In his Satire 8, the Roman poet Horace reveals “status seating” in action and shows how hard a Roman host (in this case, an unappreciated one) might work to impress a guest.Īncient sources of course take it for granted that the reader knew all about dining protocol, and therefore authors didn’t bother to explain the rules for dining with crystal clarity. Photo: Ministro per la Coesione Territoriale, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0Īs still happens at formal dinners today, places were designated for host, favored guests, and less-favored guests. In contrast, portable beds used cushions like those on Greek beds to elevate the diners.Īngled cement beds (mattresses missing) in the triclinium of the House of the Cryptoporticus, Pompeii. Surviving triclinia with built-in cement dinner couches (the elegant mattresses long since destroyed by time) show that the beds were strongly angled upward to elevate the diner above the tabletop. Although in the “old days” reclining had been shameful for respectable women, they now reclined with men, although some old fogeys disapproved, as we know from texts by Isidore of Seville ( Etymologiae 20.11.9) and Valerius Maximus ( De Institutis Antiquis 2.1.2). Reclining at parties continued to be primarily an elite practice-poorer people had no room for beds of this size.

In Rome, couches for single (generally male) diners existed, but by the late Republican and early Imperial period the practice at dinner parties was for guests to recline on three large beds placed in a U shape in a triclinium (dining room). The practice seems to have been adopted from the east, where it was a form of dining for elites. The Greeks used single couches onto which companions were often squeezed for after-dinner drinking parties. An association of dining with luxury led to 19th-century depictions, like the one above, of Roman diners leading the soft life (here, without reclining). The practice of reclining and dining continued into ancient Rome, but with a few additions-for one, respectable women were invited to join the party, and for another, drinking was not a separate, post-dinner event, but became part of the dining experience. The ancient Greeks had a recumbent approach to their (male-only) dinner parties, as I discussed in a previous post: elite men reclined, propped on pillows, to drink, converse, and-sometimes-overindulge.

Room in rome scenes