the full background is printed by Sampaolo, PPM VIII 354 fig. 92, with discussion. 71 On Roman urns and altars, the couch and figures fill the image field, and no effort is made to define or characterize the space in which the convivium notionally occurs. On Hellenistic monuments, in contrast, dining scenes are often constructed to allow substantial background detail, the iconography of which enhances the overall impression of luxury and “heroization”: Fabricius 1999: 84–86.

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the first two of these questions, leaving the third for later. The version shown here in figure 8 (P15) was transported to the Museo Nazionale di Napoli shortly after its excavation from the casa di Giuseppe II (VIII.2.38–39) in 1769. With a ground area of approximately 900 square meters, this is a very large unit, well up in the fourth quartile (indeed, in the top few percentiles) for unit size. Moreover, this house is built into a slope that falls away to the south from the main entrance at the north end, such that there are two lower levels at the back of the house, including a private bath on the lowest level. The house seems to have been heavily decorated, with a number of elaborate pavements surviving on its floors; and while rather less mural decoration survives, at least thirteen panels of the third and fourth styles, including the one under discussion, made their way to the museum in Naples.72 Given the richness of this house’s decoration, its large ground area, and the presence of a private bath, the probability is very high that its principal occupant, at least at one time, was someone of considerable means—if not a member of the curial class, then someone of the same socioeconomic level.73 This was likely a “big house” of the sort described by Wallace-Hadrill (1994: 91–103): a house occupied not only by its socially lofty dominus and his immediate family but also by a clutch of resident slaves and perhaps freedmen. Moreover, such houses were articulated, through architecture and decoration, to meet the social needs of the dominus, who was an important social nexus in and of himself. Among the visitors who would be present in various parts of the house at various times of day—especially in the atrium for the morning salutatio, and in the dining rooms in the afternoon and evening for convivia—were quantities of lower-status friends and dependents, as well as high-ranking persons who were the occupant’s social peers. Unfortunately, there is no record of the specific room, let alone wall, in which this panel was originally painted—information that would facilitate a closer analysis of its possible social functions. Scholars generally accept that panels executed at a fairly high technical level (like this one) are likely to have been located in some sort of reception space, forming part of a decorative scheme by which the occupant publicized his wealth, culture, and social importance to visitors whom he received in that space. But it matters what specific space the image comple72

For an overview of this house and its excavation, see Sampaolo, PPM VIII 308–11. On the social heterogeneity of the curial ordines in Italian cities of the early Empire (including Pompeii), see Mouritsen 1997: 66, 76–81, with Franklin 2001: 197–207 on Pompeii in particular. At any given moment there was probably little practical social difference between men of recent servile background who had gained substantial wealth as merchants (or the like), and men who came from high-status landholding families, whose members had occupied magistracies for generations. For in the political sphere, as Mouritsen argues, the former could move easily into a magistracy, while the latter also had their commercial interests; and in the cultural sphere, as Leach 2004: 236–38 argues, there is no perceptible difference in the styles of domestic decoration between these different segments of the Pompeian elite. The differences between these groups were apparent only over time, as the newcomers often faded away in a generation or two, while the older families tended to maintain their prominence over the longer term.

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ments, and lacking this information we can say nothing beyond the generalizations just made. However, I will say more about dining scenes in grand houses later (§4f), in cases where we know the paintings’ exact architectural and decorative contexts. The other version of this scene (pl. 1) is found in the casa del Fabbro (I.10.7; ground plan at fig. 9), a house with a ground area of 310 square meters excavated between 1927 and 1933. While barely one-third the size of the casa di Giuseppe II, this house nevertheless stands near the top of the third quartile in size—by no means an insignificant unit, though almost certainly not occupied by an elite. Conjecturally we might populate it with a household headed by a prosperous small trader or craftsman, and indeed the finds in the house, including a variety of tools and instruments, have been interpreted as indicating that the final occupant was a craftsman.74 Like many moderate to large houses in Pompeii, this one has an atrium complex inside the main entrance (area 3 with its associated rooms), a portico behind (area 10) giving access to two substantial rooms (8 and 9), and a garden in the very back. The doors of these two rooms provide not only access but also a view from inside each room across the portico into the garden beyond. They are similar but not identical in shape and size, and symmetrically flank the tablinum (area 7) at the back of the atrium. Identifying the functions of rooms in Campanian houses—whether the function(s) for which a particular space may have been designed, or to which it was actually put (a different matter)—is no easy task, and recently there has been much scholarly discussion about traditional methods of identifying and attributing such functions. Archaeologists have long identified certain spaces as dining rooms based on the presence of one or more architectural and decorative features. Conventionally they label these spaces triclinia, since the word triclinium is well attested in literary texts as a term for dining spaces (though it is not the only such term). The features regarded as signaling triclinia are as follows: a rectangular shape of sufficient size to accommodate three dining couches in the U-shaped arrangement that we know to have been the normative arrangement for convivial dining, along with the service functions that such dining required;75 the room’s location and size in relation to other reception spaces (especially peristyles and cubicula, discussed later); a wide opening 74 For the original and fullest publication of this house, see Elia 1934: 278–308. The finds are described at 292–308, and the conjecture that the final occupant was a joiner—from which the house takes its name—is made at 292 n. 1. More recently see Ling 1997: 150–70 (161–62 on the occupant’s occupation) and the cautionary comments of Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 89, 136, and especially 193: “the variety and state of the tools point rather to a collector of scrap.” Whatever his occupation, the presence of these materials suggests that the occupant earned some portion of his livelihood in his house; hence the house had both residential and commercial/industrial functions. 75 While arrangements varied depending on the number of guests, the three-couch arrangement is expressly described or implied often enough in literary texts to suggest that it represents a norm: see, e.g., Sal. Hist. 3.83M (three couches holding seven diners total); Hor. Serm. 1.4.86 (three couches holding four diners each); 2.8.20–26 (three couches holding nine diners total; nine diners

9. Ground plan, casa del Fabbro (I.10.7), Pompeii, after Van der Poel 1977.

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in one side; strong viewlines through that opening from at least one of the couch positions out into a portico or garden; a pattern of mural decoration that presupposes stationary viewers (e.g., the use of large central panels showing complex scenes); and a pattern of floor and/or wall decoration, perhaps along with a ceiling configuration, that divides the space into an anteroom (providing service and access) and alcove (where the couches would stand). Indeed, such features may define the specific positions of the couches, as a mosaic emblema or a “T + U” pattern of floor decoration is generally taken to do, or recesses in the walls that accommodate the couches.76 While other kinds of spaces may also exhibit one or more of these features, I am persuaded that rooms exhibiting certain combinations of these features were indeed constructed and decorated with dining in view. This does not mean that actual occupants used such spaces exclusively, or at all, for dining—some of these rooms must have had other uses when not actively employed for dining—nor does it mean that dining could not have occurred in other kinds of spaces, as more intimate meals with smaller gatherings certainly did.77 But since a great many Campanian dwellings have one or more rooms with a number of the features just enumerated, the very diffusion of such spaces must indicate something about the ambience and the structure of activities that were widely and typically thought to characterize conviviality. That is, these architectural and decorative features convey both pragmatic and ideological information about how dining events were expected to be structured, and what kinds of social values they were expected to engage in what ways—even if they can tell us little about how rooms so decorated were actually used at various times by actual occupants. In the casa del Fabbro, the rooms in question here (fig. 9, rooms 8 and 9) have both been identified as triclinia, based on their rectangular shape, their size, the viewlines out their wide doors onto the portico and garden, and the third-style decorative scheme featuring figured panel paintings that are centered on the but couches unspecified at Plaut. Stich. 487); Philo Vit. Cont. 49; Plut. Mor. 619B–F. Also, in many passages the occurrence of the words summus, imus, and/or medius to indicate the particular couch on which someone reclines should imply a total of three couches: e.g., Plaut. Stich. 486–93; Lucil. fr. 751; Sen. Const. Sap. 10.2; Petr. 38.7; Mart. Epig. 6.74.1; Suet. Aug. 64.3; Plut. Brut. 34.8. The word triclinium itself implies three couches. See further Marquardt and Mau 1886: 302–7. 76 On these features and their pertinence for the identification of dining spaces, see Dickmann 1999: 215–19, Dunbabin 1996: 67–70 (and passim); Zaccaria Ruggiu 1995: 139–42 and 144–46 (and passim); Ling 1995: 240 (and passim); critical remarks in Allison 2001: 192–93. 77 Other uses for triclinia: Plin. Ep. 8.21.2–4 says that he used a triclinium as an auditorium, reciting a quantity of his short poetry to invited guests: ut . . . adsuescerent [sc. lusus et ioci] et ab otiosis et in triclinio audiri, . . . positis ante lectos cathedris amicos collocavi . . . recitavi biduo. While this recitation seems to be independent of and unconnected with any convivial event, the phrase ut adsuescerent . . . in triclinio audiri seems to suggest that these poems will eventually be presented in the same space, but during convivia, as part of the cultured entertainment. For dining occurring in other spaces, see, e.g., Sen. Marc. 22.6 (eating by oneself in cubiculo). In general on the multiple functions of Roman domestic spaces, see Dickmann 1999: 281–88.

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back and side walls of each room, above where the couches would stand.78 This use of figured central panels set into more or less neutral backgrounds is common in other third- and fourth-style rooms, including but not limited to those identified as triclinia. The case for room 9 is further strengthened by the T + U floor pattern, while that for room 8 is somewhat weakened by having an alcove that is marginally narrower than that of room 9, with a rather low ceiling. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that both were decorated, and perhaps constructed, with dining in view.79 Now, of the three central panels that originally adorned the walls of room 8, only one is sufficiently preserved for the scene to be made out. It is on the north wall, immediately confronting the viewer who enters through the main door from the portico, and it is the version of the convivial scene under discussion (pl. 1). If indeed this room was constructed and decorated with convivia in mind, then the proprietor who commissioned this decoration must have intended that diners who gathered in this room, as they ate, drank, and conversed reclining and attended by slaves, would also examine and ponder this image of reclining diners attended by slaves. Who were these diners/viewers? In the first place, as I discuss in chapter 2, Roman convivia throughout the period of this study normally included both men and women, the two sexes reclining to dine together on the same couches and in the same room. Thus our painting, showing a man and a woman reclining together on a couch, in this respect mirrors standard Roman dining practice (in contrast to the seated woman on the Orpheus monument and other funerary monuments). Second, the dining situations depicted in literary texts usually involve either high-status hosts who invite mostly lower-status guests to dinner, or hosts of any status who invite their approximate social equals; we also hear of hosts who invite a combination of peers and inferiors. Occasionally we hear of lower-ranking hosts inviting higher-ranking persons to dinner as honored guests, but this is less common.80 If these social patterns 78 Stylistic

analysis dates these paintings between the 20s and 40s a.d. The proprietor who commissioned this decoration was probably not still the proprietor in a.d. 79, though both proprietors were probably of similar status and may have used these rooms to meet similar social needs. 79 The labeling of room 9 as a triclinium—i.e., the view that the room was constructed and decorated with dining in view—is generally accepted, while room 8 has been labeled variously, indicating less certainty about the functional intentions of those who constructed and decorated it. See Elia 1934: 282, 287; Ling 1997: 154 n. 12, 286–87; Parise Badoni, PPM II 403–19. Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 56–57 considers both spaces to be dining rooms based on their size, orientation, and decoration; Ling 1997: 152 summarizes arguments for and against the identification of room 8 as a triclinium. 80 For subelites inviting elites to dinner, see, e.g., Cic. Fam. 7.9.3, 7.16.2, Att. 14.12.3, 21.4; [Quint.] Decl. Min. 301. Situations where elites invite higher-ranking members of their own group to dinner—e.g., senators hosting the emperor (Suet. Tib. 42.2; Plin. Nat. 14.56), equestrians hosting the emperor (Sen. Ira 3.40), or lower-ranking elites hosting higher-ranking ones (Hor. Serm. 2.8; Plut. Mor. 759F–60A)—may be considered special cases of “hosts inviting their peers,” on the view that the senatorial-equestrian aristocracy constituted a broadly unified socioeconomic group (see introduction n. 5 above). See Roller 2001: 135–73 for a general discussion of exchange and social hierarchy in the Roman convivium.

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hold outside of Rome and beyond the elite, then we may suspect that guests attending convivia in the casa del Fabbro would most commonly have included some combination of the proprietor’s social equals and any dependents he may have had. Since the proprietor himself, as we inferred from the house’s size, was likely prosperous but by no means elite, presumably he selected the decorative scheme of rooms 8 and 9 with an audience of his inferiors and approximate peers in mind. Guests of much higher status than himself would probably have been present in these spaces infrequently, attending convivia only occasionally as honored guests.81 We now have enough information about this painting’s social environment to consider in a focused way its possible functions and meanings in that environment. Again, in its basic iconography it is a scene of idealized, leisured, luxurious, elite dining such as is also found on funerary monuments from the city of Rome. As such, the image of diners reclining upon a richly spread couch, among troupes of slaves and employing silver drinking cups, all in a splendid architectural setting, constitutes a material fantasy parallel to, but more grandiose than, that seen on the funerary monuments, where people likewise depict themselves as dining amid material luxury that they probably could not, in actuality, have afforded. Such fantasy is fundamental to Roman domestic wall painting. In the architectural fictions of the first and second Pompeian styles, for example, painted imitations of marble revetments and columns evoke a world of material luxury far beyond the economic reach of the occupants of the houses in which these paintings appear.82 At the least, then, this image suggests that the occupant is aware of, and appreciates, the attractions of 81 A much-quoted passage of Vitruvius asserts that persons of moderate means have no need for grand reception spaces, because they call upon others but are not called upon themselves (6.5.1: igitur iis qui communi sunt fortuna non necessaria magnifica vestibula nec tabulina neque atria, quod aliis officia praestant ambiundo neque ab aliis ambiuntur). Since the reception spaces Vitruvius specifies here are atria, vestibula, and tablina, he is clearly thinking of the morning salutatio, and not necessarily of convivia and their associated spaces. Even so, however, this statement is at best a sharp schematization of actual social practice, not to be taken as strictly true. We have already noted that Pompeian units as small as the second quartile sometimes have atria (the quintessential reception space) and/or significant decoration of the sort thought to imply reception functions (WallaceHadrill 1994: 173). Indeed, there is every reason to suppose that the occupants of such houses had salutatores. Even persons of modest means might own a slave, or several—the Augustan lex Fufia Caninia, regulating the manumission of slaves by testament, includes categories for familiae of one to two slaves, or three to ten slaves: familiae of these sizes must not have been uncommon (see Gaius Inst. 1.43, and Bradley 1994: 10–12, 57 on slaves in modest households). Such slaves, if and when freed, would presumably have called upon their former master, just as freedmen of highranking elites did. Moreover, there is abundant evidence that one could receive one’s own salutatores at one moment and then go as salutator to someone else at another moment: see, e.g., Cic. Fam. 6.14.2, De Or. 1.199–200; Sen. Ben. 3.28.5 (probably); Mart. Epig. 10.10, 12.29(26); Plin. Ep. 3.5.9; in general, see Saller 1982: 128–29. 82 On the illusions of, or rather allusions to, richly decorated, open, “public” space in Roman domestic wall painting, and on the status implications of such materialism, see Elsner 1995: 74–76; Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 17–37.

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elite-style dining, and that he wishes his guests (mostly peers and inferiors) to perceive his awareness and appreciation of such dining—even though any actual convivium held in room 8 of the casa del Fabbro was assuredly more modest than the one portrayed in the painting (certainly the architecture and decoration of the actual room cannot compare with that of the room portrayed in the painting).83 The guests themselves, presumably, should also feel an affiliation with this represented luxury, whether merely admiring and appreciating it, or perhaps regarding it as an aesthetic or material paradigm for their own conviviality. So in the decoration of this room, as also on the funerary monuments, persons of subelite status affiliate themselves with a luxurious, elite artifact—specifically, a style of dining—which betokens the success, integration, and belonging to which they aspire, even though in their actual dining practice they probably did not achieve the represented level of material luxury. At any rate, one respect in which subelite viewers may have found meaning in this painting is in the status implications of the luxurious style of dining represented in it.84 Now let us consider another possible mode of reception. Certain elements of this scene seem to be specific rather than generic: the man standing second from left, whose clothing has been thought unsuitable for a slave and interpreted, instead, as military garb; what appears to be a large oval object leaning against the head of the couch (visible only in pl. 1), which may be a shield; and the (perhaps) African features of certain figures, above all dark skin, in contrast to the lighter skin of other figures. Some scholars have interpreted these details—the converse of the generalizing, universalizing motifs such as nude torsos (though these are also found here)—as locating this scene in a particular time and place, among particular persons.85 Two specific narratives have been adduced in which such a constellation of figures plays a central role; both derive from episodes in Roman history in which Romans and Africans participate 83

Again, the loss of surface detail makes it impossible to tell whether the Fabbro version included the statues of gods that are visible in the other version. However, the Fabbro version does show windows or other architectural features high above the couch. 84 A good parallel for the prestige value I see in these paintings is provided by erotic paintings: see Clarke 1998: 106–7, 160–62, 169. In general, on the reasons and processes for the diffusion of elite “luxury” into lower social strata, see Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 143–47, 169–74 (and ch. 7 passim), and n. 51 above. In the current case, the painting itself, qua painting, may serve as a prestige object with elite associations, since the very same image could also be seen in an extremely grand house, the casa di Giuseppe II. Likewise, among paintings to be discussed later, P4, from a relatively modest house, is found in truncated form (P16) in a large house; and P2, also in a smallish house, has a close parallel (P18) in a very grand house. 85 Scholars of ancient art have traditionally distinguished “generic” scenes (Lebensbilder) from “mythological” or “historical” ones (Sagenbilder). The latter are regarded as having narrative content by reason of their specificity—showing figures whose “stories” are known from myth or history—while the former, lacking this specificity, are regarded as lacking narrative content. But narrative is more complex and widespread than this traditional distinction allows: see n. 89 below.

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jointly.86 The first is the suicide in 203 b.c. of Sophonisba, daughter of the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal and wife successively of the Numidian kings Syphax and Masinissa, so as to avoid capture by the Romans under Scipio Africanus. The second is the suicide in 30 b.c. of Cleopatra, after her defeat along with Marcus Antonius in the battle of Actium, and following Antonius’s suicide and her capture by Octavian. Under these interpretations, at least a few of the figures in the scene have been identified as specific historical individuals. These specific interpretations have also been categorically rejected, with the claim that this is purely and only a “generic” dining scene.87 My aim here is not to argue for or against any of these interpretations but to observe that this scholarly debate itself exemplifies one well-attested ancient mode of reception. A large number of literary texts depict elite Romans in convivial settings engaging in learned discussion or disputation about poetry or other literature, philosophical or historical problems, cultural practices, rhetorical points, marvels of nature, and the like; prominent among these texts are the ninety-five vignettes that constitute Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales (Mor. 612C–784D). We also hear of Romans spinning out learned (or pseudolearned) historical or mythological interpretations of visual objects or spectacles, in an effort to impress others with their erudition and so to lay claim to the deference and status that are accorded to those with elite education and acculturation. While I know of no text that explicitly indicates so, it seems all but certain that visual art was one of the many cultural artifacts subject to learned discussion in the convivium, as it was in other settings—the exposition of whose meaning constituted precisely the cultural capital that is linked to high 86 Men

are commonly (not always) represented with darker skin than women in Roman painting, so perhaps not too much should be made of the darkness of the males in this scene. Meanwhile, the leftmost of the two women standing behind the couch has darker skin even than the males. But sometimes slaves are depicted with African features as a sign of luxury, a mark of the range and variety of appealing slaves the owner can afford (e.g., the African slave boy depicted in pl. 5). So I am not convinced that the skin tones observed in this scene give grounds for inferring an African setting. 87 On the first interpretation, the reclining woman is Sophonisba, while the dark-skinned man who reclines behind her (or stands? Brendel 1935: 566–67) is identified as either her father, Hasdrubal, or her husband, Masinissa; the standing figure in the supposed military costume is identified as Masinissa or Scipio or an emissary of Masinissa; the events take place in the Numidian royal palace at Cirta (see Elia 1934: 284–85; ead. 1955: 154–55; Sampaolo, PPM VIII 354; and Parise Badoni, PPM II 403 for these various identifications; literary accounts: Livy 30.12–15; Diod. Sic. 27.7; App. Pun. 8.28). On the second interpretation, proposed by Elia 1955: 155–57, the reclining woman is Cleopatra, who staged her suicide while dining. She is supported by her physician Olympos (who, as a slave, must therefore be imagined as standing behind the couch, not reclining alongside the queen); the slave in the perizoma holds a tray of figs, in which the asps are concealed; the figure in military costume is Octavian (if I understand Elia correctly), arriving too late to prevent the suicide; the other slaves are those named in the account of Plut. Ant. 85–86. The events take place in the royal palace in Alexandria. Brendel 1935: 564–68 and Fröhlich 1991: 227 n. 1282 reject these mythistorical interpretations and regard this as a “generic” scene of leisured, luxurious dining.

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status.88 In the current case, perhaps as the diners reclined at leisure to dine, drink, and converse in room 8 of the casa del Fabbro, and as they viewed the mural decorations of the room, those whose education, acculturation, and/or social ambitions enabled them to do so might discuss (like modern scholars) whether this scene is “generic” or “specific,” and if the latter, to spin out particular historical or mythical interpretations—the specifics to be debated anew by the guests at each convivial event. “Sophonisba!” “No, Cleopatra!” “No, just a convivium!” Such diners would be displaying (or purporting to display) their knowledge and learning, and so claiming the concomitant high status; they would also be engaging in the learned conversation that was itself an ideal of elite dining in the late Republic and early Empire. Here, then, is a second realm in which dining viewers might have found meaning in this image: the realm of learning and education as an index of social status, as the scene demands to be comprehended and assimilated through narrative.89 These two domains within which meaning for this scene might be produced—the domain of depicted material luxury, and the domain of learned narrative interpretation—are potentially available regardless where this scene was displayed within the house; indeed, these domains might be available for a large variety of figured paintings in diverse domestic contexts. Neither mode, however, takes explicit account of the most striking feature of this scene in its particular context: the fact that it is a dining scene displayed in a dining room. This conjunction of content with context seems likely to stimulate a degree of self-reflection among the guests who view these scenes as they themselves recline to dine. Nor is the casa del Fabbro the only moderate to large (but still subelite) residential unit in Pompeii in which a dining room is decorated with 88

For philosophical and literary display as an arena of elite competition, see Gleason 1995: 138–45 (for the second century a.d.). Clarke 2003: 10–12 and ch. 8 passim examines the ancient habit of supplying an ekphrastic narrative for visual images. For convivial conversation about literary texts, see, e.g., Plut. Mor. 639A, 677C, 683B, 684E; also Petr. 59.2–5; Suet. Tib. 56; Gell. 19.9. For Romans interpreting visual art or spectacle in a variety of (nonconvivial) settings, see Ov. Ars Am. 1.219–28; Petr. 83, 89; Plut. Brut. 23; and, beyond the end of our period, Philostr. Imag.; Elsner 1995: 24–28 discusses narrative ekphrasis in Philostratus. The closest we come to finding explicit discussion of art objects in a convivial setting is in Petronius, where Trimalchio interprets an articulated skeleton figurine (§35.8–10), analyzes his engraved drinking vessels (§50.1–52.3), and describes his funerary monument (§71.5–12). In all these cases it is learning, as much as or more than materialism, that serves as an index of social status (see next note). 89 To define a scene as “mythological/historical” or “generic” is insufficient for determining whether it has narrative content. The sense that something “more” is implied than is shown (Fröhlich 1991: 199)—that not a single event, but a sequence, is being represented—does not require that the events be known from myth or history. See Stansbury-O’Donnell 1999: 31–35 for a way of identifying narrative in ancient art that allows “genre” scenes to claim their rightful narrative content. Indeed, a “genre” scene may offer greater interpretive scope than overtly mythological/historical scenes, since viewers must first decide what kind of narrative is to be supplied, and only then consider what specific narrative. See also Elsner 1995: 38–39 on how realist images interpellate the viewer as a narrator.

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dining scenes; at least three other such units exist. In the following pages I examine these units and their triclinium decoration, seeking to understand in greater detail the relationship between the iconography of conviviality, the social norms and practices to which that iconography alludes, and the actual convivia that may have occurred in front of these scenes. Later I offer some suggestions about the kinds of meaning these scenes might have held for their viewers in their self-reflexive social and architectural contexts. b. Casa dei Casti Amanti (IX.12.6–7) The second such unit is the recently excavated casa dei Casti Amanti (IX.12.6–7). The excavation, conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, uncovered two separate units; here I discuss the southernmost, which opens directly onto the Via dell’Abbondanza. From the street, at number 6, one enters a central room with which other rooms are associated. This central space contains a bakery, including millstones and a large oven. Elsewhere in the unit are stables for the horses or donkeys that turned the millstones, and a shop for selling the bread is also attached (at no. 7).90 Adjoining the central space to the east is a room approximately 4 by 8 meters in size, with a window in its south wall giving onto a small garden; its door is toward the south end of the west wall. The room is decorated with red and black panels of the late third style (dated 30s–40s a.d.); the west, north, and east walls feature well-preserved central panel paintings, all of which are convivial scenes (P4–6). This room’s size, dimensions, viewlines into the garden, and pattern of central panel decoration all support its identification as a triclinium—a space designed and decorated with a view to containing convivia, whatever its actual uses at various times.91 The ground area of this structure as a whole is about 410 square meters, some 30 percent larger than the casa del Fabbro’s 310 square meters and just into the largest quartile for unit size. Like the casa del Fabbro, this unit apparently incorporated residential, industrial, and commercial functions: that is, its final occupant was presumably a baker—assuredly a subelite—who conducted his business out of this unit but also maintained a well-appointed dining room in which to entertain guests.92 90

See Clarke 2003: 229, and Varone 1989: 230 for a plan of the unit; also 232–36 on the facilities for baking. 91 Varone 1993: 622 identifies it as a triclinium; see 622–29 in general for discussion of the room and its paintings, with further observations at Varone 1989: 234–36, and Clarke 2003: 227–33. 92 One must always ask in Pompeii whether the decorative schemata of rooms painted decades or even centuries before the eruption can serve as a guide to the room’s intended usage in its last years. In the case of this room, the east wall had been repainted in the period of the fourth style (60s–70s a.d.), but in a style consistent with that found on the other walls. Thus we have clear evidence that an occupant during the structure’s final phase—who presumably ran the bakery—found that the room’s preexisting decoration served his current needs. Varone 1989: 236 cautiously suggests that this triclinium might have been used as a place to consume purchased food, in contrast with (or in addition to) use as a venue for convivia hosted by the

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I discuss the panel on the west wall of this room (P4, pl. 2) in detail93—giving the other two panels more cursory discussion for now. In this panel, two couches arranged to form a right angle are each occupied by a mixed-sex couple. As in the Fabbro/Giuseppe II scene, dark-skinned, bare-chested men recline in the higher position on their respective couches (i.e., at the head), while light-skinned women recline below them (i.e., toward the foot), leaning against the men’s chests and clutching large drinking vessels. The couches again lack superstructure but are draped with colorful spreads that hang to the floor and conceal their legs.94 All participants support themselves on their left elbows, in postures that resemble, but are not quite, the standard dining posture. Thus these women, like the one in the Fabbro/Giuseppe II scene, share the men’s posture, drink wine equally (in this case, from tables located equally conveniently for both parties), and appear in short to be full, equally privileged participants in the proceedings. Even sexual objectification may again be reciprocal, as the men’s bare chests may serve an erotic function no less than an idealizing one (see ch. 2.4), rendering them sexual objects of the women just as the women are theirs. Familiar here from the funerary monuments, but absent from the Fabbro/Giuseppe II scene, are the three-legged tables standing near the head of each couch—the rightmost having lion feet, like many such tables on the funerary monuments, while the other is ungulate.95 Both are represented as being made of wood. Both, moreover, bear a set of drinking vessels owner. He considers a reception space incongruous in a bakery, and he suggests that the dining room in the casa del Triclino (V.2.4; see below) might likewise have been used as a caupona. Throughout Pompeii, however, commercial/industrial and residential spaces abut and flow into one another; the presence of one function does not preclude the other in the same structure or space: see Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 118–42. Indeed, the casa del Forno (I.12.1–2) is similar to the casa dei Casti Amanti in combining the functions of bakery and residence, including a pleasantly appointed dining room: Menotti, PPM I 684–88. Thus there is no reason in principle to doubt that the Casti Amanti triclinium served its proprietor’s domestic reception needs. 93 On this painting, see Varone 1993: 624–25, Clarke 2003: 231–33. 94 Couches in the paintings discussed in this book ordinarily have long draperies and no apparent superstructure. Hellenistic funerary monuments likewise tend to show couches with long draperies and little superstructure—sometimes none, sometimes a low fulcrum at the head. Conversely, Roman funerary monuments, as we have seen, generally show couches without draperies but with substantial boards extending upward to enclose the ends and back; never fulcra (though fulcra are attested for Roman couches archaeologically, by their bronze fittings: see Mols 1999: 100–104; Pfuhl-Möbius 1977: 360–61; Richter 1966: 105–9). Perhaps Roman painters represented couches without superstructure for compositional reasons: since these scenes have deep fields of view and figures in both the foreground and background, low-profile couches without view-blocking boards were preferred. See Dunbabin 2003a: 217 n. 10 and 231 n. 16 for further discussion. I know just one painting showing a couch with a fulcrum: an erotic panel painting from I.9.1, room 11 (PPM I 938 fig. 31). 95 Three-legged tables recovered archaeologically have feet in a variety of animal forms: Mols 1999: 44–45 and nn. In wall painting hooves or (feline) paws occur interchangeably, while on funerary monuments feline forms predominate (with some exceptions, e.g., B775, fig. 16).

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and ladles, as do many tables in the funerary dining scenes. But since the painted image reveals their color in addition to their shape, we perceive that these implements are silver, comprising a respectable if not luxurious drinking service, conspicuously displayed.96 A slave is present, marked off in the familiar way—by his standing posture—as an inferior discharging an instrumental function. Here he props up a woman who, though on her feet, seems about to topple over backward, rolling her eyes upward and clutching a drinking vessel in an unsteady manner. Aside from the slave, all these figures are crowned with wreaths, in familiar convivial fashion. One further figure appears here. On what is presumably a third couch behind and between the two visible ones, a man (as evidenced by the darker skin and close-cropped hair) lies supine, his head crowned and in profile, with his eyes closed; his right is arm folded behind his head, and his elbow points upward. Thus this painting, though compositionally a two-couch arrangement, in fact depicts three—a triclinium in the etymological sense. Finally, these events unfold within a room whose architectural and decorative features are at least roughly indicated. While modest compared with that of the Giuseppe II scene, this setting nevertheless seems to complement the respectable tableware, furniture, and the like. Several elements in this scene are unlike any found in the sculpted and painted scenes discussed earlier. First, consider the complexity of the composition: rather than a single couch bearing one or two persons plus (perhaps) standing figures, here we have no less than three couches with five persons reclining on them, plus standing figures. Moreover, these figures’ bodily dispositions are vastly more dynamic than those in the funerary monuments or the Fabbro/Giuseppe II scene: their dining postures are not quite standard; they turn their heads this way and that; some recline more on their backs than on their sides; and three of the four gesture vigorously to the left side of the scene. The supine posture of the man clutching his head on the central couch is still further removed from the rigidity of the standard posture seen on the funerary monuments. Also, the positioning of the two principal couches at an angle defines a deeper field of view than is found in the scenes discussed previously, with their rigidly frontal, single-couch compositions. There, the principal elements (figures and furniture) are essentially coplanar and do not articulate the volume of the space they notionally occupy; here, the “roominess” of the dining room is palpable, with foreground and background spaces clearly articulated.97 96 A much grander silver service lies out on display in a fresco from the tomb of Vestorius Priscus (P30): see Clarke 2003 pl. 14 in color; for discussion and black-and-white images, see Dunbabin 2003a: 85–88; Mols and Moormann 1993/1994: 30–32 and 44. Compare the actual silver service found in the House of the Menander: Painter 2001: 14–25. 97 Fröhlich 1991: 194 is helpful for compositional matters. On funerary monuments, the occasional slave or eros appearing before or behind the couch does not really break the planar sense of the composition. One exception: Speidel 1994a no. 169 illustrates a dining scene from the grave stele of

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Turning from composition to content, we find further differences between this scene and those discussed previously. While texts describe the pleasures and consequences of convivial wine drinking, and while the funerary monuments allude to them, this painting puts them vividly on display. The woman standing at the left, whose drinking vessel suggests she is reeling from wine, probably belongs on the couch with the supine man in back, who himself has presumably fallen asleep or passed out from drinking.98 Indeed, the other diners’ gestures in her direction suggest a lively conversation, perhaps concerning what should be done about her. The woman on the rightmost couch holds an overturned glass in her dangling hand, another motif suggesting intoxication. In contrast to the dining scenes on funerary monuments, where probably no viewer, ancient or modern, would imagine that a story was being told, this scene clearly implies a sequence of discrete events and so has narrative content. Scholars have not proposed any specific narratives to account for the actions represented here (contrast the ingenuity expended on the Fabbro/ Giuseppe II scene, discussed earlier). Perhaps ancient diners, with their experience of producing ekphrastic narratives off-the-cuff, did better. Yet whatever narratives may have been attached to this scene, they were surely decorous accounts of the pleasures of wine, companionship, and conversation in pleasant surroundings. For the idealized youth and beauty of the participants, combined with the “unrealistic,” abstraction-signaling bare torsos of the men, begin to transport this scene from the particular to the universal: they announce that this is no snapshot of an actual event but a stereotyped scene of a certain kind of high-style convivial event with its associated pleasures. Here, the pleasures of (too much) wine are particularly emphasized, even as they are idealized. An overview of the remaining panels in this room confirms and nuances these observations. While no narrative has been suggested to “explain” the painting on the west wall, that on the east wall (P6, pl. 3) has been interpreted ingeniously as a drinking contest. Two couples are shown, each sharing a couch. On the left, a woman supports her man’s head and guides his right hand as he decants the contents of a drinking horn into his mouth. This couple is evidently victorious, while the couple on the right is defeated because the man has passed out, his left arm and drinking vessel dangling off the side of the couch. Presumably he cannot be revived by the efforts of the slave woman who stands behind, fanning his face; his partner, meanwhile, points a finger at her counterpart, perhaps accusing her of giving her own man too much assistance. A three-legged ungulate wooden table in the foreground displays a silver drinking service. The an eques singularis Augusti (second century a.d.) displaying an unparalleled articulation of foreground and background. The artist here may have innovated in an attempt to combine two traditionally separate images—the reclining diner and the horse-and-page—into a legible, single whole. 98 Cf. P9, pl. 5, where a slave supports a drunken man as he vomits. The drunkenness of such figures marks them as privileged diners, despite being on their feet, while the (literally) supporting role of

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garlands that the participants sport on their heads and necks—even the slave woman wears a leafy crown—reinforce the atmosphere of vinolent convivial pleasure.99 While this scene provides another heightened representation of the pleasures of convivial drinking, that on the north wall (P5, pl. 7) stresses those of convivial sexuality, for the couple reclining on the central couch kisses passionately. I defer discussion of this painting until chapter 2.4. Such heightened representation of convivial pleasure has caused two scholars who have written at length on the Casti Amanti paintings—Varone and Clarke—to interpret them as parodic, lighthearted exaggerations of real convivial experience. Indeed, Clarke argues that the participants, all ideally young, beautiful, and dressed (or rather undressed) in non-Roman ways, should be regarded as Greek youths and hetairai at symposia where things are going slightly out of control; that the Roman viewers dining in this room would have found humor in the contrast between their own, more reserved, dining practices and the foreign ones depicted in these panels.100 Clarke here is refining a long-standing interpretation of such dining scenes, which holds that they depict “youths reclining with courtesans.” This interpretation presupposes that these paintings are copies or adaptations of Greek paintings and therefore actually show Greeks engaged in behaviors that are properly understood in Greek cultural contexts—in this case, the symposium. I believe this interpretation is wrong. I contend, rather, that these scenes were constructed and interpreted according to the social expectations and within the cultural horizons of these houses’ proprietors and their guests.101 Clarke is right to ask what a the slaves marks them, characteristically, as inferior and subordinate. For drunken diners supine, see the panel on the opposite wall (P6, pl. 3) with Varone 1993: 629; also, the emperor Claudius often finished convivia supine and asleep on his couch from too much food and wine (Suet. Cl. 8, 33.1). In Hor. Serm. 2.4.38–40, the languidus conviva who will “put himself back up on his elbow” for sufficiently enticing food should perhaps be imagined as currently supine. 99 For the “drinking contest” interpretation, see Varone 1993: 628–29, and Clarke 2003: 228–30. Dunbabin 2003a: 53–54 is more cautious, merely describing the elements of the scene without suggesting a narrative. I speculate, again, that scholarly discussion about what narrative (if any) to supply with such a “genre” scene reproduces the ancient diners’ own debates and discussions about what such scenes represent. The dangling arm and cup of the man on the right seems a secure sign of drunkenness in this context; hence it is taken to mean the same thing in the scene on the west wall (P4, pl. 2, woman at right): see Varone 1993: 624 n. 36. 100 Clarke 2003: 228–33; also Varone 1993: 635. Clarke 2003: 233–45 deems the triclinium decoration in the casa del Moralista (see ch. 2.4) and casa del Triclinio (see §4d) to be more “Roman.” 101 The Hetärenbild interpretation goes back at least to Pfuhl 1923: 2.853–54; discussion and further bibliography in Fröhlich 1991: 180, 226–28, and n. 1290. The assumptions underlying this interpretation are (1) that a lost Hellenistic or classical Greek “original” lies behind these scenes; (2) that the women in those “original” Greek paintings must be hetairai, since only hetairai reclined with men in the Greek symposium and wives were excluded; and (3) that Roman viewers, too, would have interpreted these women as (Greek) prostitutes. Each of these assumptions is questionable. Regarding (1), since classical and Hellenistic Greek mural painting is almost entirely lost, its relationship to

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specifically Roman viewer might have made of such scenes. But I question whether this viewer is likely to have regarded the practices on display as fundamentally Greek, with the result (as Clarke suggests) that the viewer’s interpretation would be underpinned by a perception of cultural distance between himself or herself and the figures represented in these scenes. Such a view perhaps makes too much of the discontinuities between the convivial practices or ideals represented in these paintings and those of Roman dining proper, while undervaluing the continuities. Let us examine these continuities and discontinuities. First, as I will argue at length in chapter 2, free Roman women of (probably) every status normally dined reclining alongside free males—assuredly from the late Republic onward (hence in the period of these paintings), but probably from much earlier. Thus, the men and women depicted in these paintings as reclining together, and participating equally in the convivium, cannot ipso facto have appeared foreign to Romans who viewed these paintings as they themselves reclined, in this very dining room, in mixed-sex groups on dining couches. Second, the furniture and tableware depicted in these scenes are similar to other representations of Roman dining equipment: for not only are such objects seen on the funerary monuments and described in literary texts, but actual tables (as we have seen) and vessels in these forms have been recovered archaeologically.102 Third, while some of these scenes depict a single couch or pairs of couches with couples reclining on them, others—such as the one on the west wall here (pl. 2), and those in the casa del Triclinio discussed later, depict a triclinium in the etymological sense, with three couches. We have seen that numerous rooms in Camextant Roman paintings is difficult to assess. However, a stunning fresco of a sympotic scene, recently excavated in an elite Macedonian tomb of the late fourth century b.c. (Tsibidou-Avloniti 2002: 93–95), is strikingly unlike the Roman panel paintings and may augur ill for this assumption. Regarding (2), the assumption that only hetairai reclined with men may be broadly true for classical Athens but is far from certain for other classical Greek cities—let alone Hellenistic ones, where local sympotic practice sometimes admitted wives (see Burton 1998 in general, and Fabricius 1999: 183–90 on Hellenistic Rhodes). Regarding (3), note that scholars identify the women in classical Attic sympotic scenes as hetairai on the basis of what they know from other sources to be a contemporary social custom: the exclusion of wives, but inclusion of female entertainers, in the symposium. Hetairai must therefore be what the artists intended, and what Athenian viewers saw. Exactly the same reasoning, I submit, should govern interpretation of these Roman paintings as well: the women (like every other element in these scenes) should be interpreted in light of contemporary local practices that are otherwise attested, on the ground that Roman artists and viewers created and interpreted images in light of their own norms and practices. And as Roman norms and practices differed from Athenian ones, so the identification of and meaning ascribed to the women will differ. 102 The silver vessels are depicted in typically Roman/Italic styles: Dunbabin 2003a: 54 and n. 43. For the couches see n. 94 above. Whether actual Roman dining employed couches with drapery and little or no superstructure (as seen in paintings), or superstructure and no drapery (as seen on funerary monuments), or both, is uncertain.

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pania (including the one under discussion here) were designed and decorated to accommodate a three-couch arrangement, and that certain literary texts of the late Republic and early Empire assert or imply that this arrangement was normal, or at least normative, in Rome and Campania in our period (see n. 75). This is not, however, the arrangement of the archaic and classical Greek andron in which elite males dined and drank, nor does it reflect the arrangement of Hellenistic dining spaces, insofar as these are known from a few large buildings.103 In these respects, then, visually apparent similarities to actual Roman dining practices draw these paintings close to the lived experience of actual Roman diner/viewers, and to the visual culture already familiar to these Romans. Now for the discontinuities. As Clarke and others point out, the diners in these scenes are not clothed in Roman styles: the men are nude to the waist, and the women in the “drinking-contest” scene are nude to the waist and clothed only in a transparent garment, respectively (for the latter see ch. 2, n. 100); they are also idealized in their physical beauty and youth. The sartorial practice and bodily forms depicted in these scenes, then, are assuredly not those of the typical Roman convivium. But on the funerary monuments, both men (as we have seen) and women (as we shall see in chapter 2) are often portrayed as reclining to dine with bare torsos and idealized physical forms more generally, and scholars do not regard these figures as any less “Roman” on that account. The nudity of these painted diners can likewise be seen as an idealizing motif, imparting a timeless, essentialized character to the activities, values, and pleasures on display in these scenes. Here, it is the pleasures of wine and eroticism that are represented in heightened form and thus emphasized. So if the idealization of these figures removes them from the realm of everyday Roman conviviality, nevertheless the iconographic markers of idealization and exemplification are themselves familiar features of Roman convivial iconography in general. The most striking divergence from normal Roman convivial practice, however, is that the Casti Amanti scenes show no food on the tables but only drinking vessels. Indeed, this holds true for all painted dining scenes in which the objects on the tables can be made out. Scholars have reasonably interpreted these scenes as drinking parties, where the participants consume only wine and manifest its intoxicating effects. This is another basis on which such scenes are taken to show Greek symposia, where only drinking occurs (e.g., Clarke 2003: 228–30), or are taken at least to be derived from a tradition of 103

In contrast to the egalitarian ethos of the square andron of the archaic and classical period, the appearance of rectangular dining rooms in large Hellenistic houses/palaces may suggest that social hierarchies were by then being displayed in the arrangement of diners, see Dunbabin 2003a: 36–38 and 46–50, 1998: 82–89; Murray 1996: 21–26; also ch. 3 n. 10. Aside from their shape, however, these large Hellenistic dining spaces have little in common with the Roman triclinium. Bergquist 1990 surveys all identified Greek dining spaces (few domestic, however).

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symposium painting (e.g., Dunbabin 2003a: 63). Alternatively, these scenes are taken to show a so-called comissatio, which is held to be the Roman equivalent of the Greek symposion—a drinking party separate from and following the meal proper.104 The symposion interpretation is, I think, difficult to maintain in light of these scenes’ general compatibility with Roman dining and representational practices, as just discussed. And the comissatio interpretation is demonstrably incorrect, for standard Roman dining practice did not segregate eating and wine drinking into temporally discrete segments, as Greek practice did. There was no separate symposion-like event at all, under the name comissatio or any other name (see the appendix for full discussion).105 I do agree that Roman viewers must have been struck by the absence of food in these scenes, and must have perceived that one effect of this absence was to heighten the apparent role of wine in the unfolding of the events depicted here. They must have perceived a disjunction, in this respect, between their own dining practice and that depicted in the paintings. Perhaps, as Varone and Clarke suggest, they perceived themselves as more moderate, controlled, even civilized, than these painted figures who consume only wine and exhibit the consequences. Yet I do not believe that they would therefore have regarded these scenes on the whole as culturally alien, given the continuities with distinctively Roman convivial practice noted earlier. Rather, the “unrealistic” elements serve precisely to underscore and exaggerate certain characteristics of actual Roman dining already familiar to diners from their everyday practice: specifically, intoxication and eroticism. Satiric or parodic representations, as these images are, can achieve critical distance from their target only by means of difference. Whether their orientation toward the practice satirized—here, everyday Roman dining practices—is fond and playful or hostile and mocking, they achieve their effect through the use of marked differences against a background of unmarked similarities; the viewer then “bounces” between the alternatives of affiliation or alienation, complicity or distance. More on these matters later.106 104

Mau was the first to suggest that mural dining scenes from Campania depict the comissatio in full swing (Marquardt and Mau 1886: 331 n. 2); he refers specifically to the panels from the casa del Triclinio (P7–9, discussed in §d), which were excavated as he was revising Marquardt’s work (he offers a somewhat different interpretation of these paintings at 303 n. 3). See appendix. 105 On a few occasions in the course of a convivium, wine alone might be present on the tables: e.g., Petr. 39.1–2: . . . iam sublatum erat ferculum, hilaresque convivae vino sermonibusque publicatis operam coeperant dare. is ergo reclinatus in cubitum “hoc vinum” inquit “vos oportet suave faciatis. . . .” Only moments later, however, the next course of food arrives (40.3). Presumably the painted dining scenes are not intended to show these rare moments between courses of food, but to stress the presence and effects of wine in convivia for other reasons. 106 On the operation of parody and satire, see Hutcheon 1985: 29–49; Bayless 1996: 1–17. For the humor of the Casti Amanti paintings, see Clarke 2003: 230–33 (and ch. 8 passim), Varone 1993: 624–25.

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c. VI.16.36 Before developing this argument, however, let us examine dining scenes from two additional subelite Pompeian dining rooms, which provide further evidence for the relationship between diners and the images of dining that they view. The third such house is (the unnamed) VI.16.36, excavated in 1904 (fig. 10). It is the smallest of the four houses: at approximately 210 square meters, it falls near the low end of the third quartile, just above the median unit size. It has no atrium, but a central peristyle with columns on three sides; off this colonnade to the east opens one substantial room (H) offering a view through a wide door into the colonnade. Its floor is paved in a T + U pattern and includes an elegant square black-and-white mosaic emblema in the middle (effectively the downstroke of the “T”) along with a similar mosaic threshold. This floor pattern, along with the concern for viewlines manifest in the room’s orientation toward the peristyle, has caused it to be identified, plausibly, as a triclinium. The walls are decorated in a white third-style scheme, with central panel paintings surviving on the north and east walls; presumably a third existed on the south wall, most of whose plaster has perished. The painting on the north wall is a dining scene (P2), already in poor condition when excavated and not warranting illustration here. Certain elements in the scene can be made out, however. A single couch holds two figures: a man reclining at the couch’s head to the right (though his torso seems to be very upright for a reclining diner), and a woman seated at the foot, who seems to be changing her posture from sitting to reclining or vice versa. A slave stands to the far left, and a small table bearing a drinking vessel stands before the man. Two other paintings with a similar arrangement of figures are known from elsewhere in Campania, and are discussed in chapter 2.4 (P18, P21 [pl. 6]); for now, it suffices to observe that this painting instantiates a common type of dining scene that was more widely diffused. The central panel on the east wall, meanwhile, shows a poetic recitation—a fitting scene for a dining room, since poetic recitations are well attested in Imperial literary texts as forming part of the entertainment in elite convivia.107 Finally, the white side panels on both the north and east walls, flanking the figured central panels, contain vignettes of ivy crowns, appropriate headgear for festive convivia. The surviving mural decoration of this room, then, displays a program of figured panels and vignettes that exhibit to the diners who view it various aspects and accoutrements of leisured, luxurious, elite dining.108 107

E.g., Plin. Ep. 3.1.9, 8.21.1–3, 9.17.3; Petr. 59; Mart. Epig. 3.45, 50; Plut. Mor. 711E–12E; Gell. 9.19. In general see Jones 1991: 185–94. 108 Sampaolo, PPM V 981–82 describes the house; discussion of room H at pp. 986–91 figs. 9a–16 (p. 988 fig. 12 for the dining scene). In contrast to the houses discussed earlier, the finds in this house provide little information about the status or occupation of the final occupant beyond what the house’s size by itself already suggests: “I pochi oggetti ritrovati durante l’esplorazione avvenuta

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10. Ground plan, VI.16.36, Pompeii, after Van der Poel 1977.

d. Casa del Triclinio (V.2.4) The fourth and final house known to me in which central-panel dining scenes decorate the walls of a dining room is the casa del Triclinio (V.2.4, fig. 11), excavated in 1883–84. This is the largest of the four, falling in the lower portion of the fourth quartile at approximately 480 square meters. It is typical of large Pompeian houses, with an atrium complex in front and peristyle in back, the two elements organized by a strong viewline from the entrance through the peristyle.109 The room in question here is (r), sitting behind (north of) and nel corso del 1904, indicano un medio tenore di vita da parte del suo ultimo abitante, che poteva permettersi qualche suppellettile di bronzo, qualche gemma incisa” (Sampaolo 981–82). 109 Sampaolo, PPM III 797, and Clarke 2003: 240–41 in my view overemphasize the irregularities of the plan.

11. Ground plan, casa del Triclinio (V.2.4), Pompeii, after Van der Poel 1977.

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opening onto peristyle (o). The room’s south wall is pierced both by a narrow door that gives access and by a window that provides a view onto the portico (q) and peristyle beyond. Figured panel paintings were set in the centers of the remaining three walls (west, north, and east, P7–9), in a black-background fourthstyle decorative scheme dating to roughly the 50s a.d.110 This room’s viewlines, shape, size, location with respect to other spaces,111 and pattern of decoration have caused it to be identified as a triclinium, to which the house owes its name. The panel paintings, which were removed to the Naples museum subsequent to excavation, all feature dining scenes. Their distinctive style shares some characteristics with other dining scenes discussed previously, but is unique in other respects. Here I illustrate and discuss the two best-preserved panels. The one that originally occupied the center of the north wall (P8, pl. 4)—opposite the window and main door, hence directly confronting one who entered the room—shows a triclinium viewed from the open end of the U-shaped arrangement. The perspective is not exact: while in an actual triclinium the three couches sit at right angles to enclose three sides of a square, the artist here has opened the mouth of the U so that all three couches are viewed more or less frontally. Like those in the paintings discussed earlier, these couches have no superstructure, whether boards or fulcra, and are draped to the floor with blue spreads.112 On the leftmost couch a man and woman recline. The man is at the head, in the standard dining posture, holding a silver drinking vessel in his left hand. His torso is nude except for a colorful garland. He rests his right arm on the shoulder of the woman who reclines beneath him; she holds herself upright while draining a rhyton of wine into her mouth. Paint loss has effaced her torso, so her costume cannot be described. To the far left, behind the couch, stands a slave woman.113 On the center couch reclines a single 110 The room was reconfigured subsequent to its decoration: the access door had originally been at the south end of the east wall but was moved around the corner to the east end of the south wall (the old door then being walled up); also a further door was put through the north wall to give access to the tiny room (s). However, these alterations left the centers of the walls, hence the basic decorative scheme, undisturbed; indeed, the proprietor who initiated these changes preserved the scheme by plastering and painting the walled-up door to match the rest of the room. Thus we may conjecture that he thought these structural alterations enhanced the intended function of the room, the dining function that the decorative scheme was already designed to complement. On these matters, and for the date of the decoration, see Clarke 2003: 240; Fröhlich 1991: 222–23, 229; and Sampaolo, PPM III 798 (with further bibliography). 111 Aside from the peristyle, the most important space associated with (r) is room (u), which is likely an intimate reception space; see ch. 2.4 and n. 110 for discussion of these “tricliniumcubiculum suites.” 112 On the frontal perspective, see Clarke 2003: 151 and n. 60. Pleats in the spreads demarcate the ends of the couches. One pleat clearly visible to the right of the table marks the junction between the middle and right couch; paint loss to the left of the table has effaced the presumed pleat there. These pleats are much clearer in P9 (pl. 5), from the west wall. 113 This group of figures at the left resembles the group in P2, described earlier, and also those in P18 and P21. Thus this grouping is known in four versions—three of them freestanding, and one (here) part of a larger composition. Fröhlich 1991: 228 comments on this type-scene.

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bare-chested man, one arm over his head. On the right-hand couch reclines another mixed-sex couple. A balding man with a bare torso and red mantle reclines at the head in more or less the standard dining posture, though shown in rear profile, and holding a silver vessel in his left hand. He almost entirely obscures his female companion, who reclines below him and seemingly draws him toward her with her left hand (her fingers are visible on his right side)—perhaps for intense conversation or even a kiss, as their faces are close together.114 In the foreground— the area notionally enclosed by the three couches, and presumably within reach of all the reclining diners—stands a large three-legged table bearing the various silver implements and vessels of a wine service. This table seems not especially luxurious, as it is represented as made of wood (not bronze or marble), and its legs and feet have a simple zoomorphic form (perhaps canine). Red petals and blossoms are strewn on the table and floor. To the right stands a slave boy in a thigh-length tunic girt at the waist, holding a vessel in each hand. Precisely this kind of youthful male slave is seen on the grave monuments discussed earlier, but is rare in wall paintings (found elsewhere only twice: P9, P16). Above the diners’ heads float some words applied in fresco by the artist, presumably representing things said by and among the diners: facitis vobis suaviter (make yourselves comfortable), ego canto (I am singing), est ita valeas (so it is, to your health!).115 Awnings suspended above the couches indicate that this convivium takes place outdoors. Yet civilization is not far distant, as architectural forms are visible in the background, and the awnings appear to be supported by a column. This scene can be interpreted along lines already sketched in previous discussions. Here, once again, erotic pleasures are hinted at, at least for the reclining males, by the conjunction of reclining women and an adolescent male slave in the same scene. The diners’ costumes may underscore the erotic dimension of this convivial experience. For while the women’s dress is unclear, the bare torsos of all three men may augment the sexual charge already present, as well as marking an idealizing abstraction of the kind we have discussed repeatedly. And the iconographic emphasis on wine drinking, whose normal accoutrements are highly visible here, is once more underscored by the absence of food. In this respect, again, the scene does not represent normal or normative Roman convivial practice; it may well have struck the Roman viewer as excessively, and perhaps amusingly, stressing the pleasures of wine. New in this scene, for our purposes, is the manifestation of these pleasures in verbal form, through the words that the diners speak.116 114 Parallels for this rightmost couple with faces very close (possibly kissing) are seen in P12 and P14. 115 The

phrase suaviter (suave) esse/facere occurs six times in Petronius, and twice seems to imply having a good time with wine and food specifically (39.3, 71.11, perhaps 65.11); see Maiuri 1945: 229–30. Also, at Petr. 64.2–4 a guest sings for the entertainment of the other diners. 116 Richardson 2000: 177–78 interestingly argues that this artist was otherwise a painter of signs and programmata, hence the unusual intrusion of lettering into the scene. Further discussion of this painting at Clarke 2003: 243; Fröhlich 1991: 225–26.

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Now let us examine a second panel from this dining room—an even more distinctive scene, originally on the east wall (P9, pl. 5). Again three couches are viewed from the open end of the U, whose mouth the artist has opened very wide to show the couches frontally. They are draped with floor-length yellow covers, whose pleated corners mark the boundaries between the couches. The six diners, who apparently occupy the couches in pairs, are all males; women are entirely absent. While most of the diners are youthful, other “idealizing” features such as grand architecture and nude torsos are absent: the event takes place in a room featureless save for a large door that frames the right side of the scene, and all diners are clothed in what most scholars consider “realistic” Roman costume—tunics and mantles.117 The leftmost couch holds two men. One reclines at the head, and the other sits at the foot while a slave attends to his shoes. A second slave extends a drinking vessel toward him, which may suggest that he has just arrived. He is engaged in a discussion with his couchmate, whose arm rests on his shoulder and whose face is turned toward his; above their heads a graffito has been scratched, scio (I know). On the center couch a reclining man looks toward a bald man who appears to stand behind the couch, perhaps having just entered the room through the doorway behind. He is, just possibly, the same bald man who reclines at the far right in the panel from the north wall, just discussed.118 This man wears a green mantle, perhaps a toga, pulled over his head, and a crown of flowers; above him is a graffito that has been read as valetis (to your health). He is accompanied by an African slave boy who gestures toward the unoccupied position at the head of the center couch, as if inviting him to take his place there. Over this slave’s head is an illegible or incomplete graffito. On the rightmost couch a man reclines propped on his left elbow and holding a very large silver vessel in his right hand; above his head is the graffito bibo (I am drinking).119 He is alone on this couch, but his presumptive couchmate is in the foreground, doubled over vomiting and supported by a small tunicate slave—no decorous passing out from too much wine, as seen in the Casti Amanti paintings, but a rather frank portrayal of the less attractive physiological effects of overimbibing. No table is present in this scene, but the three youthful tunicate slaves in the foreground attend diligently to the diners’ various needs and desires. Red blossoms are again scattered on the floor. 117 At

least four figures in this scene—two foreground slaves and the leftmost two diners—have red stripes on their tunics or mantles. The meaning of these clavi is unclear, though they clearly do not mark a specific social status. For slaves with such clavi elsewhere in Roman art, see Fless 1995: 38, 57; Fröhlich 1991: 31. 118 So suggest Fröhlich 1991: 227; Clarke 2003: 242–45. No similar man is visible in the third panel from this room (P7, west wall), but several of the diners’ heads in this scene are too poorly preserved to be made out. The possibility therefore remains that the same man was depicted in all three paintings (on which see later). 119 For these graffiti, see CIL IV 4123; Zangemeister read the difficult valetis and saw something like ISISA above the slave. My own inspection of the latter graffito found a B (perhaps IS?) and O, widely spaced.

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Absent any reclining women to share these men’s couches, the pleasures of this convivium seem less erotic than those of the paintings discussed hitherto—though the slave boys, with their contrasting complexions and hair, may be supposed to represent the kinds of attractive, exotic slaves described in elite literary texts, and thus to provide sexual interest for the diners (as they also do on the funerary monuments).120 Other pleasures, however, are indicated by the graffiti. These scratched words obviously postdate the painting of the panel but predate the eruption of Vesuvius, and therefore represent an interpretation of this scene by a contemporary Roman viewer—perhaps the ebullient fuller L. Quintilius Crescens, who scratched numerous graffiti, including his own name, on columns in the peristyle (o) onto which this dining room opens.121 What did this viewer see in this image? He observed the iconographic stress on the pleasures of wine drinking (the vomiting man, the slave offering a cup to a guest), as his graffiti bibo and valetis show. More intriguingly, the graffito scio above the leftmost pair may suggest that he perceived some kind of significant communication taking place between these figures—perhaps his way of accounting for their close attention to one another. Scholars have suggested that these scenes are more “realistic” or “Roman” (and less “idealized” or “Hellenistic”) than most other surviving convivial paintings. The minimal backgrounds, the unambiguously Roman costumes worn by the diners on the east wall, and the colloquial Latin phrases hovering 120

The central slave has very white skin and wavy hair; the rightmost has a darker complexion and large curls; the rearmost is African, with black skin and curly hair. The head and face of the leftmost is too damaged to allow comparison. For the luxury and desirability of such coordinated but contrasting suites of slaves, see Sen. Ep. 95.24. Clarke’s suggestion (2003: 242–43) that this scene represents a Roman version of a Greek symposium, and that the privileged, free, reclining adult male diners are the objects of one another’s sexual impulses, seems unlikely. While sexual couplings between adult males are represented both in literature and visually (Clarke 1998: 38–42, 61–66; Williams 1999: 77–86), the participants are usually of widely divergent status (Williams ibid.), which these diners do not appear to be. Furthermore, all-male convivia depicted in literary texts give no hint of sexual attractions or entanglements among the invited, reclining guests: e.g., Hor. Serm. 2.8 passim; Sal. Hist. 3.83M with Plut. Sert. 26; probably Plut. Brut. 34.8; and Petr. 26–78 (only men recline in Trimalchio’s convivium, except for Fortunata, who reclines now and then, and Scintilla, who arrives late). Thus it is not clear that a Roman would regard a convivium as modeled on a Greek symposium, or infer sexual connections among the diners, just because the diners are all male. 121 Crescens should probably be attached to the fullonica at VI.14.22, rather than be considered the proprietor of this house (Sampaolo, PPM III 798). His graffiti, e.g., fullo L. Quintilius Cresces hic regnatus est (CIL IV 4107; for all the graffiti in this house, see ibid. 4100–23), suggest that his bout of vandalism was fueled by wine, presumably drunk during a convivium in this very dining room—a convivium during which, perhaps, he also added his interpretations to this panel painting (though the columns of the peristyle bear witness to other writers of graffiti, too). Perhaps the vandal was inspired by the frescoed words on the adjacent panel (ego canto, est ita valeas). But graffiti were also scratched above the diners in the convivial scene in the tomb of Vestorius Priscus (P30, Mols-Moormann 1993/1994: 28; now illegible). That artists and viewers of such scenes sometimes felt it appropriate to supply words may attest the ideological centrality of conversation to the convivium.

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above the diners on the north wall are unique among mural dining scenes and are taken to depict aspects of the actual Roman social and physical environment, presumably in accordance with this patron’s distinctive wishes.122 Indeed, the bald man who is present in these two panels—if he is the same man—must probably represent the patron who commissioned the paintings, who is also probably the (onetime) proprietor and host. This would bring these scenes, at least when originally painted, into a highly self-reflexive relation to actuality: the man who hosted convivia in this dining room is himself depicted as a convivial participant in paintings that grace the walls of this very room.123 Yet the social function of these panels must not be distinguished too sharply from that of the other panels discussed previously. Self-reflexivity is present in those cases, too: dining scenes decorate one or more walls of rooms designed for dining; anyone reclining to dine in these rooms would therefore view scenes depicting persons reclining to dine (or drink, at any rate). All such scenes, moreover, show a preponderance of features that converge with actual Roman dining practices. Yet all also show at least a few features—such as nude torsos or the absence of food—that diverge from regular Roman dining practice and thereby interpose a distance between that practice and the scenes represented. I discuss in a moment the (possible) effects of this combination of “familiarity plus distance” on the viewer in this self-reflexive viewing situation. Furthermore, in all these cases this self-reflexivity has a consistent social dynamic: these images of idealized elite dining complement dining spaces in which the host, and for the most part his guests, could be expected to be subelites. This pattern is socially significant. It is true that the great majority of dining rooms in houses of the third and lower fourth quartiles are decorated not with dining scenes but with mythological panels;124 therefore, one can hardly argue that subelites were universally preoccupied with images of idealized elite dining and such images’ relationship to their own dining practices. Still, with one likely exception, every central-panel dining scene in a subelite house comes from a dining room. That is, subelites tended not to use such scenes elsewhere in their houses, which suggests that they regarded these scenes as having a specific social function in complementing dining space.125 In the 122 On

the “realism” of the casa del Triclinio paintings, in contrast to the sorts of scenes discussed earlier, see Dunbabin 2003a: 58–59; Clarke 2003: 239–45; Fröhlich 1991: 226–28. 123 I accept that this was a privately owned house, not an inn/caupona, at least when the triclinium was decorated: thus Clarke 2003: 239–40; Fröhlich 1991: 227–28. Dunbabin 2003a: 59 leaves this question open. 124 Ling 1995 surveys Pompeian triclinium decorations of the late second through fourth styles. His study makes clear the heavy preponderance of mythological themes, with Dionysiac themes moderately prominent. 125 The exceptional panel painting (P1), now in the Naples museum, originally adorned the north wall of a room off the atrium of the casa di Laocoonte, VI.14.30. The house’s ground area at that time was perhaps 200 m2, low in the third quartile. This third-style panel shows a couple reclining on a couch, an unusual square table before them; another woman and a slave stand to the left. This

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very largest and grandest houses, on the other hand, the dining scenes that appear seem to have entirely other functions, as I discuss later (§f). A few representations of reclining dining in subelite units do occur in formats other than panel painting: for instance, a tiny vignette that appears among other motifs in one room of a small workshop (P31); several such scenes painted on lararia (P27–29); and Nilotic friezes from the peristyles of houses of the third and lower fourth quartile that show Pygmies engaged in various activities, including dining (P22–23). But in no such case does such a dining scene constitute a prominent element in the overall decoration, or a clear focus for the attention of people present in these spaces; this can be said only of central-panel paintings. It appears that, for the proprietors of such houses, there was a particular affinity between substantial panel paintings showing convivial scenes, and the actual spaces in which convivia occurred. e. Provisional Conclusions: Subelites and Self-Reflection What, then, is this pattern’s social significance? In discussing the painting in the casa del Fabbro, I suggested two domains in which ancient (subelite) viewers might have constructed meanings for such a scene. First, materialism: I argued that this scene put on display a fantasy of elite leisure and luxury, to which these viewers might feel affiliated given their own aspirations to social success and belonging. Second, erudition: I suggested that such scenes spurred viewers to comprehend and assimilate them through narrative. Competitive displays of learning (or pseudo-learning) might result, which are themselves well-attested desiderata in elite convivia. Both the materialism represented in the scenes and the displays of erudition they might provoke could serve as indices of social status, and vehicles by which subelite viewers might articulate their status aspirations. The coincidence of form and content, however—that scenes of dining are painted on the walls of dining rooms—suggests a third possible mode of reception: that the (mostly subelite) diners are invited to reflect consciously upon how these represented convivia relate to their own dining practices at the moment. On the funerary monuments, the deceased himself is shown partaking of leisured, luxurious, elite dining, “embodying” through his posture and surroundings the high status and social integration that he claims as his due. The paintings, on the

room was subsequently detached from VI.14.30, opened to the street, and converted into a one-room shop (now numbered VI.14.29), and the house simultaneously underwent other changes (Bragantini, PPM V 341). No other middle-range house has a panel-painted dining scene in a room off the atrium; however, a similar arrangement occurs in the grand casa di Meleagro (P18, §4f below). Two panel-painted dining scenes in the Naples museum (P19–20) have traditionally been assigned to a small workshop at I.3.18. This assignment is now known to be wrong; their actual provenance is completely unknown, save that they were excavated somewhere in Campania in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century (Varone 1997: 149). P19, pl. 8 is discussed in ch. 2.4.

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other hand, do not seem to depict specific persons (unless the proprietor of the casa del Triclinio is depicted in P8–9). Yet the viewers of these paintings might “embody” elite conviviality in a different way: they might think themselves into the figures depicted in these scenes, reflecting upon their own feelings and social positionality using as an armature the painted scenes depicting the very activity in which they themselves are at that moment engaged. Such a social dynamic may also occur with other paintings depicting scenes of everyday life. For instance, at least three wool-processing establishments in Pompeii are decorated with images of fullers or felters at work; several taverns contain paintings showing patrons who not only eat and drink but also gamble, brawl, and engage in other activities that were thought to characterize such establishments (see §6); and the brothel at VII.12.18–20 famously contains a series of erotic paintings that may have provoked a degree of self-reflection for the establishment’s (probably) subelite patrons.126 Finally, recent years have seen much scholarly debate about whether erotic paintings found in domestic settings articulate spaces for sexual activity. The answer is probably no—that is, sexual scenes painted on walls probably did not, in general, define spaces for sex or “illustrate” what went on in these rooms. Nevertheless, several erotic images survive in which the primary sexual activity is depicted as occurring in a room whose wall is itself graced with an erotic painting, as though this (inset) painting set the tone or established a paradigm for what was occurring beneath it.127 So while we should not imagine that scenes of “everyday life” illustrate such activities precisely as they actually occurred, nor need they indicate the precise spaces for such activities, there is still enough coincidence between the represented activities and spaces that certainly or possibly contained these activities to suggest that Roman viewers might indeed engage with images self-reflexively, at least in certain situations. Self-reflection is also manifest in the few texts from our period that describe viewers looking at painted scenes. In Terence’s Eunuchus (late 160s b.c.), the character Chaerea, who masquerades as a eunuch in order to approach his beloved, is inspired to rape her upon contemplating a painted image of Jupiter approaching Danae in the form of golden rain; he explicitly notes the similarity of Jupiter’s situation to his own and proposes to follow this divine model.128 In 126 Scenes

of wool processing in or near establishments where such work occurs: VI.8.20–21 (Sampaolo, PPM IV 609 figs. 8b–c); VI.14.21–22 (Bragantini, PPM V 328–31 figs. 34–39); and IX.7.7 (Sampaolo, PPM IX 776–77); also Moeller 1976: 44–49 and 54. I thank Eleanor Leach for drawing my attention to these instances of self-reflection. Tavern scenes in taverns: see nn. 164–65 below. Intercourse scenes in brothel: Clarke 1998: 196–206. 127 On the self-reflection that erotic scenes in domestic contexts might (or might not) provoke, see Clarke 1998: 59–118, 145–94 (and passim); Myerowitz 1992: 148–55 (and passim); cf. Suet. Tib. 43.2, 44.2 (with Riggsby 1997: 37–39); Ov. Ars Am. 2.679–80; Prop. 2.6.27–34 (with Clarke 1998: 276–77). For erotic scenes where sexual activity occurs beneath an (equally) erotic pinax painted on the wall of the room, see Clarke 1998: 201–2 and fig. 83; 166–69 and fig. 60; also figs. 57–58. 128 Ter. Eun. 583–92; painting described at 584–85. Chaerea notes that Jupiter “played the same game” as he himself plays (586–91): quia consimilem luserat / iam olim ille ludum, impendio magis

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Vergil’s Aeneid, Aeneas quite literally finds himself in the painting of episodes from the Trojan War that adorns Juno’s temple in Carthage; precisely because he himself is depicted in the painting, he assumes that other viewers will identify with his plight and feel for themselves the pathos of his situation.129 In the first century a.d., Petronius places his protagonist Encolpius in a picture gallery (Sat. 83) to view paintings of divinities and their human loves (Jupiter abducting Ganymede, the nymphs abducting Hylas, Apollo lamenting Narcissus). Having just lost his own beloved to a rival, Encolpius interprets these paintings as images of divine blessedness, since the gods—in contrast to himself—love without rivals. Finally, Plutarch reports (Brut. 23) that Porcia, preparing to separate from her husband, Brutus, shortly before the battle of Philippi, was moved to tears by a painting of Hector parting from Andromache.130 In each case, the viewer is depicted as feeling affiliated or alienated, complicit or distant (or both simultaneously): at any rate, as reflecting upon his or her current situation through the painted scene. The paintings described in these passages all have mythological themes and are not typical scenes of “everyday life” showing, for example, dining, sex, or trades. But if mythological paintings admit a selfreflexive mode of engagement, scenes of daily life would seem all the more likely to admit, even encourage, such engagement—and dining scenes in particular, painted on the walls of the rooms in which the activity occurs. Indeed, these dining scenes are well designed to provoke feelings of either affiliation or alienation (or both at once) in their viewers. On the one hand, they idealize the physical forms and surroundings of the event, while on the other hand, they exaggerate the eroticism and intoxication that are potential features of any convivium. As such they have a satiric or parodic character. Do such images trouble and repel viewers with their depiction of dissipation, thus affirming for them the value of self-control? Or do they put forth an attractive, appealing image of carefree leisure in materially luxurious surroundings? Or both simultaneously, so that viewers oscillate between feelings of complicity and distance, depending on what elements of the image they focus upon?

animus gaudebat mihi / deum sese in hominem convertisse . . . per impluvium fucum factum mulieri. / at quem deum! . . . ego homuncio non facerem? ego illud vero ita feci, ac lubens. Also Plaut. Capt. 998–1000, where Tyndarus’s experience in the quarries reminds him of paintings depicting the torments of Acheron. 129 Verg. Aen. 1.455–93; he finds himself at 1.488: se quoque principibus permixtum agnovit Achivis. At 1.459–63 he assumes others will feel what he experienced: . . . sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi; / sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. 130 Here, Brutus declares that he would never say to Porcia what Hector said to Andromache. But whether the viewer sees herself vividly in a figure in the painting (as Porcia presumably does in Andromache) or refuses to see himself in a figure (as Brutus does in relation to Hector), the question of each viewer’s affiliation with figures in the image defines its meaning for these viewers. On viewers’ self-recognition in mythological paintings, with further discussion of the Petronius and Plutarch passages, see Zanker 1999: 40–41.

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Might these images even provide a behavioral paradigm, leading the viewer/ diners to seek through their own actions to close the gap between these representations and the reality of their actual dining situation, or conversely to keep that gap open? Here, then, is a third domain in which viewers might find meaning in these images: the domain of personal conduct and ethics, of what constitutes proper or desirable behavior. If satire is, among other things, a moralizing discourse directed at social practices, then these images’ satiric quality— their participation in a discourse about proper convivial behavior—is only sharpened by the fact that they decorate the walls of dining rooms, and have a relationship to the dining events that happen before them. I resume this discussion in chapter 2.4, following an examination of women’s convivial posture. No doubt still other kinds of meaning could be made from these images. For instance, scholars have recently pointed out that many mythological panel paintings depict the central figure as an ideally beautiful nude. Such scenes offer their viewers a moment of “erotic fascination,” that is, attraction and arousal that is immediately available thanks to the nude figure itself, regardless of the specific myth being represented (e.g., Ariadne, Endymion, Narcissus), and regardless of any ethical, aesthetic, or intellectual “programs” in which the paintings might also participate.131 Nudes of this sort do not occur in our dining scenes (though P6, pl. 3, and P21, pl. 6, come close). Yet this observation reminds us that meaning can be found almost anywhere, and is intensely personal and individualized. Nevertheless, it seems possible to map out particularly problematic areas where convivial and iconographic practices intersect, and within which meaning is especially likely to have been generated. Materialism, erudition, and proper conduct seem to be three such areas that emerge when subelite status anxiety encounters the practice and iconography of dining. Such encounters occur in subelite dining rooms decorated with paintings such as I have been discussing. f. Grand Houses My contention would be undermined, however, if this coincidence of rooms and images occurred in grand houses as well. For then the self-reflexivity that I explain as an aspect of subelite identity formation would require a different explanation in the context of elite proprietors and more numerous high-status dinner guests. In fact, however, the pattern differs. Panel-painted dining scenes do occur (P10–18) in houses that rank in the upper fourth quartile for size— houses built and usually decorated on a scale that implies occupants of substantial wealth and perhaps even decurial rank. But these paintings do not occur in the pattern identified earlier for smaller houses. From the vast, lavishly decorated casa di Meleagro (IV.9.2, 1,230 m2) comes a fourth-style panel (P18) 131 For “erotic

fascination,” see Fredrick 1995: 273–76; also Zanker 1999: 44–46.

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showing a reclining man with a bare torso, who rests his right hand on the shoulder of a woman who seems to be rising from or settling into the reclining posture against his chest; a table with drinking vessels sits before them. This scene closely resembles P21 (pl. 6), which comes from an unknown location in Herculaneum and is discussed in chapter 2.4. It also resembles the panel from the dining room of the modest house VI.16.36 (P2, discussed previously). In the grand house, however, the scene comes from a small room (12) opening off the atrium, just to the right of the fauces; this is assuredly not a dining room but may function—like other small, decorated rooms adjoining the atrium in larger houses—as a relatively intimate reception space for callers attending the proprietor’s morning salutatio. A second panel in this room shows Ganymede being abducted by the eagle (the third panel is destroyed); why these scenes, with their erotic overtones, constitute appropriate decor for private meetings with morning callers (if that is indeed the room’s intended function) is open to question.132 Meanwhile, from the slightly smaller but still immense house at IX.1.22/29 (ca. 1,000 m2) comes a sharply truncated version (P16) of a scene found in the casa dei Casti Amanti (P4, pl. 2).133 It adorns a small, rather isolated room (z) that opens onto a large peristyle (y). This room’s possible function or range of functions is not clear, but it was assuredly not a primary dining or reception space in this house.134 And, again, from the monumental casa di Giuseppe II (ca. 900 m2) comes one version (P15, fig. 8) of the scene also preserved in the dining room of the casa del Fabbro (P3, pl. 1). But since this painting is no longer in situ, and no information about its provenance within the house is recorded, we can say nothing more about the kind of social space it may have complemented. Three other grand houses, to my knowledge, contain panel paintings with dining scenes. These paintings perhaps pose a few more difficulties for my contention, since they appear in spaces that admit at least the possiblity of dining. In the casa del Criptoportico (I.6.2, ca. 1,200 m2), the cryptoporticus—an underground walkway of the sort familiar from luxurious suburban villas, and a rare amenity in townhouses —gives access to an “oecus” (room 22) with elaborate, late second-style decoration dating to 40 to 30 b.c. A number of small 132

For the (possible) reception functions of small rooms opening off the atrium, see Dickmann 1999: 98–103, 279–81. For room 12 of the casa di Meleagro and its decoration, see Bragantini, PPM IV 688–89 figs. 60–61; on the whole house and its decoration, ibid. 660. 133 In this version, the rightmost couch and its associated table, along with the center couch bearing the supine man, are eliminated and replaced by an adolescent male slave in a short tunic, who looks toward the remaining couple and the standing woman to the left (Varone 1993: 636 illustrates two nineteenth-century drawings of this painting; also Clarke 2003: 232–33). The painting itself is now illegible: PPM VIII 1000 fig. 76 and 1002 fig. 78. 134 See PPM VIII 956 for a plan of this house. Its proprietor, in its latest years at least, has been identified from electoral programmata near the entrance as Epidius Sabinus or Cuspius Pansa, in either case men who reached the duovirate: see PPM loc. cit., with Franklin 2001: 149–51 (on Cuspius), 156–63 (on Epidius).

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figured panels grace the upper register of the wall; among these is a scene (P17) showing two satyrs or silens flanking a bare-breasted maenad, all three of whom recline on a single couch to drink (there is no table, but a large wine cooler instead), attended by two small satyr-slaves. This, the earliest painted convivial scene of which I am aware, shows the three reclining figures (apparently) in states of fairly decorous intoxication. The scene’s Dionysiac overtones are complemented by erotic ones, since satyrs are commonly imagined, and represented, in hot sexual pursuit of maenads.135 Indeed, satyrs, embodying the pleasures of eroticism and wine in extreme form, make amusing participants in a dining scene, since dining is a social practice for which the degree of acceptable immersion in these pleasures is constantly being negotiated. The satyrs, then, make the image more overtly satiric (literally and figuratively) than human figures would do.136 Convivia certainly could have been held in this room: its size and shape, along with a ceiling configuration dividing it into an anteroom and alcove, are common features of dining room architecture, and its heavy decoration suggests it was an important reception space. However, it lacks other characteristic features, such as viewlines into a portico and telltale patterns in the floor paving, that might confirm that it was designed and decorated with dining in view. But if we do imagine diners (including elites) reclining to eat and drink in this room, at least on occasion, would the painting in question have spurred self-reflection? This seems doubtful: it is but one figured panel among many bearing diverse images, all of which are furthermore restricted to a narrow upper zone of the walls. This panel’s lack of prominence does not leave the impression that it was designed to loom, or would have loomed, especially large in the psychological and ideological landscape of any convivium that might have taken place here. The second case of a grand house exhibiting panel paintings with dining scenes admits a similar analysis. The casa di Marcus Lucretius (IX.3.5/24, ca. 770m2) is both large and extensively decorated; moreover, an inscription in a wall painting was read as giving the proprietor’s name as M. Lucretius and identifying him as a decurion (Bragantini, PPM IX 141–42; CIL IV 879). The house’s largest enclosed space is room 16, identified as a triclinium thanks to its viewlines into a garden out a large window in the north wall, and its elaborate decoration: for it has a mosaic floor (though not in any of the telltale patterns 135 For the house, see Spinazzola 1953: 437–593 and Bragantini, PPM I 193–95. Marks of especial luxury include the cryptoporticus and a private bath. For the sexual impulses of silens/satyrs, see, e.g., Ov. Met. 1.692, 14.637, Fast. 1.397 (etc.); Col. 10.1.147; Plin. Nat. 5.7; Sil. 3.103; Hyg. Fab. 169. For the iconographic tradition (Greek, Etruscan, and Roman) of satyrs amorously pursuing maenads, see Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae VIII.1.781–89, 793–95 (nos. 53–82, 115–31, 139–43); also Clarke 1998: 50–54. 136 The same applies to Nilotic scenes that show Pygmies dining, since their (in Roman eyes) nonnormative somatotype makes them apt vehicles for exploring the limits of civilized behavior; more in ch. 2.4.

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that commonly identify triclinia) and a series of three large and six small panel paintings. The large panels occupy the centers of three walls, while the fourth wall is consumed by a wide door—typical features of triclinia decorated in the third and fourth styles, as we have seen. These scenes have thematic relevance to conviviality, as two show the triumph of Dionysus and the third a drunken Hercules.137 The six smaller panels fill some of the wall space remaining around the large central panels; all show winged erotes and psychae engaged in various activities. In four of the six they dine, in each case reclining in open air under a sunshade, and reveling in the pleasures of music, dance, wine, and eroticism.138 Numerous as they are, however, these dining scenes seem unlikely to be intended, or able, to spur significant self-reflection among guests, who recline to dine in this room. These diner-viewers might be less ready to see themselves in nonhuman figures than in human ones; moreover, these panels are again secondary decorations, not the large central panels that are designed to dominate the diners’ attention. They are connected thematically to the Dionysian theme of the central panels but cannot plausibly be imagined to carry much exemplary weight in and of themselves.139 The third instance is again similar. The substantial casa del Trittolemo (VII.7.5, ca. 700 m2) contains a room (m) decorated with various panels in the upper zone, including—reportedly—a scene of erotes dining (P10). This painting’s appearance is unknown, as the panel is now illegible and was never photographed or drawn. The room in question has a wide door opening onto the peristyle, giving a view down one leg of the colonnade. Yet it is awkwardly shaped for a triclinium, and apparently lacks the additional features (floor patterns, anteroom/alcove configuration) that often mark dining spaces; moreover, a much superior dining space—clearly the premier reception space in this house—is located just doors away, at room (q). Even if dining occasionally took place in room (m), the panel under discussion is no more prominent in the decorative scheme than the single such panel in the grand “oecus” of the casa del Criptoportico, and can hardly have stimulated significant self-reflection among its viewers. Convivial paintings in grand houses thus do not display the pattern of usage identified earlier for subelite houses. In the latter, virtually all panel paintings of reclining dining are located in dining rooms as the central and largest image on 137

Ling 1995: 241 considers these panels “almost the archetypal Dionysiac decoration,” and observes their thematic connection with the six subsidiary panels—though he argues more generally that Dionysiac decoration is not especially common in Pompeian triclinia. 138 See P11–14. Eroticism: P14 certainly, and P12 perhaps, shows a pair kissing; further discussion of kissing diners in ch. 2.4. 139 See Clarke 1998: 93–107 (esp. 107) for similar thoughts about the relationship between the erotic secondary panels in the cubicula of the Villa under the Farnesina and any sexual activity that might occur in these rooms.

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one or more walls; hence they play major roles in these rooms’ decoration. In the former, panel paintings of dining tend to be smaller and noncentral, hence play a subordinate role in the decoration; they also tend to depict nonhuman figures, to occur in rooms serving a variety of reception functions (when their functions are identifiable at all), and to be juxtaposed in those rooms with a variety of other scenes. I interpret this result to mean that engaging in conscious self-reflection about dining practices—at least, through viewing painted dining scenes—was not a way in which elites formed their social identity, as it was for subelites. But this is unsurprising. We saw previously that elites defined their essential social being through their negotia—their advocacy on behalf of clients, their office holding, and the like. For them, otium and its associated activities, including dining, was what they did precisely when they were not inhabiting and constructing their essential social identity by pursuing their negotia. Meanwhile, subelites, especially freedmen, formulated their claim to social belonging in part by appropriating aspects and images of elite leisure, the most important of which was luxurious, reclining dining. If we seek a parallel at the elite social level for the self-reflexive subelite practice, we might look to the essays and handbooks that self-consciously articulate and reflect upon proper elite aims, actions, and behavior, especially in the realm of negotia: texts like Cicero’s De Officiis, Q. Cicero’s Commentariolum Petitionis; Seneca’s De Clementia or De Tranquillitate Animi (along with innumerable lost Stoic treatises on proper behavior), and various rhetorical treatises. In the visual sphere there are honorific statues, buildings erected ex manubiis, and other monuments that commemorate an honorand’s achievements as a magistrate and thereby thrust those achievements before the eyes of others. In and through texts and monuments like these, elite identity and values were constructed in a self-reflexive manner, just as subelite identity was constructed self-reflexively through exhibiting, on the walls of dining rooms, substantial panel paintings showing leisured, elite reclining dining.

5. Alternative Postures and the Rejection of Otium The evidence from literary texts, funerary monuments, and wall paintings is overwhelming and consistent: throughout our period, free adult males of every status normally reclined at convivia, assuming the posture associated with pleasure, otium, luxury, and social privilege broadly—though, as we have seen, the specific sociocultural implications of the posture varied with the medium and with the social status of the persons involved. It is striking, then, to encounter situations where such males sit or stand to dine, rather than reclining, whether voluntarily or perforce. Such men are conspicuously marked out as not enjoying the privilege, pleasure, and otium that the reclining posture, to which they are ordinarily entitled, universally signals. Virtually all such representa-

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tions come from literary texts and refer mostly to elites; for them, the apparent social abasement is all the more noteworthy. These texts tend, however, to suggest reasons for the anomaly, reasons that further illuminate the ideology and practice of posture in the Roman convivium. When free adult males sit or stand at convivia, it is often implied that they have suffered a status reduction, rendering them inferior to others who recline. Standing signals the sharpest status reduction, since this is stereotypically the posture of slaves, as we have seen in both literary and visual representations. Just as the standing posture marks the slave’s essential exclusion from the leisure and pleasures shared by the reclining diners, and signals that his or her role in the convivium is instrumental, so too we will see that free adult makes who are depicted as standing are, at least sometimes, thereby implied to be reduced to slavish instrumentality. A striking instance occurs in Livy (24.16.12–18), describing the situation of the slave-volunteers who were enrolled in the army after the battle of Cannae. After several years of meritorious service their commander, Tib. Sempronius Gracchus, promises them freedom provided they prevail in an impending battle. They do: but some fight poorly in the course of this battle, while others are conspicuous for their valor. As promised, Sempronius frees the lot—stipulating, however, that those who disgraced themselves must eat and drink standing for the remainder of their military service, and must serve their braver comrades, who would henceforth dine reclining. Thus Sempronius requires some of these soldiers to adopt the characteristically slavish posture and duties at mealtimes, binding them symbolically to their former status as a mark of humiliation; meanwhile, he allows the others to assume the reclining dining posture that is both the privilege and the symbol of the free status they have just acquired, and that carries its meaning precisely through its contrast with the standing posture of the first group.140 High-ranking aristocrats may also experience this reduction in status. When Suetonius describes the humiliations that the emperor Caligula heaped upon senators, noting in particular that he “allowed certain men who had discharged the highest magistracies to stand as he dined, now at the back of the couch and now at his feet, wearing a linen garment girded at the waist,” we recognize the telltale costume of the slaves who stand in attendance at the couch of their reclining master as he dines.141 Thus the specific humiliation experienced by these lofty senators is that they assume the function, posture, and appearance of slaves in convivia—slaves, moreover, of Caligula himself, who is iconographically their master. In this way the emperor asserts that he surpasses them 140 Koortbojian

2002: 35 discusses the symbolism of this episode. Cf. Apul. Met. 4.8, where the robbers, an egalitarian society, draw lots to determine who serves and who reclines. The particular status positions encoded in the different convivial postures and roles are therefore not durably attached to anyone but are distributed by chance at each meal. 141 Suet. Cal. 26.2: quosdam summis honoribus functos . . . cenanti modo ad pluteum modo ad pedes stare succinctos linteo passus est. See n. 35 on succincti, along with (e.g.) figs. 1–3, pls. 4–5.

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in status to the same degree and in the same ways that masters typically surpass their own slaves.142 The anecdotes involving Julius Caesar at the court of King Nicomedes of Bithynia in 81–80 b.c. likewise show the aristocrat suffering “slavish” degradation by standing in a convivium. Suetonius (Iul. 49.2) reports a number of invective sententiae alleging that Caesar, then nineteen or twenty years old, was sexually penetrated by the older Nicomedes; among them is the following: “Gaius Memmius makes the accusation that he [Caesar] even stood as cupbearer . . . to Nicomedes, alongside the other male prostitutes [exoleti], in a full convivium where some traders from the city of Rome were reclining, and he gives their names.”143 The claim that Caesar “stood with the other prostitutes” as the king’s cupbearer again alludes to the stereotype of the attractive, sexually receptive adolescent male slave who serves wine at the convivia of the wealthy: Caesar, Memmius alleges, has assumed this slavish posture, along with all the personal services to the master—including sexual ones—that it implies. Accusations that Roman aristocrats submitted sexually as adolescents to older men are a standard invective topos in the political wrangling of the late Republic and have been much discussed in recent years; one aim of such accusations was to reduce their target to political impotence by branding him with slavish (or womanly) character, evidenced by sexual penetration.144 And the claim that Caesar stood “among the other exoleti”—a word designating “male prostitutes” irrespective of age, but sometimes in addition carrying its etymological charge of “mature male prostitute”—may hint that he was getting too old for the role of (attractive, penetrable) adolescent that he was then playing. And to accuse a mature male of enjoying being penetrated, that is, of being a cinaedus, constitutes more wicked invective still.145 Finally, the observation that Roman traders were present and reclining in this same convivium implies that these men could attest in Rome to the entire disgraceful scene, and to the social inversion (adult male aristocrat symbolically “enslaved”) that it put on display. The standing posture assumed by the adult male aristocrats in these passages, then, conflates them with slaves by reducing them to instrumentality—whether bringing up the dishes and drinks that serve the reclining male diners’ gustatory pleasure, titillating or even satisfying their sexual desires, or discharging other such tasks—and so strips them of the privilege and status, as well as the leisure and pleasure, associated with the reclining posture that they themselves would ordinarily be expected to assume. 142 On the figuration of the emperor as a “master” in relation to his aristocratic subjects in the JulioClaudian period, see Roller 2001: 247–64. 143 Suet. Iul. 49.2: sed C. Memmius etiam ad cyathum †et ui Nicomedi stetisse obicit cum reliquis exoletis pleno convivio accubantibus nonnullis urbicis negotiatoribus quorum refert nomina. 144 For the sociopolitical implications of imputing sexual passivity to elite males, see Williams 1999: 75–77, 188; Corbeill 1996: 143–54; Edwards 1993: 63–81. 145 On the social construction of cinaedi, see Williams 1999: 172–97, 215–18, with further references.

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Cicero presents a somewhat different case in the third Verrine oration. Amid a catalogue of Verres’s misdeeds (Ver. 2.3.53–63), Cicero describes how Verres’s lackey Apronius mistreated the Roman equestrian Q. Lollius, who had justifiably but rashly declared that he would give no more than he owed to the tax farmers (§61). Apronius summoned Lollius, who arrived just as Apronius and his companions were taking their positions on the couches for dinner. Lollius was left to stand, despite his great age and auctoritas—being an equestrian and nearly ninety years old (§62). He was neither dismissed nor invited to recline; he could only stand and watch as Apronius’s slaves brought food and drink to the diners, and was at a loss for what to say or do as they laughed at him. “Through these humiliations, judges,” Cicero concludes, “know that Lollius was forced to accede to Apronius’s terms and conditions”—that is, to pay considerably more than he owed.146 This humiliation (contumelia) clearly consists partly in being made to stand, despite his age and status, rather than being invited to recline and eat alongside the other diners. Here his standing posture does not directly assimilate him to the slaves, since he is not required to offer service himself: it merely strips him of the privilege, leisure, and luxury that are associated with reclining and that ordinarily attend a man of his status. Standing is not the only posture marking inferior status, however: we also hear of free adult males sitting in convivia, to distinguish them from superiors who recline. In Plautus’s Stichus the parasite Gelasimus tries to elicit a dinner invitation from the newly wealthy trader Epignomus (486–94). Epignomus demurs, objecting that he already has a group of nine diners for that evening— envoys (oratores) from Ambracia, no less, men of the loftiest status (summi viri). Thus he implies both that the couches are full (presumably he counts three couches holding three diners each), and that the low-status Gelasimus is no fit company for the guests already invited. To these objections Gelasimus replies that he does not need to recline on a couch but would sit on a bench, and that he is content to occupy a place reflecting his low status; eventually he even offers to dine standing.147 Similarly willing to be degraded through position and 146

Cic. Ver. 2.3.62: statuitur Lollius in illo tempestivo gladiatorum convivio. . . . statuitur, ut dico, eques Romanus annos prope XC natus in Apronii convivio, cum interea Apronius caput atque os suum unguento confricaret. “quid est, Lolli,” inquit, “tu nisi malo coactus recte facere nescis?” homo quid ageret taceret responderet, quid faceret denique illa aetate et auctoritate praeditus nesciebat. Apronius interea cenam ac pocula poscebat; servi autem eius qui et moribus isdem essent quibus dominus et eodem genere ac loco nati, praeter oculos Lollii haec omnia ferebant. ridere convivae, cachinnare ipse Apronius . . . ne multa, iudices: his contumeliis scitote Q. Lollium coactum ad Apronii leges condicionesque venisse. 147 Plaut. Stich. 486–93: Ge. vin ad te ad cenam veniam? Ep. si possim, velim; / verum hic apud me cenant alieni novem. / Ge. hau postulo equidem me in lecto accumbere; / scis tu me esse unisubselli virum. / Ep. at ei oratores sunt populi, summi viri; / Ambracia veniunt huc legati publice. / Ge. ergo oratores populi, summates viri, / summi accubabunt, ego infimatis infimus. See 593 for dining standing. In the end, however, Gelasimus is not visibly abased: he is invited to attend and to recline (618–19), provided he can squeeze in among the guests already invited (si arte poteris accubare).

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posture is Pomponius Secundus, consul at the time of Caligula’s assassination. According to Dio Cassius, he not only sat to dine at the foot of the emperor’s couch but also repeatedly kissed his feet as he sat there.148 Leaving aside the foot kissing, Pomponius here assumes a position and posture on the couch that is elsewhere associated with women (e.g., on the Orpheus monument [fig. 2]; more in ch. 2.3). More complex is the anecdote about Terence, preserved in the Suetonian life (Suet. Poet. fr. 11R), discussed in the introduction. To review, the young Terence called at the house of the preeminent comic playwright Caecilius Statius, to submit his Andria for approval. Arriving during dinner, he was placed on a bench next to Caecilius’s couch “on account of his mean clothing.” The quality of his dress, apparently, provides the basis for a prima facie judgment that his status was inferior to the other diners’, so he is required to assume a posture and position that accord with and reify this judgment. After reading a few verses, however, he won over his host: he was invited to recline alongside the great man on his couch and dine with him. Thus the initial status evaluation is overturned thanks to the quality of his poetry, whereupon he is “promoted” to a posture and position that equalize him with the other diners.149 This anecdote may be fictional, as Jerome places Caecilius’s death in 168 b.c. while the Andria was produced in 166.150 If so, however, the evidence this anecdote provides for the correlation of social status with convivial posture among free adult males is all the more striking. For in this case, it was entirely Suetonius’s (or his source’s) decision to express Terence’s elevation through a change in convivial posture. Presumably he did so because he knew his audience could decode this familiar symbolism. Elsewhere free adult males may elect not to recline in convivia, to show that they reject some or all of the otium, pleasure, and luxury that reclining connotes. Reclining is especially problematic in military society, where the associated luxury and pleasure could be thought detrimental to military preparedness. Plutarch reports (Mor. 201B–C) that, when Scipio Aemilianus took command of the demoralized Roman troops at Numantia in 134 b.c., he diagnosed luxury as a key problem. He expelled the prostitutes, permitted the soldiers to keep only pots and spits (implements for roasting or boiling meat),151 and imposed other . . ατ [sc. Caligula] κα$ %σθιε κα$ πινε κα$ το& α ´λλου ε'στα, (τε δ) κα$ Ποµπ"νιο Σεκο-νδο . τ/τε πατεων νεφορετ/ τε α0´µα τ1ν σιτων, παρα` το ποσ$ν ατο- καθ2µενο, κα$ πικ3πτων συνεχ1 ατο& κατεφλει. This story recalls the Suetonian anecdote discussed earlier (Cal. 26.2; n.141), where senators stand in service at Caligula’s dining couch. 149 For the text, see introduction n. 1. In birth there is probably little to distinguish Caecilius Statius from Terence: both were freedmen (Jerome Chron. s.v. 179 b.c.; Suet. Poet. fr. 11, p. 26 Reifferscheid). But Caecilius’s successful career had presumably earned him a status increment that placed him well above the young Terence. 150 Skutsch, “Caecilius 25,” RE 3 (1899) 1189–90. 151 These are represented as simple, unpretentious forms of cookery: cf. Var. Lat. 5.109; Dio Chr. Or. 7.57. For an overview of meat cooking in Roman culture, see Corbier 1989: 234–37. 148 Dio 59.29.5: .

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restrictions on equipment, diet, and bathing; he also required that they stand for their midday meal but permitted them to recline for the evening meal. The inclusion here of injunctions regarding dining posture suggests that reclining to dine—at least, more than once a day—is among the symptoms of luxurious living that, in Scipio’s view, sapped the army’s fighting spirit.152 For aristocratic commanders, too, reclining to dine is sometimes depicted as unsuitable or disadvantageous. Plutarch says that Marcus Antonius won his soldiers’ goodwill by embracing their social conventions; inter alia, he “ate standing at the soldiers’ table,” which perhaps implies that neither he nor his soldiers reclined at all to dine (Ant. 4.4).153 Indeed, dining without reclining is a stereotypical practice of the ideal general. Tiberius, leading troops into Germany in a.d. 10, the year after Varus’s army was destroyed, took extraordinary precautions: according to Suetonius (Tib. 18), he always consulted his council for advice, often took his meals sitting on bare turf, frequently slept in the open, put all instructions in writing, made himself available for consultation at any time, imposed strict discipline, and so on. Velleius Paterculus (2.114.3) offers a somewhat different list of Tiberius’s ideal qualities but likewise remarks that he dined seated among his invited guests during his summer campaigns (implying that they reclined)—one indication of his own stern personal discipline, though he did not zealously impose it on others.154 These descriptions clearly imply that Tiberius did not live luxuriously. But they also—perhaps more important—imply that he never embraced otium and disengaged from his negotium, that of leading Roman troops through enemy territory and into battle on behalf of the commonwealth. Military command was perhaps the negotium par excellence for Roman aristocrats; and while even a general was no doubt entitled to embrace convivial otium now and again, under these circumstances. Tiberius refrained from doing so—at least, not during the summer campaign season.155 His refusal to recline visibly signifies this rejection of otium and Plut. Mor. 201C: προσ5ταξε δ α ριστα˜ν µν 8στ1τα α ´πυρον 9ψον, δειπνεν δ κατακειµ5νου α ´ρτον ; π/λτον α0πλ1 κα$ κρ5α