There’s plenty of epic debauchery in the annals of Greek legend and history – from
pretty much any myth involving Dionysus to Alexander burning Persepolis during a bender
– but the Romans, as in so many things, brought a certain distinctive grandeur to
festivities public and private.
So, without any further ado, five of the most intensively excessive parties in Roman history.
Number five.
Caesar’s quadruple triumph barbeque
Any Roman triumph was spectacular.
The victorious general rode through the city’s heart in a four-horse chariot, his army marching
behind with shambling captives and heaping wagonloads of treasure.
But no triumph – even the third triumph of Pompey, which lasted two full days and
proclaimed the capture of a thousand cities – ever matched the grandeur of Caesar’s.
In April, 46 BC, after a decade and a half of almost continuous fighting, Julius Caesar
celebrated an unprecedented quadruple triumph for his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus,
and Africa.
Each of the four triumphal processions was a masterpiece of pageantry, complete with
floats and painted dioramas of scenes from the campaigns.
At the end, where the triumphal way ascended the Capitoline Hill, Caesar stationed forty
elephants, each cradling a lighted lamp in its trunk.
The games Caesar staged afterward were even more impressive: five days of gladiatorial
combats and beast hunts, culminating in a battle between two armies of five hundred
captives, each with twenty war elephants.
Plays were staged in every neighborhood, performed in multiple languages for the benefit of Rome’s
polyglot population.
Every Roman citizen was given grain, oil, four hundred sestertii, and a year’s free
rent.
Then, having paid everyone’s bills, Caesar threw the biggest government-subsidized street
party in Roman history.
Twenty thousand dining couches were set out, and huge quantities of meat and fine wine
were served to all who wanted them.
Five days later, Caesar staged an even grander banquet, to ensure that every citizen had
a chance to eat their fill.
Number four.
Lucius Verus’ cocktail party
When he wasn’t picking fights in Rome’s dive bars, Lucius Verus, Marcus Aurelius’
party-hearty co-emperor, spent most of his time in a succession of opulent villas and
pleasure resorts, where he hunted, played dice, and sipped wine from his gargantuan
crystal goblet.
One of the many parties Lucius threw became proverbial for its extravagance.
If we can believe the Historia Augusta, from which the following details are taken, it
was a banquet for twelve.
After each course was carried in, the servers presented the silver trays to the guests as
gifts.
After each round of wine, likewise, the guests were given goblets made from precious myrrh.
As the meal progressed, the gifts accumulated: crystal cups, gilded garlands, vases of purest
gold, and finally the slave servers themselves.
Verus diced with his guests until dawn; and then he gave each a carriage, gleaming with
silver, to carry them home.
Number three.
Nero’s swim-up love-ins
Nero lived large.
Infamously, after a fire that he was rumored to have started engulfed much of Rome, he
constructed his gargantuan Golden House, which featured a 120-foot bronze statue of the emperor,
a triple colonnade a mile long, a banquet hall with a rotating ceiling, and a vast central
pool, large enough for Nero’s fleet of pleasure barges.
Nero really liked pleasure barges.
Sometimes, he filled the enormous pool where Augustus had staged naval battles, launched
dozens of boats, and held floating feasts, served and serviced by Rome’s finest courtesans.
Whenever he took his barges down the Tiber, according to Suetonius, Nero arranged for
bars and brothels to be set up at intervals along the shore, so that he and his companions
could stop and take their pleasure whenever they pleased.
He did the same at Baiae, his fleet drifting just offshore, between piratical descents
on the seaside villas of the Roman elite.
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Returning to our topic…number two.
Any party involving Elagabalus
According to the unreliable but unfailingly entertaining Historia Augusta, the teenaged
third-century emperor Elagabalus spent much of his time inventing new ways to antagonize
the city of Rome.
On one occasion, for example, it was rumored that he had hired a gang of snake-charmers
to gather hundreds of serpents and then – for no discernable reason – released said serpents
into a crowd, causing mass panic.
But what Elagabalus liked best was a good old-fashioned orgy.
He partied with everyone, from the prefect of Rome to commoners.
He was said to have couches framed in silver, draped with the downiest of rabbit fur cushions.
The ceilings of his banqueting hall had movable panels, from which flower petals descended
– occasionally in such volume that they smothered the unwary.
Elagabalus reportedly devised primitive whoopie cushions – pillows made from skins that
slowly released air over the course of an evening, leaving guests under the table.
He tormented other diners by having them served wax models or pictures of food.
His favorite party trick, we’re told, was to unleash his pet lions and leopards on unsuspecting
guests.
He sometimes did this during dinner, allowing the animals (which the emperor, unlike his
guests, knew to be tame) to leap onto the tables and couches.
On other occasions, he waited until a visitor was asleep, and then sent a lion into his
bedroom.
The Historia Augusta claims that several guests suffered a heart attack.
Number one.
Rome’s millennium birthday bash
According to a tradition accepted from the late republic onward, Rome was founded in
the equivalent of our 754 or 753 BC.
During the early imperial era, Rome’s anniversary came to be associated with the Ludi Saeculares,
or Secular Games – an ancient festival celebrated every 100 or 110 years.
Claudius commemorated Rome’s eight hundredth birthday in 48 AD.
Antoninus Pius celebrated nine hundred years in 147.
So as the year 247 approached, Emperor Marcus Julius Philippus – later remembered as Philip
the Arab – prepared to mark the millennium with spectacular games.
The traditional rites of the secular games came first.
Heralds summoned the Roman people to a spectacle they had never seen before and would never
see again.
Torches and sulfur were handed out, so that a purifying smoke would be raised.
Three days of rituals and feasting followed, in the course of which the emperor presided
personally over a nocturnal sacrifice to the Fates.
Though not quite on the scale of Trajan’s famous Dacian games a century and a half before,
which had lasted 123 days and involved 10,000 gladiators, the games that followed were the
most spectacular Rome had seen in many years.
A thousand of the empire’s best gladiators clashed in the Colosseum, and famous charioteers
faced off in the Circus Maximus.
Alongside events featuring tame elephants, leopards, and lions, Philip displayed animals
seldom seen at Rome, including a rhinoceros, hippopotami, and giraffes.
Some of the coins Philip struck to commemorate his games featured animals from the Colosseum
– stags, gazelles, antelopes, lions, and hippos.
Other coins displayed an altar, or the temple of the goddess Roma.
Others still showed the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, a millennium and more before
one of the most memorable celebrations in Roman history.
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