Skeletons and Dining Couches: Eating and Dining in the Roman Empire

Sometimes the most exciting aspect of a lecture is its title.

That's my rather snarky reaction to tonight's lecture, the second in the UW History Department's winter lecture series.

So where, in my own opinion, did things go wrong? 

First, the length of the lecture.  The speaker's announced topic -- as I interpreted it -- was a study of diet, nutrition, and the enjoyment of food in the Roman Empire.  A broad topic.  The lecture, after the usual fulsome introduction of the speaker, lasted fifty minutes.  Those of us who have been attending alumni lectures recall when the lectures lasted a full two hours.  Professor Costigan's lectures, which were presented for a number of years during the 1970s and 80s,  could go as much as 15 or 20 minutes past the two-hour mark, once he got wound up, accompanied by apologies for taking up so much of our time.  Those lectures -- and the lectures of several subsequent lecturers -- were so well-focused and eloquent that we would have gladly stayed for another hour.

Second, and speaking of focus, it was hard to tell exactly where the lecturer was going.  She emphasized that what we know about Roman eating is based on three types of evidence -- studies of skeletons, especially from Pompeii, written texts such as those by Pliny and Seneca, and various art works showing Romans at table (for example, illustration above).  She didn't have enough time to present more than a few items in each category, but the evidence was interesting.  More would have been more in this case, not less.

And third, aggravating the first two problems, was the time she spent trying to put an ideological spin on her research.   I could tell there were going to be problems near the beginning of the lecture when she warned us that the human body is more than just our flesh and blood -- it is also a surface upon which elites write their aspirations and prejudices.  I hope I'm not mis-paraphrasing.  Thus, in our own world today, eating organic food isn't just eating healthily, it's also a way to display your social class and educational background.  It's aspirational.

It's as though you had signed up for a lecture on Wordsworth and the Lake poets, and found yourself listening to a deconstruction of Wordsworth, one that demonstrated how the poet had forced male heteronormative values on his readers, worshipping Mother Nature as a means of asserting Victorian idealization of and thus male societal control over women.

Our lecturer pointed out illustrations on murals and mosaics that showed slaves at a banquet hustling and in motion to serve food and assist the diners, while the dining guests lay quietly on their couches, speaking to each other but avoiding eye contact with the slaves.  Having experienced the same behavior at most good restaurants and banquet halls I've attended, this didn't surprise me.  Yes, there's a gulf between server and those being served, whether the servers are slaves or aspiring actors or writers who are just working as waiters to pay the rent.  I suppose that it's legitimate to do research to establish that this common human behavior was also common among the Romans, but I'm not sure it should be more than mentioned in passing in a fifty minute lecture.

The lecture wasn't terrible.  The lecturer was personable, and the examples shown on the screen were interesting.  I'm just disappointed that we aren't being offered longer lectures with more depth and clearer focus.