Dining Children: Posture, Pedagogy, and Coming-of-Age

This chapter focuses on the analysis of freeborn children's posture in the context of Roman (and Graeco-Roman) dining. It aims to understand children's dining posture more broadly, along with the meanings associated with the various practices. Free children are marked for status and privilege by their convivial posture, just as free adults and slaves are. The “handbook” view is that, if such children were present at all among the adults, they sat, and that males only began to recline upon assuming the toga virilis. This view finds corroboration in other adult roles that freeborn youths are supposed to have assumed along with the toga virilis: the beginnings of military service; enrollment as citizens in the tabularium; the dedication of the bulla to the household Lar; the formal entry of young aristocrats into public life.

Dining Women: Posture, Sex, and Status

This chapter examines the historical and ideological aspects of women's dining. The scholarship reveals that, during early periods, women sat to dine while men reclined; whereas “now,” women too recline to dine, just as men do—their posture must therefore have changed at some point. On the other hand, by linking the alleged shift in women's posture to overall moral decline, these studies reveal that the distinction between the two postures has ideological implications. That is, dining posture is a locus where practice, gender, and ethics intersect. The chapter suggests that the seated posture functioned pragmatically, placing women under male scrutiny and control. Moreover, whatever the vagaries of actual social practice, the seated posture for women remained at all times the “strict protocol,” even in the Imperial period.

Dining Men: Posture, Leisure, and Privilege

This chapter analyzes the link between reclining dining and otium within three types of media: literary texts, funerary monuments, and wall paintings. These media are treated separately not only because they emerge from and address themselves to different social strata, but also because each medium has a distinctive place in the spaces and rhythms of everyday Roman life. Thus, to discuss representations of reclining dining in the different media is also to discuss different producers, consumers, settings, and meanings for these representations, even though the activity represented in each case is broadly the same. These representations do allow for synthesis and cross-illumination, but only after the fundamental differences are carefully accounted for.

Introduction

This introductory chapter talks about the upsurge of scholarly interest, over the past fifteen years, in Roman dining practices and foodways. The concerted attention of historians, archaeologists, and literary critics has greatly enhanced their understanding of the physical environments, social dynamics, and symbolic operations of the Roman convivium. The positions assigned to the guests, the kinds of food and entertainment on offer, and even the give-and-take of convivial conversation all participate in the construction and maintenance of social hierarchies. Being concerned with how bodily bearing relates to social hierarchy, the chapter pursues this sociocultural approach. It also seeks to contribute to a second area of burgeoning scholarly interest: the history of the body, and specifically of the ways in which a Roman's social position and subjectivity were expressed in and constructed through bodily dispositions and movements.