Dining Men: Posture, Leisure, and Privilege

1. Overview

THROUGHOUT THE PERIOD OF INTEREST to this study, in all the media under examination, free adult males are represented as reclining to dine at convivia in the normal course of events. As noted in the introduction, the practice of reclining was transmitted from the Near East through the Greek world into central Italy by the late archaic period. In all these cultures, reclining marked a greater degree of social privilege and autonomy than was associated with the other possible dining postures, namely, sitting and standing. In each culture that appropriated the reclining posture, however, that privilege and autonomy was articulated through locally distinctive social forms; the posture was always embedded in, and in turn helped to construct and sustain, a culturally unique regime of social values and symbols. In the Roman case, in our period, the reclining dining posture is associated with one social value in particular: otium (leisure) and the various pleasures and luxuries that Roman otium comprises. In this chapter, I examine the link between reclining dining and otium in the three media defined in the introduction: literary texts in section 2, funerary monuments in section 3, and wall paintings in section 4. I treat these media 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. The concluding sections of the chapter (5 and 6) discuss circumstances under which free adult males reject the reclining dining posture and its associated otium.

2. Reclining and Elite Otium: Some Literary Evidence

The association of the reclining dining posture with otium is articulated most clearly in literary texts. Being produced largely by and for a Rome-oriented elite, these texts tend to articulate elite urban values, anxieties, and practices. In such texts, conviviality is often categorized under the rubric of otium, and is implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the various negotia — the occupations or duties — by which elite Roman males occupied themselves much of the time, and indeed defined themselves as elite Roman males: their own private social and economic affairs; legal advocacy on behalf of their clients or friends; discharging magistracies or other military and administrative posts associated with government. More generally still, conviviality in these texts may symbolize or instantiate something "pleasant," in contrast to "unpleasant" alternatives. While the association of elite conviviality with otium should come as no surprise, it seems worthwhile to cite a handful of literary passages, scattered across various genres and ranging throughout the period under discussion, that illustrate this association, and that show how the reclining posture is implicated in this schema.

To begin with the earliest Roman literary texts, several Plautine dramas contain convivial scenes in which high-status males dine and drink while reclining in one another's company and alongside courtesans. The convivium is thus a place where such males enjoy a nexus of pleasures: wine, food, companionship, and the prospect (at least) of sex. Meanwhile, a fragment of the historian Calpurnius Piso, dating to the late second century B.C., relates that King Romulus drank wine sparingly when invited to dinner, on the ground that he had serious work to do the next day (eundem Romulum dicunt ad cenam vocatum ibi non multum bibisse, quia postridie negotium haberet). Thus the sharp distinction between elite negotium and the activities of the convivium — along with a moral hierarchy privileging the former over the latter — is attributed to the city's founder, and so receives strong ideological sanction. Moving into the late Republic, Catullus, in poem 50, declares that he and his friend Licinius Calvus are "at leisure" (otiosi, v. 1), playfully composing spontaneous verses and drinking wine in an atmosphere filled with eroticism. Meanwhile, Cicero, early in his treatise on the ideal orator (De Or. 1.27), contrasts convivial pleasures with more "serious" activities and concerns. He relates that, when he was a young man, the senior senator and orator Cotta regaled him with a story dating from Cotta's own youth. Cotta said that he himself had participated one day in a gloomy and difficult discussion with certain éminences grises regarding the condition of the state. Following this discussion, however, when the party repaired to the dining couches, the host Crassus dispelled the prevailing gloom with his humanity, urbanity, and pleasantness. Cotta contrasts these differing moods as follows: "In the company of these men the day seemed to have been spent in the senate-house, but the dinner party in a villa in Tusculum." That is, the grave affairs of state (negotia), which filled the day's conversation, stereotypically occupied the curia at the political heart of the Roman Republican forum, while the pleasurable, cheerful reclining fellowship of the evening convivium (otium) better suited a country villa. Cicero himself, according to his biographer Plutarch (Cic. 8.4), almost never reclined for dinner before sundown, citing a bad stomach and also his ?s????a (i.e., negotia) as keeping him away.

Moving into the Augustan and Imperial ages, Horace contrasts otium and negotium, though not necessarily in these terms, in some of his dinner-invitation odes (e.g., Carm. 2.11, 3.8, 3.29). Here he dangles before his addressee — in each case, a magistrate busy with public affairs — the enticements of companionship, sex, and especially wine, requesting that he embrace these pleasures and abandon for the evening his anxious cares on behalf of the state. In a more mythical vein the wretched Phineus, in Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica, is finally delivered from the plague of Harpies; at last he can recline on a dining couch and consume food and drink, joyful at the forgotten pleasures of the table; he now enjoys tranquillity and indeed "drinks down forgetfulness of his long punishment" (4.529–37). Meanwhile, a declamation in the elder Seneca's collection (Cont. 9.2) posits that a provincial governor, L. Quinctius Flamininus, executed a criminal in the midst of...