The Ancient Romans are famous for feasting and
drinking. Whether it’s obsessing over who sits where on the giant couches,
deciding to eat snails or peacocks, or making a power play on your rivals,
Roman parties were one of a kind. Here's what it was really like to party like an Ancient Roman.
As opposed to larger public festivals, the Roman dinner party, known as the convivium,
generally took place in a private home. These dinner parties were held in residences with
attendance from a small group of friends, family, and business associates, though they were still
designed to be extravagant and impressive. The most common reception room for such
parties was the dining area, which in Roman homes were known as the "three-couch room."
This is because dining was typically done while reclining on, you guessed it: Couches. They were
arranged in a U-shape with a table in the middle in order to facilitate sharing and conversation.
As these entertaining spaces were meant to be a delight to the senses, an upper-class shindig
would often feature plenty of decorative elements such as floor mosaics, sculptures
or other pieces of art, and fancy furniture. While the Greeks were known to enjoy drinking
parties known as symposia, Roman dinner parties were different in a number of ways.
The chief difference is that women were allowed to attend Roman gatherings, providing that they were
of the appropriate class. At Greek symposia, the only women allowed were entertainers, musicians,
or sex workers. If you were Roman, at least married women could attend with their spouses.
For aristocratic Romans, especially political figures like the emperor,
lavish banquets were essential political tools for garnering favor and accumulating power.
These extravagant dinner parties were a way for Rome's elite to show off their wealth,
network with the powerful, and intimidate their enemies. The ulterior motives were even more
important for emperors. Using parties, they were able to display their power,
offer gifts to those who might bestow upon them political favor,
and keep an eye on their political rivals. Occasionally, assassination was on the events
list. While actual evidence of poisoning at parties is rare, Roman dignitaries always
got suspicious when someone took sick after a party. A notable example is when
the son of the emperor Claudius died after a party and suspicion naturally fell on Nero,
who stood to benefit most from the death of Claudius' heir. For the most part however,
the goal of such lavish banquets was not murder but rather buying favor with an epic bash.
Since the goal of a Roman banquet was often political or business-oriented in nature,
it makes sense that the seating chart would be an essential aspect of preparation.
High-powered guests could be flattered with a seat of honor, while the host could secure
himself unfettered access to an influential guest during dinner. The three couches of the
Roman party room represented different tiers of respect. The most honored guests would recline on
the couch that formed the center of the U-shape, while the host would lie to their right. Less
important guests would lie on the leftmost couch, somewhat ironically known as the "high couch."
By seating the guests of honor on the middle couch, the host assured not only that these
guests would be the center of attention for anyone entering the room, but they also made
sure that these important diners got the best views of the party, typically of the host's
courtyard or garden. The low-status guests would have to settle for staring at the dining room's
expensive and extravagant wall art. As time went on, parties got bigger and more elaborate, so
hosts needed more elaborate couch installations. The traditional three couch setup ended up
being replaced by a huge semi-circular couch that could hold up to 12 people.
Besides the fact that women were allowed to be guests, another thing that distinguished
a Roman party from a Greek event was that wine flowed freely at every stage of a Roman bash.
It was generally considered gauche by both Greeks and Romans to drink wine that had
not been mixed with water, so at dinner parties, each guest's wine would be mixed
with water to taste in their individual cups. Wine was served into the drinking cup with a
ladle, which allowed for exact measurements, by attractive, often nude, male slaves. Depending
on the party, hot or cold water would then be mixed in. The Romans used special boilers to
heat their mixing water. If a host really wanted to show off, they might add snow to the wine.
The cups of the Roman elite were typically made of silver, and while there are multiple
varieties of cups in the archeological record, the most common types were two-handled cups
modeled off the Greek style. More ornate cups were decorated with reliefs depicting floral motifs,
erotic scenes, or mythological subjects, including of course Bacchus, the god of wine.
A typical Roman banquet was made up of three courses: The hors d'oeuvres, the main course,
and dessert. Since most dinner parties were meant to impress, the food was generally a
spectacle designed to engage all of the senses. Exotic foods were common, as their rarity,
high cost, and difficulty in preparing were a part of the appeal. They put the wealth, taste,
and tenacity of the host front and center. Popular dishes included oysters, wild boar,
venison, pheasant, lobsters, peacock, and basically any kind of songbird you can imagine.
Illegal foods, such as sow's udders and fattened up poultry, were common at these elite affairs.
A Roman author named Apicius recorded in the only still surviving cookbook from the Roman empire
hundreds of recipes. They include such outlandish dishes as parrot, goose liver, camel heels,
flamingo, cranes, ostrich, coxcombs, sausages stuffed with brains, crawfish stuffed with caviar,
and snails. Snails, as it turns out, were eaten so commonly that there were actually special spoons
made just for eating them. There are also recipes for normal stuff like vegetables and beans, but
who cares about that in the face of honey-smeared nightingales stuffed with prunes? Apicius was so
in love with his recipes that he spent all his money on fancy food, and ultimately died bankrupt.
Roman banquets were often the place for all sorts of entertainment, some of which we might
even consider deranged by today’s standards. A very common element at dinner parties was
musical accompaniment in the form of flutes, water organs, lyres, or even choirs. If your
party mood was a little less "adults enjoying wine and cheese" and a little more hype, you might hire
the services of acrobats, dancing girls, mimes, or maybe even a standup philosopher or two...
"Good evening ladies and emperors. I just got back from Venice, and boy are my arms tired!"
But if you wanted the party to get really lit, you’d take it to the next level.
If your appetite was as much for blood as wine, you might bring in trained exotic animals or
have a gladiatorial battle. To give your party a chill vibe, you might consider options like having
poetry readings or recitations of history. The cheapest option might just be having your slaves
sing as they serve the food and wine. There’s one particularly indulgent,
and probably apocryphal, story of a Roman party that went way too far. The famously
extravagant emperor Elagabalus wanted to shower his dinner guests with flowers,
so he built a dining hall with a false ceiling that was then filled with them. When the ceiling
was tilted open, a flood of petals fell heavily upon the guests and smothered them to death.
While Roman dinner parties are infamous for their excess, at least one aspect of them
has been exaggerated in modern culture. It’s a common belief in popular culture that the Romans
had a special room called the vomitorium where they would go during dinner parties in order
to purge their bellies so that they could make room to indulge in more food. Modern
authors as varied as Aldous Huxley and Suzanne Collins have often discussed the vomitorium
as a literal place in the home as a symbol of Roman excess, indulgence, and disgusting luxury.
But there was not, in fact, a dedicated purge-and-rally room in Roman homes. "Vomitorium''
was a word in classical Latin, possibly coined by the writer Macrobius. He wasn't talking about a
puke room, though. He was describing the entrances and exits at stadiums and theaters, which
resembled someone throwing up in the way that people poured out of them and into the streets
or seats. It was a weird, kind of intentionally gross metaphor. But sometime in the 19th century,
people started taking the word literally and applied it to their pre-existing notion of the
Romans as an indulgent and gluttonous people. In this case, truth is not stranger than fiction.
While the Roman convivium was a private and even exclusive affair, it was not the only kind
of dinner party to be found in ancient Rome. There were also public feasts with religious,
rather than social or political, purposes. As opposed to private parties, these public events
were civic banquets open to all the citizens of the city. They frequently played host to
enormous numbers of diners. When one of these public parties had a specific religious focus,
food offerings were made to the gods who were generally present in the form of statues.
One of the most notable of these public religious feasts was the Feast of Jupiter.
This banquet was celebrated every September 13, the Ides of September, and was originally
held for the dedication of the temple on the Capitoline Hill. Seven priests whose job was
overseeing the public feasts would sacrifice a white heifer and then invite the gods to feast.
Statues of the gods were placed on couches bedecked with the most splendid of coverings.
While initially only the Capitoline Triad took part in this feast, by the third century BCE,
all 12 Olympian gods were present in the form of statues chilling on couches.
Even today, the word bacchanalia is used to refer to a riotous drunken party,
often aimed at boisterous fraternity or sorority parties.
"Toga! Toga! Toga!"
This reputation for bacchanalia goes back to ancient times as well. A bacchanal is
a celebration of the god Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine and fertility. Roman bacchanalia were
based on various Greek rites which, depending on location, could include drunken feasts,
ritual parades, dramatic performances, or carrying clusters of grapes around.
These Greek fertility rituals were introduced to Rome through Greek provinces in southern Italy.
The Italian bacchanalia were initially celebrated only by women and were held three times a year,
during the day. However, before long, men were admitted as well, and the rites were held at
night, as often as five times a month. The rituals were private, and like most
ancient mystery cults, we don't actually have much information about them. What we do know
is that men and women getting together in big groups at night to drink wine and party caused
a huge scandal among the Romans. Rumors that the bacchanalia included orgies and even human
sacrifices led to the Senate passing a ban on the parties throughout all of Italy in 186 BCE.
Despite this decree, these celebrations continued covertly in southern Italy for many years.
There was no shortage of Roman holidays, with some state holiday, religious feast,
or public game being held practically every other day on the Roman calendar. They celebrated
everything from fertility to driving out the shades of the evil dead. But the most popular
Roman religious festival was Saturnalia, the midwinter festival celebrating Saturn,
the Roman god of agriculture. By the late Republic, Saturnalia had expanded from a
single-day festival to a weeklong affair stretching from December 17th to the 25th,
and its influence is thought to still be felt in modern Christmas celebrations.
Saturnalia represented an upending of standard social order. Businesses and schools closed,
work was forbidden, and slaves and masters traded places.
Well, kind of. Masters would serve their slaves,
who would sit at the head of the table and take part in the holiday festivities.
Houses would be decorated with wreaths and greenery, and colorful clothes were worn.
Gambling was temporarily legalized, and singing, feasting, socializing, and gift-giving were
standard celebrations. A common Saturnalia gift was candles, which represented the return of
sunlight after the winter solstice. Houses would elect a leader of Saturnalia, a Lord of Misrule,
to oversee the chaos represented by this joyous, raucous, topsy-turvy time.
From a modern perspective, Roman emperors have a reputation as pampered libertines.
A classic example being portrayals of Nero lying on a couch and being fed grapes while Rome burns
around him. This wasn't true of all Roman leaders. Julius Caesar, his heir Augustus, and Stoic
philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius were all famous for their simple diets and moderation. However,
the reputation for debauchery was earned by some, like Elagabalus, who swam in a saffron swimming
pool and served his guests rice mixed with pearls.
"We need to be shut off. Especially you, Hedonism Bot." "I apologize for nothing!"
But probably the most famously debauched Roman emperor of them
all was the infamous emperor Caligula. Caligula is known even today for his
wild fits of spendthrift waste and capricious violence. He was enormously egotistical, wanton,
and hedonistic. His personal and financial excess led to his being assassinated after four years on
the throne. He was not the first and hardly the last, Roman emperor to be assassinated.
But before that, he would hold his violently orgiastic parties on luxury barges described as
being "blazed with jewels" and "filled with ample baths, galleries, and saloons, and supplied with
a great variety of vines and fruit trees." These boats were deliberately sunk after
Caligula's assassination, and researchers have been trying to find them for the last
several decades after some of Caligula's other ships were discovered in the 1920s.
But so far, no luck… which, given his reputation, is maybe just as well.
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