Grasping the Pangolin: Sensuous Ambiguity in Roman Dining

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.