Articles

Power Lunches in the Eastern Roman Empire

Power Lunches in the Eastern Roman Empire

By Susan E. Alcock

Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 42 (Fall 2003)

Introduction: You might be wondering about my title. Even in this depressed economy, you can all still envision the spectacle of a “power lunch”: that scene of extravagant eating, drinking, and even more extravagant billing, of collusion, coercion, and power plays around the table. Meanwhile, if you put the notion of “food” anywhere near the concept of “the Roman empire,” an equally immediate, and still more fantastic image springs to mind: of wild parties, unimaginable meals, of excess beyond belief.

Both these phenomena are appropriately invoked in a lecture intended to do honor to John D’Arms. Let’s face it, John was not uninterested in power and its operation; he was a worldly guy. But, much more importantly, he was a long-term student of asymmetrical human relationships, a student of interaction (easily evolved or painfully enforced) between individuals of different status in the Roman world. Just as significantly, he became in his later career a central figure in ancient food research, helping it mature into the increasingly sophisticated subdiscipline of classical studies it is today.

If “Roman food” was once all about the “ooh ahh” factor (flamingo tongues, vomiting, and, of course, the inevitable orgies), John saw far beyond. Mind you, he could tell an outrageous and salacious “bad food” anecdote with the best of them (I’ve seen him do it!). But he also pushed continually for more rigorous analyses of Roman dining practices—the commensal relationships forged, the hostilities created, what currents lay beneath the deceptive surface of our sources

In some of John’s later writings, a new theme began, I think, to emerge. Our best evidence for Roman foodways, both textual and archaeological, comes from the heartland of empire, from Italy. Our sources, of varying date, have frequently been collapsed together to present a synchronic picture: to represent the Roman dinner party (the convivium); to assert this is “how the Romans ate.” As John would say, “this will not do”; and he evinced increasing curiosity about variation in food consumption across the Roman empire. In one of the last things he wrote, John was skeptical of any “kind of seamless coherence in Roman elite constructions of culinary reality”; he deplored “any belief in an unvarying consistency in upper-class dining protocols, rituals and representations”—especially over a span of several centuries, and across a vast empire.

Click here to read this article from the University of Michigan

Food in the Ancient World – check out Ancient History magazine

Food in the Ancient World – check out Ancient History magazine

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