Konrad Vössing has edited this interesting and useful collection of essays on Roman dining, with a strong emphasis on visual material and a range across the Empire, from Rome and Pompeii to Carthage, Antioch and the Greek East. In some ways it resembles William Slater's 1991 volume, Dining in a Classical Context. The aim of the volume is to reconsider the Roman banquet in some detail, outside the twin traditional approaches of the details of daily life in ancient Rome and the nostalgic retrospectives of Republican life to be found in Satire and moralizing texts that contrast pastoral simplicity with the corroding power of luxury in the contemporary world of the poet. The volume has a strong archaeological and artistic component, along with literary and historical approaches. Though more has been written on the Greek symposium under the stimulus of Oswyn Murray and others, much new work has appeared on Roman dining in recent years, not least Vossing's own Mensa Regia (2004), Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet (2003), Stein-Holkeskamp, Das römische Gastmahl (2005) and other studies, Donahue, The Roman Community at Table (2005), and Roller, Dining Posture in Ancient Rome (2006). Quite how élite dining in a reclining posture, which Greeks, Etruscans and Romans inherited from the Near East, was then integrated into their own cultural practices and passed on one to another within the complex exchanges of the Roman Empire will be the subject of much more investigation. The present volume though offers much, not least its very welcome focus on the Romans, and the frequent reference to Greek authors of the Roman period, notably Athenaeus and Plutarch in his table talk.

V.'s own contribution is the final essay, in which he argues that the commissatio was not a regular Roman institution, but an occasion that an author might use to compare with the Greek komos and to colour the character of a particular gathering, often in a negative way. Earlier in the volume, Katherine Dunbabin presents visual images of music and dancers at convivia from the first century b.c. to the sixth a.d. These may be elegant or lewd, but imply greater variety of practice than literary texts; they imply varied levels of representation of those who owned them, and like the well-known Menander mosaics from Pompeii, Mytilene, Antioch and Zeugma make a statement about householders in a Roman Empire with a rich Greek prehistory. The chapter points to further profitable research in this area. Harald Mielsch reviews still-life paintings, also from a wide geographical range, and a range of locations in the home and of apparent representation — of birds, fish, animals and plants, that might be in a natural setting, that might be dead or alive, or in stages of preparation for the table, along with other tableware, sometimes in glass.

Eric Morvillez discusses ‘sigma-fountains’, a form of dining beside water, which became an important development of the stibadium in later antiquity but has earlier manifestations in Pliny's letters and elsewhere. Salvatore Ciro Nappo assesses in detail the building complex at Murecine, beside the Sarno at Pompeii, with particular reference to the baths, kitchen, triclinium and wall decorations. Anja Bettenworth discusses the banquet of the emperor Maximus at which St Martin is a guest in the Life of St Martin by Paulinus of Perigueux. Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser in ‘das versteinerte convivium’ offers a striking interpretation of the Medusa section of Ovid's Metamorphoses 4.607–5.272, in which the familiar motif of the gorgon's head at the banquet/symposium is made to work within the sophisticated elaboration of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda. Elena Merli discusses the eranos, or contributory dinner, as a ‘literary fossil’ in a Roman setting, which was elaborated by Lucilius, Horace, Martial, Juvenal and others, with reference to the problematic area of aequalitas. William Slater discusses conversation at the convivium, the importance of speech, and the delicate balance that needed to be maintained between appropriate and inappropriate words and jokes in order to maintain the order of the occasion and avoid quarrels at table. Dirk Schnurbusch discusses the process by which the emperors appropriated the hierarchical aristocratic banquet of the late Republic in order to enhance their status and prestige. Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp discusses mealtimes and the banquet with reference to time, the ordering of the day, and deviations from that order by distinctive literary characters who carry strong moral agendas, such as Cato the Elder and Trimalchio. Werner Tietz builds on earlier work on the solitary meal in Roman thought, and the striking position of those who deviate from social norms, such as the parasite, the solitary host, and the emperor.

There is a good index of sources and a useful bibliography.