II

For more than 600 years (from the early second century B.C.E. into the fifth century C.E.), written texts describing table luxury (luxus mensae) at the banquets of the rich and powerful corroborate, for the most part, the components of Roman haute cuisine that were summarily noticed by Goody. Our literary sources are explicit about the dishes that the Roman elite considered to be special delicacies, about the ways in which these could be prepared and elaborately combined, and about their ceremonial—and often spectacular—presentation. In the last years of the Republic, Cicero, attacking crude Epicurean hedonism, makes clear that those who regarded themselves as the most discriminating gourmets looked to fishermen, to fowlers, and to hunters to provide the choicest and most exotic provender.⁷

A contemporary member of the senatorial elite, Varro, confirms this in detail, in a passage on villa husbandry (pastio villatica) for the purposes of both pleasure and profit: he observes that fish can and should be raised in both the villa's saltwater and freshwater ponds (piscinae), that the products of aviaries, too, come in two subdivisions: the peafowl (pavones), turtle doves (turtures), and thrushes (turdi) that are land-based; and the geese, teal and ducks (anseres, querquedulae, anates) that all require water. The products of the hunt, Varro continues, need to be further divided between large game (boar, roe, and hare), and the bees, snails, and dormice (glires) that are also to be found outside the villa (De Re Rustica 3.3.1–4).

As I have argued elsewhere, nearly all of these comestibles appear among the foods on offer at the most elaborate Roman private banquet in the record, the cena aditialis (inaugural dinner) hosted by the Pontifex Maximus (Chief Priest) Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius in August of 70 B.C.E., to celebrate the installation of a new flamen Martialis (Priest of Mars), the young patrician L. Cornelius Lentulus Niger.⁸

The menu, which the high priest himself scrupulously recorded “in the fourth register of his pontifical records,” and which has been preserved and transmitted by the late-antique scholar Macrobius (Saturnalia 3.13.12), also featured notable quantities of fresh shellfish, including “as many oysters as the guests desired,” haunches of venison and wild boar (lumbos capruginos aprugnos), and fattened fowls cooked in pastry (altilia ex farina involuta).

By providing fattened fowls at this inaugural dinner, Metellus was flagrantly defying a provision that had been repeated in every piece of Roman sumptuary legislation from the lex Fannia onwards: the stipulation that any dinner be limited to only a single winged creature “and that one not fattened” (by cramming: Pliny Historia Naturalis [HN] 10.139). To be sure, these inaugural dinners became and remained notorious for the high degree of their culinary experimentation, for their exotic refinements, and for their astronomically high costs: it was at one of these, about the same time as Metellus' dinner, that the orator Hortensius first served a peacock.⁹

The solitary item on Metellus' entire menu that derived from a domestically bred mammal were two dishes of sows' udders (sumina, and a patina suminis): further evidence that at this banquet the pontifex maximus was parading the culinary privileges restricted to the members of this highly exclusive feasting group, while flagrantly defying prevailing social and cultural norms. For sows' udders, too, were among the dishes proscribed by the sumptuary laws (as must be inferred from Pliny HN 8.209). Indeed, that they were considered to occupy an exalted place among elite culinary delicacies is already clear by 191 B.C.E., when Plautus' comedy Pseudolus was produced. In this play the pimp Ballio, intent on making a good impression on certain grandees (viros summos) whom he has invited to dinner, orders a kitchen slave to take special pains with the preparation of the ham (perna), the pork rind (callum), the sweetbreads (glandium), and the sows' udders (sumen).¹⁰ If sumen had not by this time come to count as a delicacy at the tables of the Roman rich, neither of these passages would have made sense to any members of Plautus' audience.

Some time during the last quarter of the second century B.C.E., satiric hexameters of Lucilius, who elsewhere refers to avoiding the Licinian sumptuary law (Aul. Gell. 2.24.7 = ROL 3, p. 599), emphasize that the special wants of all dinner guests should be gratified, be these sows' udders or a platter of fattened fowls.¹¹

The next appearance of sumina in the literary record are the two dishes of them which, as we have seen, Metellus included on the menu of the cena aditialis in 70 B.C.E. Not long thereafter, probably near the date of Cicero's In Pisonem (55 B.C.E.), we encounter the letter of the Greek intellectual Philodemus to his powerful Roman friend Piso, the single surviving example of a Greek invitation poem, which contains specifically Roman elements: the ninth hour specified as the time of the dinner; Philodemus' humble cottage advertised as the locale; and the promise of honest companions and agreeable conversation; while luxuries such as sows' udders (outhata) and wine from the island of Chios are explicitly mentioned as delicacies that Piso will have to forego on this occasion (Anthologia Palatina 11.44).¹² Clearly, these sows' udders are worthy of our careful attention.

They reappear in any number of Roman texts of the first century C.E. In the first satire of Persius, composed in the 50s, the poet displays his thorough distaste for the kind of hypocrite who seeks to buy the esteem of his dinner guests, and to earn their praise, by serving them calidum sumen (Pers. 1.53). The elder Pliny, in his great encyclopedia, notes that the flavors of pork number nearly fifty, in contrast to those of other meats, which possess no more than one each, and lists the edible parts forbidden by the sumptuary laws from being served at banquets: paunches (abdomina), sweetbreads (glandia), and matrix (vulva) are conspicuous among these. Pliny adds that one writer of pantomime, after obtaining his freedom, insisted on consuming abdomen at every subsequent dinner, thereby earning sumen as his sobriquet¹³

; elsewhere Pliny observes that the udders of young sows that have just given birth have the best flavor, provided that the sow has not yet suckled her litter.¹⁴

In Martial's Xenia, a succession of two-line mottos intended to accompany gifts of food or wine, the motto devoted to sumen (44) represents the udder as so swollen with milk as to suggest that the sow was still alive.¹⁵

In book two of the Epigrams, a dinner guest is represented as shamelessly tucking the sow's udder and other delicacies into a napkin so as to carry them home with him. “Put back the dinner,” enjoins the poet, “I did not invite you for tomorrow” (Mart. 2.37.1–11). In books 4–9, the poet denies that presenting guests with sumen, along with wild boar, oysters, mullet, and mushrooms, constitutes a valid proxy for friendship (7.78; 9.14). In a later poem,¹⁶ Martial deceitfully promises sows' udders to Iulius Cerialis in an attempt to persuade him to come to dinner (11.52.13–15). At another convivium, where the lofty L. Arruntius Stella was expected among the guests, the poet announces his plans to present a sow's udder dripping with tuna brine as the pièce de résistance.¹⁷ And among the epigrams dispatched from his native Bilbilis in Spain back to Rome before his death (in 103 or 104), Martial reintroduces the same self-regarding Laetinus whom readers had earlier encountered in an epigram from 87 (3.43): Laetinus, though suffering from fever, apparently does not let illness interfere with his enjoyment of mushrooms, oysters, sows' udders, and wild boar, or with his excessive consumption of suitably fine wines (12.17.1–8).

In the two books Plutarch wrote “On the Eating of Flesh” (De Esu Carnium),¹⁸

he excoriates, among the unspeakably cruel practices which seekers after pleasure commit out of gluttony, the habit of kicking sows about to give birth, so as to destroy the litter and to enable the udders, the most inflamed part of the creature, to gratify epicures' jaded palates (Plut. Mor. 997A). The great doctor and medical writer Galen adjudged pork the most nutritious of all meats, including beef (which is less easily digested). In book 3 of On the Properties of Foodstuffs, now available for the first time in English in a new translation by Mark Grant, Galen explicitly commented on gourmets' penchant for animal glands, particularly sows' udders, which he believed to furnish nourishment not dissimilar to that of meat.¹⁹

In Diocletian's Edict of Maximum Prices (301 C.E.), the costs for individual meat items that no one was to exceed included the sum of twenty denarii for one Italian pound of sows' udders, an amount equaled only by two types of ham, and surpassing that for any other meat except sow's matrix (bulba), at twenty four denarii; even boar, venison, and suckling pig carried lower maximum prices.²⁰

It is now generally agreed that the De Re Coquinaria, the single collection of recipes to have survived from antiquity—the text is preserved in two ninth-century manuscripts—cannot be the work of the notable connoisseur of food and eating M. Gavius Apicius, who lived in the age of Tiberius and with whom numerous culinary anecdotes are associated. De Re Coquinaria is instead in all likelihood a product of the late fourth century.²¹

Dishes featuring sumina feature in four of the surviving recipes. In the first, a kind of paté en croûte, the udders, cooked and sliced into small pieces, are to be combined with the flesh of fish, chicken, ficedulae (fig-peckers, the only Roman game bird that was eaten whole), and the breasts of thrushes (turdi); the reader is enjoined to boil and to season the ingredients, and is then directed to a drawing of the bronze vessel (patella aenea) in which the dish was to be served: here is proof that the De Re Coquinaria was an illustrated cookbook.²² The second recipe is a more everyday version of the first (IV.142.15, with the fig-peckers and thrushes omitted). The two other recipes place the sows' udders at the very center of the attention: in the first, the instructions require the udders to be boiled, then lightly grilled, and finally seasoned with pepper, garum (Rome's omnipresent fish-based seasoning) and wine²³; in the second, for stuffed sumen, the udders are first to be filled with salted sea-urchins, then cooked, served, and eaten with the remains of fish filtered by garum (allec), and with mustard.²⁴

III

Thus, over a period of nearly six centuries, and notwithstanding repeated objections by Roman moralists to the insatiable appetites of gluttons for culinary luxury and excess, our surviving texts demonstrate that sows' udders (sumina) ranked along with fresh shell fish and mullet, and other major delicacies, at convivia where a host was seeking to convince his guests that he and his cook had taken elaborate pains and had spared no expense in constructing the menu. We next need to ask: how far is this written record compatible with surviving images, with convivial protocols as they were conceptualized and executed in Roman art? There is in fact a measure of dissonance.

As I have attempted to show elsewhere, a striking feature of the literary descriptions of elaborate private banquets is the degree to which such descriptions are dominated by the language of spectacle and show.²⁵

Our sources teem with accounts of cooked hot dishes, of the elaborate combination of these, and of their ceremonial presentation. Horace's description of the dinner of the boorish and pretentious Nasidienus offers a notable illustration: slaves brought out “a lamprey, outstretched on a platter, with shrimps swimming all around it” (Sat. 2.8.42–43), and later presented, on a huge serving dish, “the limbs of a crane sprinkled with salt and meal, and the liver of a white goose fattened on rich figs, and hares with limbs torn off, as if being more elegant than if they were eaten with the loins” (ibid. 85–93). By the time of the emperor Hadrian, tetrapharmaca, a dish consisting of sows' udders, pheasant or peacock, ham and wild boar, is said to have found special favor at the emperor's table.²⁶ That gourmets were especially attentive to dressing cooked meats and poultry so as to enhance the visual impression that these created when presented and displayed at table is well illustrated by the elder Pliny, who, in an important passage, reports that by the first years of the Roman Empire, the kitchen staff of great houses had devised new methods for displaying the haunches of fowl, and for “spreading them out from one foot so as to make them fill the dishes in which they were presented and served,” all for the purpose of better showing off these winged edibles (Pliny HN 10.140).

Sows' udders, along with other prestige meats, fowl, and fish—roasted, boiled, or cooked in their own juices, the canonical three stages of preparation by fire (Varro, De Lingua Latina 5.109), and conveyed theatrically to the dining room by slave waiters—thus pervade the literary texts. And within this literary tradition, signals appear suggesting that the aesthetic protocols of at least some visual artists might well have been consistent with the tendencies so clearly detectable in the written record. The Greek painter Piraeicus, for example—mentioned only by the elder Pliny, who however regarded him as masterly, and indeed as having attained summa gloria (high repute) for his depiction of trifling, even sordid, subjects—appears to have had a penchant for painting the dishes of foods ready to be consumed at meals (obsonia), whence derived the cognomen that attached to him: “rhyparographos” (painter of flotsam and jetsam).²⁷

From Pliny's words it is surely not unreasonable to infer the existence of Roman artists who possessed comparable interests and even (perhaps) comparable competence. And at the other end of the alimentary spectrum, representation of the debris of eaten meals seems to have resonated notably among rich Roman patrons commissioning decoration of their triclinia. In the second century B.C.E., Sosus, the only mosaicist to gain an entry into Pliny's chapters on the history of art, “laid at Pergamum the floor of what is known in Greek as the ‘unswept room’ (asarotos oikos), because, by small cubes treated in various shades of color, he represented on the floor the refuse of the dinner table (purgamenta cenae), making them appear as if they had been left there.”²⁸ In the version of this mosaic signed by Heraklitos, dated to the early second century C.E. and now in the Museo Gregoriano Profano in the Vatican (Figure 1), the refuse of consumption appears in artfully random distribution on what is intended to be read as a dining room floor, where such debris might have fallen or been discarded by the diners: the bones of a fish and a fowl; the claws of crab and crayfish; the shells of sea urchins, oysters, and snails; olives and olive pits; dates, nuts, and lettuce leaves. Sosus laid his original version of this visual pun or jeu d'esprit—which simultaneously pretends to be and is a floor, and makes a monument out of the inconsequential, precisely in the manner of Piraeicus, whom we have just encountered above—at Pergamum's royal palace. That it quickly found favor with the owners of the houses and villas of the Roman rich is clear from the fact that a number of other variations of Sosus' original have turned up in the Roman west.²⁹

But for the most part, in the wall paintings and mosaics from private houses and villas, beginning with the evidence from cities buried by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E., foods, when depicted at all, are represented in their “natural” states, uncontaminated and therefore unaltered by the medium of fire. Fish, fowl, and game remain animate, or, if dead, are represented as whole, unplucked (or, if plucked, raw), hung in preparation for cooking. Surprisingly, paintings of a ring-shaped loaf of bread on a shelf, the leg of an animal, and below, an uncooked cut of meat or a fillet of fish, have now turned up in Neronian Rome, during the recent cleaning and restoration in the Domus Aurea (cryptoporticus # 79).³⁰

Cheeses, snails, or eggs, clearly destined for the table, were juxtaposed with live fowl, as in the painting of a hen, feet tied for market, and a guinea fowl reclining alongside two wicker baskets (one of them spilling over) of ricotta cheese (Figure 2, from Herculaneum); or in the remarkable mosaic where, in the lower register, one of a pair of guinea fowl pecks at basketed snails, while in the upper, two ducks float in a pond and a third breaks into the lower plane to eat reeds (Figure 3, Rome, Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere). Fowl and fish, dead and ready for cooking, are commonly introduced together in paintings (a brace of fowl and a pair of moray eels, Figure 4; or a dozen small fish on a plate, a pair of fowl, and a bowl of olives).

These images, along with many others depicting fruits (figs, pears, peaches, cherries, raisins, prunes, dates, or [Figure 5] apples, grapes, and pomegranates), or vegetables (lettuce, mushrooms, carrots, radishes, leeks, and asparagus), invite at first sight comparison with what would later come to be known as “nature mort,” “stillstehende Sache,” “still Life.” But in Roman art, as we know from the architect Vitruvius (6.7.4), they comprised a special category, xenia: painted images of agricultural produce which, in the Greek world, hosts saw fit to send to the guest quarters of their houses as acts of hospitality, for the enjoyment of visitors staying for more than one night. These images of groupings of edibles may always have retained some association with the idea of guest gifts, but as they spread throughout the empire, especially to the mosaic floors of North Africa, such motifs are increasingly scattered through the compartments of geometric compositions, or dominate such rooms as the small triclinium in the House of the Triumph of Neptune at Acholla (Africa Proconsularis) (150–170 C.E.).³¹

Yet despite the quantity of xenia images in Roman imperial art, the ever-present sumina of our texts remain conspicuous for their complete visual absence.

Roman xenia painters and mosaicists represented each and every food that could be cooked in its natural, precooked state. This is not, however, the impression that is conveyed in two recent analyses of xenia paintings, based on an important text: the elder Philostratus' comparison of the two he included in his Eikones or Imagines, a description—ekphrasis—of paintings purportedly belonging to a rich collector in third-century Naples. For Emily Gowers, the two xenia paintings compared by Philostratus (Imagines 1.31; 2.26) represent the passage from nature to culture, from raw to cooked, from ripe to rotten.³²

Gowers was here following Norman Bryson, who earlier, in a detailed analysis of these two descriptions, presented them as a voyage of marked contrast: from a starting point in a state of pure nature (1.31: figs, chestnuts, pears, apples, cherries, grapes, honey from the comb, newly curdled cheeses, and bowls of milk), to a trip “across the categories of food fermented, prepared, and cooked (2.26).³³ But this conceptual voyage is only minimally supported by the text of Philostratus. With the exception of bread, every one of the foods Philostratus discusses in the second painting appears in the same natural state as those described in the first. Indeed, after mentioning the hares, ducks, geese, and loaves of bread of the second painting, he advises his readers: “if you desire a (cooked) second course, put that off until you have cooks, and partake instead of the food (i.e., the chestnuts, figs, and other fruits) that needs no fire” (Imagines 2.26.2). Philostratus could scarcely have made it clearer that the foods in this, as in the first, painting, are to be understood as uncooked foods. The only artist in the Roman Empire ever to have included cooked meats, fish, and game among xenia was a poet, not a visual artist: Martial's xenia offer numerous examples, some of which, indeed, we have already discussed above.

Next, if we move beyond images of the foods in xenia paintings and mosaics to the artistic conventions governing early imperial representations of Roman banquets in progress, we meet the same indifference to the culinary elaboration that features so prominently in literary accounts of upper class feasting. Artists' spotlights typically pointed elsewhere: to assemblies of the diners, depicted as reclining or as seated on couches; to dining room paraphernalia—canopies, cushions, cloths; and, especially, to drinking rather than to eating.

At Pompeii, as is clear from the figures of the reclining couples represented on the west, north, and east walls of the recently excavated triclinium adjacent to the house of Iulius Polybius along Via dell' Abbondanza (regio IX, ins. 12.6), the painter has represented the banquet as having reached its final, sympotic phase: there are no signs whatsoever of any foods, and the figures are deep into the commissatio, post-prandial carousing.³⁴

So also in other early imperial images: banqueters, their arms extended, display drinking cups; tables, centered in the dining spaces, hold drinking vessels; attendant slaves move the wine among the participants (a banqueting scene from Pompeii, Figure 6; a sculptured funeral relief from Amiternum, Figure 7). The governing aesthetic protocol, in short, was the convivium as social phenomenon. Foods, when they appear at all, are usually unidentifiable; images are conventional, highly stylized, and seem intended first and foremost to mark the social fact that a banquet is occurring (a funerary relief from Neumagen: Figure 8).³⁵

One must await the third century and later before identifiably cooked foods in private banqueting imagery begin to make anything like a distinct impression. By far the best-preserved, and one of the most unusual of these, is the earliest one known: the mosaic representation of the components of an elaborate dinner discovered in the House of the Buffet Supper at Antioch on the Orontes and dated to the early years of the third century. It displays a series of dishes (and the silver receptacles that contained them) beginning with eggs, artichokes, and pigs' feet, followed by a cooked fish, a ham, a fowl and—after another dish that has been damaged beyond recognition—something that resembles a cake. Loaves of bread, drinking vessels, and garlands for the banqueters fill the spaces between.³⁶

The second example, dating probably to the years 320–350 C.E., is the outdoor picnic scene, also a mosaic, from the so-called Room of the Small Hunt in the villa of Piazza Armerina in Sicily. Here five huntsmen, seated around a stibadium and underneath a red awning, confront a large platter containing a game bird on the table set before them. In the foreground, one slave draws what appear to be other pieces of game from a wicker basket, and another holds out a glass drinking cup in his right hand.³⁷

As Ghedini has rightly observed, the importance of the convivial scene is heightened by its position on the central axis of the composition in front of the entrance, and is further emphasized by the fact that the red awning or tent, stretched through the trees, constitutes the geometric center of the entire pavement, thus serving to seize the attention of the spectator.³⁸

Possibly in part under the influence of Philostratus the Younger, the third of whose Imagines is similarly dedicated to five hunters on an improvised stibadium preparing to consume a meal of game, Ghedini has argued that the association of the theme of the hunt with that of the banquet became established in the artistic repertoire by the late third century, and then, by the fourth, became increasingly common in the mosaics of aristocratic houses, as well as in examples of elite silver service (e.g., the Hunting Plate of the Sevso Treasure).³⁹ However this may be, the fowl that was set before the hunters in the mosaic of Piazza Armerina, while clearly represented as cooked, is but a single dish; no other foods are visible. And though the meal occupies the geometric center of the composition, the visual emphasis is not on what is being eaten or drunk, but rather on the social fact that refreshment is being taken in the open air after the successful conclusion of the hunt.

Further late-antique images of culinary elaboration and display are provided by the seven painted panels discovered at the end of the eighteenth century in what appears to have been a dining-room in an aristocratic house on the Caelian Hill in early Constantinian Rome. Six life-size female slaves in highly ceremonial costume are represented bearing circular platters of imposing dimensions, intended for display and loaded with a suckling pig, a fowl, vegetables, and other food and drink. Their destination was in all probability the owner of the house who will himself have been represented in an eminent position in the room.⁴⁰

This review leaves us, however, with a question. Why (to revert to the beginning of this section) have we no representations of sows' udders in the Roman artistic representations of elite convivia under the principate? The reason is that they should instead be sought elsewhere, on the grave reliefs that publicize the trades of the persons of sub-equestrian and lower status who commissioned the funerary monuments. An uninscribed relief in Luna marble, depicting the shop of a pork butcher (taberna laniena), discovered on the wall of a house in Trastevere and now in Dresden, displays a butcher in a short tunic (the toga cincta) employing his cleaver to chop ribs (costae). Suspended from the meat rack behind him there hang, from left to right as one views the relief, a pig's head (sinciput), pig's intestines, sow's udders, pig's trotters, a ham, and more pig's ribs. To the right of the butcher hang another cleaver and a scale, while to the left a woman seated in a high-backed chair (cathedra) is keeping the accounts; this monument has been dated to the reign of Hadrian or slightly later.⁴¹

And from the Antonine period, a second marble relief (inscribed) of unknown provenience, now in the Villa Albani in Rome, represents another taberna laniena, that of the deceased butcher Ti. Iulius Vitalis: the cuts of prepared meats reveal a caput, perna, sumen, succidium, and pulmo (lungs).⁴²

On Roman sarcophagi where the deceased are figured as reclining in preparation for consuming a meal—the Totenmahl—the iconography remained predominantly mythological at first (from ca.150 to 250 C.E.); thereafter it changes dramatically. By the time the oval sarcophagus of P. Caecilius Vallianus was carved—it can be dated with assurance to the years around 270 C.E. and is now in the Vatican—the emphasis on elaborate culinary procession and display has at last moved decisively into the foreground in metropolitan Roman commemorative art. The deceased is shown in the center of the composition reclining on the left elbow; he is identified in his ungrammatical epitaph as a militis (sic), who lived forty-four years. Carved in the foreground in front of the couch, two children (one seated on a stool) play with a dog, and a mouse gnaws a nut. The three-legged table in front of the deceased contains a dish holding a large fish ready for eating. A female slave proceeds forward from the left of the deceased towards the kline, bearing a large platter with a cooked and clearly recognizable fowl, while a chicken pecks for grain between her legs. The next platter, borne by another female servant, appears to contain a hare. The final figure in this series, extending beyond the right end of the sarcophagus, is male, with a live peacock standing at his feet. Behind the kline, three erotes hold a garland over the shoulders of the deceased, and a fourth, larger than the others, stands at the foot of the couch, holding up a pointed basket.⁴³

To the right of the deceased, a woman seated in a wicker chair—the widow?—is playing a stringed instrument; to her right another woman (not a servant, as is clear from her dress) holds a wine jug and a wine cup—and in the background another female is playing a double flute. Then the series of dishes for the banquet continues. The first foreground figure bears a large platter of cooked food—bread, according to commentators, but in fact the platter in question quite definitely (I have inspected it) contains a sow's udder. Just visible in outline around the corner of this side of the sarcophagus is another figure, carrying a hare.

Throughout the scenes of this procession, it is the emphasis on culinary profusion and display that make the dominant impression—and this despite the clearly unillustrious professional and social status of the deceased. The three females bearing the platters of cooked delicacies—the fowl, the game, and the udders—all hold their platters not parallel to the ground but flat against their bodies, at an angle that defies gravity and would in fact have resulted in the contents of the platters being dropped and lost. The governing aesthetic objective on this monument was clearly non-naturalistic: to show the foods off to best and most recognizable advantage for the benefit of any spectators viewing the sarcophagus from the front.

I have not made a compete list of surviving late-antique images and monuments of the kind discussed above, and do not presume to attempt here any but the most provisional conclusions. What can be asserted with confidence, however, is, first, that while sows' udders make their first known appearance in banquet display on the sarcophagus of Caecilius Vallianus, at least twelve later examples are identifiable with certainty. Secondly, processional food presentation and elite culinary self-representation such as that represented in the Antioch mosaic, on the sarcophagus of Vallianus, and in the fourth-century paintings from the house on the Caelian, are important evidence that beginning at some point in the third century the attitudes and sensibilities of the rich must have undergone significant change: the foregrounding of elaborate dishes of banquet foods was no longer considered a subject to be confined to the writings of the educated elite but became part of upper-class self-representation in the visual arts as well. Thirdly, scholars should display a greater awareness of such attitudinal changes, and undertake to analyze the reasons for it. Elsner was, I suggest, mistaken in claiming an unvarying consistency in upper-class dining protocols, rituals, and representations from the days of Petronius' Satyrica to the fifth century.⁴⁴

This is to underestimate, for one thing, the influence of Stoicism in restraining the behavior of the educated elite,⁴⁵ and for another, the changes brought about by political and other developments of the third century. Fourthly, there is undoubtedly more to be said about the cultural meaning of such late collections of silver service as the Sevso Treasure. To what degree were this and other known examples of such massive silver plate designed for use rather than ostentation?

But above all, behind these three examples of explicit figurative rendering of luxus mensae, in all its processional and showy profusion—on a rich man's floor in Antioch, on a highly unusual funeral monument in Rome, and in a Constantinian house on the Caelian Hill—there must stand a strange and distinctively Roman combination of desires, aspirations, and attitudes. Here we have some of the ways in which persons of standing in the later Roman Empire elected to represent their world. We need to understand these desires, aspirations and attitudes better, and how they had developed out those of earlier times.