Foods of Rich and Poor Households
Foods of Rich and Poor Households
Roman writers loved to describe dinner parties, because a meal revealed everything about a person’s wealth, character and morals. In this lesson you will meet three different angles on food: writers who listed the laws that tried to stop Romans overspending, a writer who served up an old-fashioned meal to attack moral decline, and writers who showed how the food on a table could flatter an important guest or humiliate a lesser one. Running through all of this is the idea of the sumptuary law.
Roman Thrift: Trying to Control Extravagance
The writer Aulus Gellius, in his book Attic Nights, lists a series of Roman laws that tried to limit spending on dinner parties. He writes that parsimonia apud veteres Romanos — thrift among the ancient Romans — was protected not only by private habit but by public disapproval and the penalties of several laws. Gellius is describing centuries of Roman anxiety that the wealthy were spending too much money showing off at the dinner table.
The earliest law he mentions, the lex Licinia — the Licinian law — allowed ducenos aeris — two hundred bronze coins each — to be spent on a wedding feast, and set a lower limit of tricenos — thirty coins each — for ordinary days. The same law fixed exact weights of dried meat and pickled fish that a household could serve each day.
Under the emperor Augustus, a new law called the lex Iulia — the Julian law — raised the old limits: two hundred coins on ordinary working days, three hundred on festival days such as the Kalends and Ides, and a thousand sesterces at a wedding. The rising numbers show either that Romans were spending more, or that the value of money had fallen — or both.
One detail in Gellius is easy to miss. The Licinian law set exact limits for dried meat and pickled fish, but placed no limit at all on fruit and vegetables. Gellius writes that the law allowed quidquid esset natum e terra, vite, arbore — whatever was produced from the earth, a vine, or a tree — to be used promisce atque indefinite — indiscriminately and without limit.
This tells you something important about Roman priorities. Meat and fish, which had to be bought, were seen as the real markers of extravagance. Homegrown produce was not restricted at all, because it did not cost money and did not display wealth in the same way. Keep this distinction in mind — it explains why so many of the “plain” meals described in this theme are built almost entirely from fruit and vegetables.
An Old-Fashioned Meal: Juvenal’s Plain Fare
The satirist Juvenal invites a friend to dinner and promises him fercula nunc audi nullis ornata macellis — hear now the main courses, not decked out by any markets. His point is that nothing on the menu has been bought: everything comes from his own small farm at Tibur, outside Rome.
The ferculum (plural fercula) — main course — is a young kid so young that Juvenal says qui plus lactis habet quam sanguinis — it has more milk than blood in it. Alongside the kid comes wild asparagus gathered by the farm manager’s wife, warm eggs still packed in hay, grapes preserved from the previous summer, and pears and apples stored through the winter.
Juvenal then names Curius, a famous Roman general remembered for defeating a foreign invader and for living with total simplicity. Juvenal says that Curius, working with his own hands, used to place holuscula — small vegetable dishes — grown in his own tiny garden onto his modest hearth.
Juvenal’s sharpest point comes next. He says this meal — haec olim nostri iam luxuriosa senatus cena fuit — was once considered quite a luxurious dinner for our senate. But now, he says, squalidus in magna fastidit compede fossor — even the filthy ditch-digger, weighed down in his heavy chains, turns his nose up at it. Juvenal is arguing that Roman standards had risen so far that yesterday’s luxury became today’s contempt.
Rich versus Plain Fare
Martial’s epigram to a man called Ponticus shows rich and poor food side by side at the very same dinner table. Martial complains that although he is now invited as a guest rather than paid as a client before, his patron still serves him worse food than everyone else.
While Ponticus eats ostrea tu sumis stagno saturata Lucrino — oysters that you consume, fattened in the Lucrine lake — Martial is left with a mussel that cuts his mouth: sugitur inciso mitulus ore mihi — a mussel is sucked by me, my mouth having been cut. Martial lists pair after pair of foods like this — prized mushrooms against pig-fungus, turbot against bream — to show exactly how a host could flatter an important guest and humiliate a less important one through food alone.
Some Roman writers describe wealth on an even grander scale. In Petronius’s account of a dinner given by the show-off millionaire Trimalchio, slaves bring in glires melle ac papavere sparsos — dormice sprinkled with honey and poppy seed — held up on little soldered bridges (ponticuli ferruminati) attached to the dish, followed by wine labelled Falernum Opimianum annorum centum — Falernian, a hundred years old.
Whether the wine really was a century old is beside the point: Trimalchio wants his guests to be dazzled by the label. Petronius uses this kind of exaggerated luxury to mock hosts who use food to advertise their wealth rather than to honour their guests — the opposite of the old-fashioned thrift praised by Gellius and Juvenal.
Across all these texts, food works as a language of Roman status. Sumptuary laws tried to hold back extravagance; Juvenal used a simple farmhouse meal to criticise moral decline; and both Martial and Petronius showed how the food on a table could flatter, humiliate or simply show off. Keep this contrast between thrift and display in mind as you work through the rest of this theme.