style="font-size:15px;"> Through time and conquests, far-flung colonies offered a staggering range of foods as tribute or trade, and sybaritic decadence became stylishly rampant among the wealthy. By then, wealthy Romans’ villas often offered multiple dining rooms, each elaborately decorated with murals, and Roman chefs had developed complex dishes from unusual and costly ingredients.
Although conservative Roman senators argued loudly against the ruinous waste of hedonistic feasting, it continued unabated. Sumptuary laws defining the acceptable limits for entertaining were passed by the Senate and typically ignored. While many banquets were given to gain economic or political prestige, others were staged as extravagant excuses for sheer debauchery. Elaborate menus and prolonged feasting were interlarded with loud or sometimes crass entertainments and occasional trips to baths or vomitaria to regurgitate, to relax or to recover stamina for more feasting - all ingenious if unappetizing alternatives to feeling as stuffed as many of the dishes served.
Luxurious Roman dining rooms were typically light, airy, attractively furnished and decorated with colorful murals celebrating food or food-related activities. Some murals were definitely erotic, as the ruined villas of Pompeii and Herculaneum illustrate. Wealthy Romans dined reclining on couches while being served by servants or slaves. A triclinium, the dining room, takes its name from the arrangement of three couches (triclinia) placed on three sides of each dining table. Thus, dining room sizes were referred to as two, three or more sets of triclinia arrangements.
During long feasts, guests were sometimes invited to bath and/or change their garments between courses, and special resting-rooms were provided for sloppy or careless diners to don extra togas brought with them. In this sense, dining chambers functioned much like stage settings with dressing rooms nearby. Having slaves and dressers makes a huge difference!
Roman men typically banqueted together, although women could also be present depending upon several factors and the nature of the feast. Sometimes women were present as entertainers, and/or were present and introduced as ‘trophy’ wives or mistresses before the serious drinking of unwatered wine began. Trimalchio’s feast includes just such an interlude staged by the host’s wife. In her case, she brought a couple of fellow-diners with her and provided a few literal high kicks and jokes for dramatic relief.
Roman literature reports that fortunes were spent on feasting by the imperial likes of Lucullus, Heliogabalus, Claudius and Caligula – names to reckon with. Gluttony and hyper-developed tastes for the bizarre were expressed by serving dishes like flamingo or nightingales’ tongues, camels’ heels, and ostriches stuffed with sows’ udders. Emperor Lucullus even excavated a canal from the ocean to one of his estates in order to have abundant fresh seafood literally swimming into his kitchen. He also constructed an immense aviary to dine luxuriously on birds while observing others flying about in ‘their prison’. This reminds the author of something Samuel Butler noted in his Notebooks: Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
We know a good deal about Roman culinary history through the writings of historians, social critics, dramatists and poets. We also have an extant Roman cookbook containing considerable information regarding classical period dishes. This cookbook, one of the first in Western history, entitled De re coquinaria (Of Culinary Matters), is attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius, a wealthy gourmand and luxury loving merchant reputed to be a world-class diner. Dates for Apicius vary, but it is generally agreed he lived during the final years of the last century B.C.E., and dined during Tiberius’ reign (14 to 37 C.E.).
Apicius was reportedly so serious about food that Seneca wrote about him: ‘Having consumed thousands of sesterces for food, Apicius, oppressed by debtors, was forced to review his accounts, and when he discovered he had only a few hundred sesterces left, he poisoned himself for fear of dying of hunger.’ Even if Seneca’s commentary is an exaggeration based on gossip, no other information is needed. Perhaps it is true, however, since Seneca was young Nero’s tutor, and thus a member of the gossipy palace staff.
Some say there was perhaps more than one Apicius, both (or more) noted for their devotion to food. Varying stories were handed down through history. Athenaeus’ several-volume published Greek manuscript entitled, The Deipnosophists (The Learned Ones or Sophists at Dinner), is rich with tales of Greek and Roman culinary history. In this important work, Athenaeus described Apicius’ fixation on seafood – especially giant shrimp – and noted that certain cakes were named ‘Apician’ after him. However, Apicius’ cookbook was never mentioned. Perhaps it was not actually known as a collection until after the third century C.E., when, by that time, his manuscript may have included many additional added recipes.
Although written in Greek, The Deipnosophists tells us much about Greek and Roman food and dining habits. Athenaeus of Naucratis, Egypt, was a learned man from the early to mid-3rd.century C.E. who was perhaps also quite a gourmand. His writings include many tongue-in-cheek feast descriptions. One example is his reference to a notable Greek marriage feast to celebrate the nuptials of Iphierates, who married the daughter of King Cotys of Thrace. The narrative stretches the imagination and mentions how some hosts gave their guests such elaborate take-home memorabilia as gold tiaras, silver cups, and expensive jars of precious unguents. A few selected lines about the Cotys’ wedding feast summarize some details. Clearly the somewhat later Romans were not unique in hosting crazy feasts:
‘At the dinner were your butter-eating gentry, with unkempt hair and in countless numbers. Cotys (the King) himself had an apron on, and brought in soup in a gold pitcher; but what with tasting the wines in the mixing bowls he got drunk before the guests did…. His home does not lack Syrian myrrh, the breather of frankincense, tender-flaked barley cakes, fine meal cakes, octopuses, entrails, suet, sausages, porridges, garlic, beets, stuffed fig leaves, anchovies, mackerel, chops, sea-eel, ray, sole, swordfish, roe-tunny, shark, grapes, figs, flat-cakes, olive-cakes, milk-cakes, cauliflowers, silphium, vinegar, fennel, sesame, periwinkles, grasshoppers, rennet, cress, limpets, mussels, oysters….’
The description continues for pages, and lists more dishes, music, entertainers, semi-nude dancers, guest follies and so forth (see. Vol. II, book IV, pp. 101 and following). At least the Romans had addlepated Greek spendthrift precedents as their models in food as in the visual arts.
Athenaeus also describes how abstemious the early Spartans were during their feasts, but notes that they were eventually corrupted by Persian customs. He mentions that early Spartan rural feasts were typically public and contributed to by all the citizens who dined together in a kind of harvest sharing or thanksgiving banquet. Democracy in action! But customs change or are soon corrupted, whether by the then Persians and/or later Romans.
By imperial Roman times, many dishes were complex, and a collection of herb and spice flavored sauces, variously called garum, liquamen or muria, were widely used. It is possible that Apicius’ first recipes consisted primarily of sauces, and that his earlier collection was later augmented by other dishes and then collected into a single volume cookbook.
During Greek and Roman times, and for centuries afterwards, most of the world considered herbs and spices to be not only flavorful, but medicinal and curative too. Their use was important for health, aside from their tasteful serendipity. A glance at Apicius’ published sauce recipes show they included many ingredients such as: wines, vinegars, celery seed, mustard, broth, oil, pepper, cumin, thyme, coriander, raisins, nuts, dates, dill, mint, honey, onions, caraway and so on. Similarly, the Roman category ‘poultry’ included: chicken, duck, goose, crane, partridge, doves, wood pigeons, figpeckers, squab, pheasant, thrushes and ostrich – any flying bird including the ostrich, which can only run hell-bent and flap vestigial wings.
Questions remain about the identity of some Roman herbs and spices. Whether or not the famous and favorite herb silphium came originally from Asia Minor is not known; however, by Roman times it flourished along North African shores until it disappeared, probably
