Abstract
This chapter examines the cultural geography of Roman dining, arguing that the food, seating arrangements, entertainment, and decoration of triclinia worked together to construct the body as more than a "slightly porous jug" (M. Douglas). The half-open body in Plutarch's Quaestiones Convivales and Petronius's Satyricon is compared to the treatment of the wall surface as membrane in fourth-style painting: both types of evidence point to dining as a process of unwrapping the body/self from layers of formal deportment. Neither simple decadence nor Bakhtinian carnival, dining functions as a dynamic metaphor for social change in the early empire.
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