It is probable, however, that the table talk of the higher classes at Rome was peculiarly terse and epigrammatic. Many specimens have been preserved to us of the dry, sententious style which they seem to have cultivated; their remarks on life and manners were commonly conveyed in solemn or caustic aphorisms, and they condemned as undignified and Greekish any superfluous abundance in the use of words. The graceful and flowing conversations of Cicero’s dialogues were imitated from Athenian writings, rather than drawn after the types of actual life around him. “People at supper,” said Varro, himself not the least sententious of his nation, “should neither be loquacious nor mute; eloquence is for the Forum, silence for the bed chamber.” Another rule of the same master of etiquette, that the number of the guests should not exceed nine, the number of the Muses, nor fall short of three, the number of the Graces, was dictated by a sense of the decorous proprieties of the Roman banquet, which the love of ostentation and pride of wealth were now constantly violating.
Luxury and the appetite for excitement were engaged in multiplying occasions of more than ordinary festivity, on which the most rigid of the sumptuary laws allowed a wider license to the expenses of the table. On such high days the numbers of the guests were limited neither by law nor custom; the entertainer, the master or father, as he was called, of the supper, was required to abdicate the ordinary functions of host, and, according to the Greek custom, a king of the wine or arbiter of the drinking, was chosen from among themselves by lot, or for his convivial qualities, by the bacchanalian crew around him.
Our own more polished but not unmanly taste must look with amazement and even disgust at the convivial excesses of the Romans at this period, such as they have themselves represented them to us. Their luxury was a coarse and low imitation of Greek voluptuousness; and for nothing perhaps did the Greeks more despise their rude conquerors than for the manifest failure of their attempts at imitating the vices of their betters.
The Romans vied with one another in the cost rather than the elegance of their banquets, and accumulated with absurd pride the rarest and most expensive viands on their boards, to excite the admiration of their parasites, not to gratify their palates. Cleopatra’s famous conceit, in dissolving the pearl in vinegar, may have been the fine satire of an elegant Grecian upon the tasteless extravagance of her barbarian lover. Antony, indeed, though he degraded himself to the manners of a gladiator, was a man of noble birth, and might have imbibed purer tastes at the tables of the men of his own class; but the establishment of the imperial régime thrust into the high places of society a number of low-born upstarts, the sons of the speculators and contractors of the preceding generation, who knew not how to dispense with grace the unbounded wealth their sires had accumulated.
Roman Dinner-table
(After De Montfaucon)
Augustus would fain have restrained these excesses, which shamed the dignified reserve which he wished to characterise the imperial court; he exerted himself by counsel and example, as well as by formal enactments, to educate his people in the simpler tastes of the older time, refined but not yet enervated by the infusion of Hellenic culture.[39] His laws, indeed, shared the fate of the sumptuary regulations of his predecessors, and soon passed from neglect into oblivion. His example was too austere, perhaps, to be generally followed even by the most sedulous of his own courtiers. He ate but little, and was content with the simplest fare: his bread was of the second quality, at a time when the best was far less fine than ours; and he was satisfied with dining on a few small fishes, curds or cheese, figs and dates, taken at any hour when he had an appetite rather than at regular and formal meals. He was careful, however, to keep a moderately furnished table for his associates, at which he commonly appeared himself, though he was often the last to arrive, and the first to retire from it.
The ordinary arrangement of a Roman supper consisted of three low couches, disposed, horse-shoe fashion, before a low table, at which the attendant slaves could minister without incommoding the recumbent guests. Upon each couch three persons reclined, a mode which had been introduced from Greece, where it had been in use for centuries, though not from heroic times. The Egyptians and Persians sat at meat; so, till the Greeks corrupted them, did also the Jews; the poetical traditions of Hellas represented the gods as sitting at their celestial banquets. The Macedonians also, down to the time of Alexander, are said to have adopted the more ordinary practice; and such was the custom at Rome till a late period. When the men first allowed themselves the indulgence of reclining, they required boys and women to maintain an erect posture, from notions of delicacy; but in the time of Augustus no such distinction was observed, and the inferiority of the weaker sex was only marked by setting them together on one of the side couches, the place of honour being always in the centre.