Mireille Corbier
Was there a difference between the food of the rich and the food of the poor? In trying to answer this question, one faces two difficulties: the first has to do with sources, the second with the fact that the Romans, while not unaware of the difference between rich and poor, primarily classified individuals in terms of status rather than wealth.
Nevertheless, a satirical author such as Martial (first century C.E.) did not shrink from using the terms “rich” and “poor” in speaking of food: in Book 14 of his epigrams, no food items per se figure among “the various gifts of rich [diues] and poor [pauper],” but we do find a serving dish for mushrooms—a dish that “complains” of being used not for mushrooms as intended but only for a less prestigious vegetable, namely, broccoli. Similarly, in Book 13, certain foods such as the broad bean and the beet are described as being exclusively for poor people or “workers” (indeed, there is a play on words between faba, or broad bean, and faber, or worker). In the same vein, a decorated lamp from Aquileia depicts a basket containing a pitcher of wine, a round bread, and a radish with the legend “Pauperis cena: pane uinu radic” (Poor man’s dinner: bread, wine, and black radish). Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are: food is an important token of social status. Artifacts like the lamp just mentioned, in which a text is combined with an image, are rare, however. For the most part, historians of Roman eating must work with sources of three kinds: normative, descriptive (sometimes merely by allusion), and archaeological.
Production and Distribution
A MEDITERRANEAN DIET Before we can appreciate social differences with respect to food, however, we must first describe the typical Roman diet, which was more or less the same as the diet of other Mediterranean peoples. It included grain, wine, oil, dried and fresh vegetables, dried and fresh fruits, sugar obtained from those same fruits as well as from honey, nuts (walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pinenuts, and chestnuts), together with foods rich in animal protein (milk and cheese, meat, and fish). There was also room for such gathered items as mushrooms, asparagus, laurel, wild fruits, and snails.
Food-producing regions formed concentric circles around Rome: truck farms and vineyards near the city, then wheat, and finally livestock. But this geographical distribution, captured in the well-known von Thünen model, changed in response to massive imports of grain and oil by sea.
Although the Roman diet began as a version of the basic Mediterranean diet, Rome’s conquest of the entire Mediterranean region, including its desert fringes, along with half of Europe, broadened it in two ways. First, the Roman Empire came to incorporate a substantial portion of what Fernand Braudel called “carnivorous” continental Europe. No longer were meat eaters found solely on the periphery: they had joined the empire, and the Gauls and others supplied the capital with smoked meat and ham. Semiarid regions to the south and east were also incorporated into the empire and became rich sources of birds (such as the guinea fowl, also known as the “African chicken,” and the ostrich) and exotic fruits (such as dates). Pepper and other spices from India arrived by way of Egypt and Arabia and found their way into costly culinary creations. Second, the Roman diet was transformed by expanding commerce in primary foodstuffs. In Rome, for example, the plebs consumed quantities of wheat imported from Egypt and Africa and oil from Betica (Andalusia) and Tripoli, while the wealthy set themselves apart by opting for more exotic imports. Not everyone ate the same foods. Some people could not afford the more expensive imported items. Others, however, were not permitted to eat certain things. Such restrictions created social divisions different from those defined by wealth. Last but not least, food was not always purchased on the market for cash.
ACCESS TO FOOD Rome, the quintessential city and surely the place with the densest concentration of money in the empire, was fed, from republican times onward, largely through taxation in kind and redistribution. This system reflected a certain apportionment of political power: 200,000 specially entitled plebeian citizens received the lion’s share of public distributions of wheat (which is why this group was referred to as the “frumentaceous” plebs). From the third century C.E., they also received oil, bread, wine, and pork. The system worked only because aristocrats felt themselves bound by certain obligations. Wealthy Romans drew supplies from their estates and, with them, directly subsidized substantial numbers of servants (slaves and freedmen) and clients.
But the system also involved reciprocity, a sign of equality. Food was one of the gifts that friends exchanged with one another. Such gifts ranged from a brace of thrush or chickens to the two thousand moray eels that a wealthy breeder “lent” to Julius Caesar for a banquet celebrating one of his victories. The man, we are told, “did not wish to be repaid in money or in kind”: he expected the same number of eels in return.
While “negating” monetary exchange, redistribution and reciprocity tended to reproduce the categories of rich and poor. Certain gifts were appropriate for people “below” one’s own station, while others were suitable for one’s “betters” and “equals.”
At both the top and bottom of the social hierarchy people ate what they produced. Peasants had nothing else, whereas wealthy landowners who lived in town obtained part of their food from their own estates. Taxation profited the city, where people ate better than in the country and had first choice of what was grown elsewhere.
Urban markets were large enough to justify permanent oversight in regard to quantities and prices. Columella blamed the fact that “the poor can no longer afford expensive foods and have to settle for the cheaper ones” on the growth of the cash economy and rising prices. According to him, “In the past…rich and poor both lived on milk, game, meat from domestic animals, water, and wheat.” In Rome, as in many later societies, money tended to increase dietary disparities. The urban poor had barely enough to scrape by: “But for a single two-as coin that I’m keeping for chickpeas and lupine, my pockets are empty,” one of Trimalchio’s less wealthy guests reported in Petronius’ “The Banquet of Trimalchio” (first century C.E.).
In a society that exhibited inequalities of status as well as fortune, distributions of food always reflected the social hierarchy. During one public banquet to celebrate a religious holiday, the emperor Domitian ordered that meal baskets of different sizes and contents be distributed to senators and equestrians on the one hand and common people on the other. When generous donors gave public dinners in Italian cities, rank was always respected: municipal councilors received full dinners while commoners were simply served a glass of wine.
At private dinners the hierarchy was reflected not only in the seating arrangement but also in the quality of the food served. In satirical literature one often finds the second-class guests at the foot of the table excluded from the better food (such as white bread) and wine reserved for the guests at the head. But some aristocrats liked to distinguish themselves by serving everyone the same thing. Lucullus (as Plutarch tells us) adjusted the sumptuousness of his banquets to the rank of his guests. And when he dined alone, he insisted on being treated at his own table in a manner befitting a man of his quality: “Lucullus is dining with Lucullus.”
The state played a role in standardizing eating habits, especially of two groups whose food was, if not provided entirely by the state, at least guaranteed by its authority: the plebeian citizens of Rome and the army. Both groups enjoyed a privileged status relative to the rest of the imperial population.
In the first century C.E., Roman soldiers took Roman customs with them wherever they went. Many were Mediterraneans who, when they settled in the north of Europe, continued to insist on olive oil and wine. These customs were adopted by new recruits from the provinces. The military diet, like the Roman diet, thus consisted of baked bread, meat, olive oil, and wine. Soldiers commonly drank posca, water mixed with a little vinegar, which both disinfected the otherwise insalubrious liquid and gave it a sharp acidic taste. It was with such a solution that a Roman soldier, moved to pity, moistened the lips of the crucified Jesus. If dilute vinegar was the Coca-Cola of the Roman army, soldiers and officers alike nevertheless preferred wine, which was believed to be a source of fortifying energy. Cato’s rural slaves were given wine to drink after the grape harvest.
Slaves also ate standard fare, provided by their masters, who had a personal stake in their well-being. Their diet may have improved along with that of plebeians and soldiers. Cato’s slaves received, in addition to their daily bread, what was called a pulmentarium. This consisted of oil, salt, and vinegar along with other foods that varied with the season, the place, and the nature of the work to be done—olives after the harvest, and when those were gone, hallec (the fish skin left over from the making of garum, a kind of fish sauce), as well as figs for those who toiled in the vineyards as the grapes reached maturity. Although Cato’s recommendation of a vegetarian diet was not accepted at the villa of Settefinestre, slaves were not given top-quality meat. Diets at all levels of society improved, and disparities diminished: two centuries after Cato, Seneca’s slaves received a monthly ration of five bushels of wheat, exactly the same as the imperial distributions to Roman citizens.
Choice of Foods
In Roman Italy a diet based on grains, increasingly consumed in the form of bread, gradually became standard, along with wine. Within this common diet, however, there were differences involving the preparation of food, the contents of the pulmentarium, the quantities and qualities of servings (especially of foods eaten fresh), and seasoning.
PREPARING GRUEL, FLATCAKES, AND BREADS The Romans of the third century B.C.E. were seen as “gruel (puls) eaters.” In modest households the tradition of eating grain mixed with water to make gruel or baked into unleavened flatcakes continued. Soldiers in the field consumed their grain ration in the same way. In late republican and imperial Rome, which erected a monument to bakers—the tombstone in the shape of a colossal oven at Eurysaces—bread was baked at home only in aristocratic households. When wheat was distributed to plebeian citizens in the form of grain, the standard practice was to turn it over to professional bakers; soldiers did the same. Later, when Rome began distributing bread in lieu of wheat in the third century, the change represented more than just an improvement in diet. It also enabled the state to tinker with quantities and qualities: flour could be baked into smaller or blacker loaves.
PREPARING MEAT Although the Romans, unlike the Greeks, apparently did not expound on the relative merits of boiled versus roasted meat, Varro’s idea was that the different techniques for cooking meat were discovered one after the other, first roasting (assus), then boiling (elixus), and finally stewing (ex iure), and to many contemporaries this sequence represented qualitative improvement. As for frigere (loosely, “frying”), the word had two meanings: it referred on the one hand to the toasting of grains and on the other hand to vigorous cooking in a hot liquid other than water, a liquid which, unlike the ius, was not consumed with the prepared dish. This “frying” was similar to our cooking in fat when oil was used but different when other liquids or mixtures were involved (garum alone; wine and garum; oil, wine, and garum; oil, honey, and garum; etc.). Where such mixtures are used, Apicius speaks sometimes of coquere (“cooking”), sometimes of frigere. Longer cooking times seem to have been related to the quality of the dish: meat was often boiled before roasting.
THE PULMENTARIUM Meals were generally composed of three main elements, one of which depended on the occasion and social level of the diners. An inscription from Isernia now in the Louvre speaks of a triad consisting of bread, wine, and pulmentarium. In the case in point, the pulmentarium was clearly the main dish, a stew, which the traveler ate with his bread. Any grain-based diet needs something to supplement the basic staple, and modern nutritional science has corroborated the wisdom of certain ancient customs. For instance, the protein not available from grain alone could be found in dried legumes, which the ancients saw as the poor man’s meat, as well as in cheese, other dairy products, eggs, and of course fish and meat. According to the celebrated physician Galen, “Legumes are those grains of Demeter that are not used to make bread.” He recognized their value as a source of energy and served them to the gladiators in his charge. Our best information is that Roman soldiers in Egypt primarily ate lentils, moreover. Martial tells us in Xenia that in frugal meals cheese took the place of meat. If the triad bread, wine, and radix (roots) was the “poor man’s dinner,” plebeians looked upon a dinner of bread, wine, and meat (with or without beans) as special.
QUALITIES, QUANTITIES, AND PORTIONS It was not uncommon for the wealthy to eat just a small part of a costly animal. When Seneca wished to criticize the “monstrous sybaritic excesses of those who select only certain portions of an animal out of disgust for the rest,” he singled out the practice of eating the tongues of flamingoes. By contrast, ordinary people ate everything: tripe, blood sausages, leftover meat ground into meatballs, even the heads of sheep (which Juvenal called a “feast fit for a cobbler”). The same Juvenal remarked that a chained fieldhand (a slave of the lowest possible social condition) might dream of the sow’s womb he once ate in a tavern.
A feast without meat was inconceivable. In one of Horace’s Satires, the arrival of a guest serves as the pretext for a small farmer to forgo his usual frugal meal in order to serve a goat or chicken from the farm. Such a feast, featuring homegrown specialties, was seen as superior to a meal made with ostentatious, costly market items such as fish. In Roman times people did not distinguish between meat and fish, as they would have done in the Middle Ages. To the Romans, fish was a variety of animal flesh, served with the meat course. In what was basically a peasant society, saltwater (and hatchery) fish were an expensive luxury, reserved for the rich.
If Varro and Pliny the Elder sang the praises of pork, Cato provided the counterpoint with his praise for cabbage, which was eaten raw as well as cooked. For Pliny, however, the most important crops for the human diet after wheat were the broad bean, or fava, which was consumed primarily in the form of a puree, and the turnip, which was grilled or boiled. These two examples point to two categories of plants between which the Romans drew a clear distinction: the legumina, pod-bearing plants of which one ate the seed pods, including the broad bean, chickpea, lentil, and lupine, and the (h)olera, of which one ate the root or green stem (holus; the singular of this collective noun, in fact, meant “cabbage”). Lettuce was eaten as an appetizer, as it is today in some Mediterranean regions. Quality foods were not infrequently identified by their place of origin: Pliny mentions rape from Nursia and turnips from Amiternum. Oil was often used as a condiment with beans.
CONDIMENTS “Crush together some pepper, lovage, oregano, bay leaf, coriander, and onions; moisten with honey, wine, garum, and a little oil, heat, and thicken with starch [from wheat].” This recipe for boar sauce is one of 468 in Apicius’ cookbook, which relied on ten basic ingredients. In order of frequency of use, these were pepper, garum, olive oil, honey, lovage, vinegar, wine, cumin, rue, and coriander. The average dish took eight or nine ingredients. Even the poor had their special recipes. According to Columella, one skillful cook used common garden herbs to season his fava beans: chervil, chicory, lettuce, garlic, and onion. Garlic had plebeian overtones and does not figure in Apicius’ cookbook. Usually the ingredients of a dish were blended with mortar and pestle, a tool found in every Roman kitchen.
Food and the Social Hierarchy
UNEQUAL ACCESS TO HOT MEALS For peasants, urban plebeians, and soldiers in the field, accustomed to a monotonous daily regimen dominated by uncooked or at any rate cold dishes, the ultimate dining pleasure was a hot meal, preferably including meat and oven-baked bread. These people also liked hot or at the very least warm drinks (like our grogs) or wine diluted with hot water (calda), which could be bought not only in Roman cities but wherever Roman soldiers went. The sixth-century monastic rule known as the Rule of the Master prescribed a mixture of hot water and vinegar for the monks to drink after dinner, attesting to the durability in Italy of the twin traditions of the calda and the posca. A similar practice exists in China, where hot water is sometimes served to guests in lieu of tea, especially among the lower classes.
At one extreme, the poor, the peasantry, and the miserly (a favorite target of satirists) lived on puls, or gruel, plus broad beans and lentils, cabbage and turnips, and greens. At the other extreme, we know a good deal about luxury foods. For Cicero, oysters, fish, and home-baked bread were marks of high social status. Elite and populace nevertheless shared a taste for such soft animal parts as the nipple and uterus of both the domestic and wild sow. These were also served at banquets, but as appetizers.
Puls in its simplest form was nothing more than wheat flour mixed with water or milk. Cato gives a fancier recipe that combined semolina from high-grade wheat with cheese, honey, and eggs—a complete meal. The wealthy always served gruel made from semolina but only as a garnish for seasoned meat or brains. Although the elite did not disdain plebeian dishes, they set themselves apart by the manner in which those dishes were prepared and eaten. When they ate broad beans, for example, they added a costly, refined sauce that completely disguised the beans’ taste.
Roman high cuisine was essentially an art of complexity and transformation. Surprising combinations were also favored: one aristocrat bestowed his name upon a stew of cockscombs and goose feet. A few gourmets shared sophisticated tastes: the frequent combination of garum and honey in the cookbook attributed to Apicius suggests a distinctive taste for a combination of the sweet and the savory, and the mixing of vinegar and honey indicates a predilection for the sweet and sour. Fruit was used as an ingredient of many dishes for the same reason.
It was not enough to be wealthy to be a gourmet, however. The wealthy but uncouth freedmen portrayed by Petronius did not eat refined dishes. One of Trimalchio’s guests tells a humorous story about a funeral repast at which a variety of ordinary fare was served. In the story the plates are all mixed up. A real funeral dinner would have had three courses, in the Roman style: appetizers (gustatio), a meat and fish course (primae mensae), and dessert (secundae mensae). The meal would have begun with bread, snails, tripe, liver, beets, turnips, mustard, eggs, and cheese, followed by meat, including pork topped with blood sausage, with pork sausage and gizzards on the side, and perhaps, if there were no costly boar meat, some bear (purchased at cut rates after a gladiatorial contest) and ham. Finally, for dessert, there would have been pie served with honeyed wine, chickpeas, lupine, walnuts, and apples—quantity but not quality.
Ovid tells the tale of the peasant couple Philemon and Baucis, who served dinner to a visitor whom they failed to recognize as Jupiter in disguise. As the main dish they served cabbage, garnished with a thin slice of salt pork. For appetizers they served olives, wild chicory, black radish, cheese, and eggs cooked in the ashes of the fire. Dessert consisted of walnuts and figs, dried dates, apples and plums, grapes, and of course a honeycomb.
INFRASTRUCTURES By our modern standards, the kitchens in the spacious homes that archaeologists have excavated in Pompeii, Herculanum, and other Roman cities were quite small, but the fact remains that a specific room was set aside for cooking and equipped with the necessary utensils. Some houses had ovens in the courtyard for baking bread or roasting large pieces of meat. Unlike these individual dwellings, the insulae (apartment blocks) of Ostia, which have been preserved up to the second story, gave short shrift to cooking and other chores. Apartments were generally without fireplaces, ovens, or dedicated kitchens. In the few that did contain kitchens, the space was generally shared with the privy. Food was normally cooked on a portable brazier set near a window. The use of the clibanus (a sort of covered brazier) made it possible to do without an oven.
In Roman slave society one did not have to be wealthy to have a cook, and the cook role was well developed in the comic plays of the time. The rich nevertheless sought out cooks of talent and also employed a whole panoply of other servants to serve wine diluted with warm water, carve meat, and so on.
DINNER SETTINGS The sources tell us most about the dinners of the elite—not the ordinary ones but the banquets, which were probably rare even among the wealthy. Before going any farther, we must first pause to dispel the persistent myth of wealthy Romans indulging in lavish banquets at which they consumed dishes whose splendor (or rarity) was rivaled only by the crudeness of their table manners. For contemporaries, what stood out about banquets was that they were meals eaten in company—dining among one’s friends. Listen to Cicero’s definition of convivium: “To sit down to dinner with friends because they share one’s life.” The importance of conviviality was extended to the Latin word for dinner, cena, for which ancient authorities invented an etymology linking it to the Greek koinon, meaning “in common.”
For plebeian men, social life was virtually synonymous with dining outside the home. Tabernae and popinae were inextricably intertwined, and for the common people both symbolized the pleasures of the city. The taberna was primarily a place where beverages were served and food was an afterthought; while drinking wine people also ate chickpeas, turnips, and salted foods, according to a sign found in Ostia. The popina was our bar and grill, a restaurant where dinner was served along with drinks. It catered to a plebeian clientele. Here social rank ceased to matter. The reputation of the popina was rather dubious, however. As in the cities of the Middle Ages, in Rome the tavern was the antechamber to the bordello. It was also a place were men gambled with dice.
In every popina thick vapors emanated from the stewpot and kettle that were always kept boiling on the stove. What people liked about such places was that the food was not just cooked but served hot. We hear of “steaming plates” and “smoking sausages.” Drinks were also served hot.
TABOOS Taboos on food were uncommon. The fact that a flamen of Jupiter was forbidden to touch or even name raw meat or leavened dough was a sign of the importance attached to the transformation of raw foodstuffs into edible foods. But the Jews’ abstention from eating pork was something that the Romans—who believed, as Varro put it, that “nature made the pig for the banquet table”—could not understand. Among the Romans there was no generally prescribed ritual fasting, although individuals did restrict their diets in various temporary or permanent ways.
THE ELITE The Romans did, however, encourage frugality, even among the wealthy. “Good” emperors were praised for their observance of this rule, which could be violated for ritual occasions. It was not always respected, though: among the signs of abuse were the frequency and timing of meals, the places where meals were taken, the quantity of food eaten, the consumption of rare and especially exotic dishes as well as of foods bought on the market rather than produced at home, wasted portions of meat, and certain cooking techniques (such as the excessive use of pepper, an exotic spice that tended to make dishes expensive and disguise what was being served). Republican sumptuary laws restricted the consumption of certain types of food. Simple cookery was honored for respecting the ideal of frugality.
SOLDIERS Dietary restrictions in the military essentially concerned the cooking of meat. Scipio, after ridding his bivouac of prostitutes and soothsayers and disposing of inessential baggage, limited his troops’ authorized mess kit to a spit, a copper pot, and a drinking cup. For lunch his soldiers were ordered to eat raw foods standing up, while for dinner they were allowed to sample roasted or boiled meat. Such orders suggest that the troops were apt to supplement their meals by cooking other foods or buying prepared dishes from camp-following merchants.
The historian of diet has hard information about what only a small fraction of the population ate and very little detailed data even about the rations of soldiers or Cato’s slaves. The medical literature does, however, make it possible to discover dietetic principles that were to some extent actually applied. Anthropologists concerned with the symbolic aspects of eating have little in the way of taboos to work with in the case of Rome, but the rituals of sacrifice do offer a field of study characteristic of Mediterranean societies. Nevertheless, the richest vein in the study of Roman cookery, table manners, and dining customs doubtless belongs to the sociologist. In this realm the sociologist is concerned not so much with “distinction” as with the opposition between the licit and the illicit, which crops up repeatedly in Roman discourses about food. To be sure, the sources still afford only limited understanding of Roman eating, cooking, and gastronomy. Despite this, sociological study can shed clear light on urban behavior with respect to food.
The categories of analysis may at times seem rather simplistic: rich and poor, aristocrat and plebeian, citizen-soldiers and slaves, nouveau riche and old elite, including senators and other prominent men, even emperors, who at times conducted themselves with dignity while at other times deliberately acting in degrading ways. These distinctions remind us of Rome’s conquests and their consequences. Roman society was profoundly transformed, right down to its eating habits, by the growing cash economy and the spectacular increase in the income and expenditures of privileged groups. Yet Romans for the most part continued to see the growing disparity in terms of traditional status hierarchies, even if they were only too well aware that the new hierarchies of consumption were undermining not only the rules on which their civilization was based but their own self-image.
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