What was really going on at Roman banquets? In this lively new
book, veteran Romanist Matthew Roller looks at a little-explored
feature of Roman culture: dining posture. In ancient Rome, where
dining was an indicator of social position as well as an extended
social occasion, dining posture offered a telling window into the
day-to-day lives of the city's inhabitants.
This book investigates the meaning and importance of the three
principal dining postures--reclining, sitting, and standing--in the
period 200 B.C.-200 A.D. It explores the social values and
distinctions associated with each of the postures and with the
diners who assumed them. Roller shows that dining posture was
entangled with a variety of pressing social issues, such as gender
roles and relations, sexual values, rites of passage, and
distinctions among the slave, freed, and freeborn conditions.
Timely in light of the recent upsurge of interest in Roman
dining, this book is equally concerned with the history of the body
and of bodily practices in social contexts. Roller gathers evidence
for these practices and their associated values not only from elite
literary texts, but also from subelite visual
representations--specifically, funerary monuments from the city of
Rome and wall paintings of dining scenes from Pompeii.
Engagingly written, "Dining Posture in Ancient Rome" will
appeal not only to the classics scholar, but also to anyone
interested in how life was lived in the Eternal City.
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