Sharing a meal to express identity and connection is the focus of H.’s book. Based on his dissertation and a subsequent 2010 article, the book argues that mixed-class meals came to an end during the fourth to the early seventh centuries ce and that this shift had significant consequences for social relations during this period. Given the paucity and the bias of the surviving literary evidence, H. bases his claims largely on archaeological remains, especially table service items and sites identified as dining or potential dining spaces.
The introduction sets the terms. The meal itself is the convivium, which H. interprets as ‘invitation dining in private settings’ (p. 2). The diners are identified as belonging to groupings well known from the legal sources of the period: honestiores or patrons and humiliores or clients. To add immediacy and accessibility to the topic, H. reimagines the diners and the spaces they occupied through brief fictive scenes related by a client dining with his patron during the Principate; by a late antique patron, who greets clients in the morning and hosts a meal for friends in the evening; and by a client visiting the home of his late antique patron in the morning and dining with friends in the evening. These stories are accompanied by H.’s digital recreations of these meals – sometimes the attendees are wearing Western-style, business-casual garb, at other times nothing more than a blanket. This ‘exercise in historical imagining’ (p. 17) is clever and helps us to understand class differences and the universality of shared eating in a highly engaging and contemporary way.
Chapter 1 focuses on the literary evidence for shared meals. Here, owing to the sparsity of the late antique sources, H. must extrapolate dining features from the rich literary tradition of the Principate to serve as a guide for later practices. The effort is successful, although it underscores the limitations of the later period, where Sidonius Apollinaris, Julian, Ammianus Marcellinus and John Chrysostom are either negative or frustratingly inconclusive on the question of mixed-rank dining. One omission from the Principate is curious: the Satyricon of Petronius. H. discounts it as too ostentatious and as having too many diners to meet his definition of a mixed dining event. Still, the Satyricon, although a work of fiction, vividly captures social differences among diners as well as the elaborate nature of the dining accoutrements (however over the top they may be), features that surely resonate with the social disparities and wealth displayed at late antique meals. It is a source worth reconsidering.
Before advancing to dining equipment and diners, H. provides a theoretical framework in Chapter 2 for appreciating how material culture is an essential component of meal performance and how objects contribute to the expression of social structures. To accomplish this, he turns to ‘atmospherics’ from marketing theory to recreate the ‘moods’ or ‘social tones’ of ancient convivial settings. In essence, the theory explains how the physical world prompts certain emotional responses. In the case of shared meals, it becomes possible to discern atmospheric variables that are external, internal and human – for example, house size, colour palettes of dining spaces and employee characteristics, respectively, to cite but a few features. The theory provides a useful framework for identifying the myriad components of mixed meals that appear in later chapters, although references to this construct as an organising tool seem to fade as the narrative advances.
Chapter 3, ‘Table Equipment’, and Chapter 4, ‘Architecture, Furniture, and Lighting’, on the material remains of dining form the strongest parts of the book. Chapter 3, an update of H.’s 2010 article, argues convincingly that archaeology has much more to tell us about dining equipment than the literary sources. To take one example, silver items from the Principate as preserved from the House of Menander at Pompeii are finely wrought and form part of an elaborate dining set. There are fewer silver items and dining sets from late antiquity, as more and more cups are made of glass. Similarly, there are more silver platters from the later period, indicating that fewer personal vessels were found on the convivial tables of late antiquity, a finding suggesting that these meals were likely simpler than those of earlier times.
Chapter 4 on physical space for dining reveals evidence that is skewed towards large villas and town homes. In the case of wealthy patrons structures like the North Temenos House at Aphrodisias featured lavish decorations and an apsidal space for the patron host that reinforced his elevated social position, while limiting guest access to him based on class. Domitian’s Palace on the Palatine comes to mind as a worthy prototype for H. to have considered as a forerunner to this type of evidence. Dining settings controlled by clients are more modest, specific dining features less easy to discern, although structures like Maison D at Alexandria at least allow us to survey spaces that were potentially suited for convivial gatherings. Turning to furniture, sigma tables and stibadium couches were common among the wealthy, while mats or cushions for meals on the ground, well-preserved in heavy textiles from late antique Egypt, had to suffice for the less fortunate.
Chapter 5, ‘Images of Communion’, completes H.’s analysis of the material remains of late antique shared meals by considering images of outdoor picnics and festive meals as well as Last Supper scenes and early catacomb art. Here Christian art is especially interesting. Last Supper scenes appeal to the wealthy patron class as a way of affirming elite attitudes to the self and dining, while catacomb art tends to be either festive or sombre, thereby reflecting two different attitudes to group dining among the lower orders.
The final three chapters turn from the material remains of dining to the actors involved in these meals. Chapter 6 argues that convivia allowed honestiores to express personal power, control and status, while the artistic features of many table service items transmitted the cultural ideals that patrons would have absorbed through the paideia system of education. H. argues further that changes in civic administration during this period reduced opportunities for patrons and shrank their numbers and that over time the lower classes were no longer welcome at patron-sponsored meals. For the humiliores of Chapter 7 these changing circumstances meant that they increasingly sought to express their identity in group settings like guilds and circus factions as well as through Christianity, where shared meals were a fundamental feature. In the concluding chapter H. argues that the disappearance of mixed-class meals marked the end of whatever measure of social justice clients might have formerly gleaned through these shared events and that this loss of social porosity would only deepen in the later Middle Ages.
Among the quibbles, typos are few; key terms like suffrigium (p. 10) could be more clearly defined; and more recent bibliography on topics like circus factions is missing. It is curious, too, that, in a study devoted to meals, there is little mention of the food consumed on these occasions. Still, the book is well written and carefully researched, and its value lies in the skill with which it builds a narrative based largely on archaeological evidence in order to provide a timely and important contribution to the understanding of dining, and social history more generally, during Late Antiquity.
