The human body itself was a form of non-verbal communication throughout the Roman world, and posture – the way people sat, leaned, stood or reclined – was one of the chief ways of distinguishing whether someone was rich or poor, old or young, or of a high or low social standing.
DINING POSTURE
The importance of posture to the social order is beautifully exemplified by the study of Roman dining practices, in particular at the convivium. This was the midday or late-afternoon meal, and at its heart was the notion of sociable eating; in the words of the statesman, philosopher and lawyer Cicero (106–43 BCE), the concept of the convivium was ‘to sit down to dinner with friends because they share one’s life’. It was also something of a spectacle, at which to perform and spectate. Convivium was a general term for a banquet, the nature of which varied widely. As represented in the dramas of Plautus from the third and second centuries BCE, it was an occasion of companionship in order for men to eat and drink wine together – sometimes in the company of courtesans, with the possible expectation of sex.
At such a meal, there was a discernible hierarchy of postures for men of different social standings, which we see represented abundantly in literary texts, funerary monuments and wall paintings. This is brilliantly demonstrated in a passage from the historian Suetonius’s De Poetis, which relays an anecdote about the comic Roman playwright Terence, in which, as a young man, he visits the highly respected playwright Caecilius Statius (c.219–c.168 BCE) to read him some of his work.
The youthful Terence turns up scruffily clad at the senior poet’s house while he is dining. Terence is invited to join his host for a meal, but ‘because he was poorly clothed’ and because of his perceived status as an unknown, he is seated on a bench, near to but separate from his host’s couch, upon which the latter is reclining. On reading the first few lines of his verse, Terence so impresses his venerable listener with his elegant words that he is invited to move from his seated position to a couch where he can also recline and share properly in the meal, while continuing to read the rest of his work to his enraptured audience.
Through this we can see how the host reclining on his couch was the centre of the event; that those of similar high status would likewise recline on couches close to the superior male, while those of inferior social status would be placed further from the host, as a mark of their relative insignificance. This particular example is also significant because it shows how important poetry was in Roman society: Terence was allowed to sit close to the host regardless of his poor clothing once the value of his poetry was appreciated, and his posture of reclining, once assumed, would have been a far more significant signpost to his status than his attire.
The opposite end of this scale of posture was standing. A relief on a stone altar dating from the second century and now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome depicts an interesting dining experience. In it, the god Orpheus is presented reclining, accompanied by a slave who is standing. The senior male thus reclines, immobile; while the inferior stands, ready to move and do his bidding. This is typical of how slaves were depicted in the Roman world: always on their feet, standing around or else engaged in carrying, serving the guests food and drink or clearing up. An epistle by the satirist Seneca the Younger (c.4 BCE–65 CE) depicts hungry slaves standing silently all evening while their tyrannical master eats and metes out whippings for the slightest noise.
WOMEN AND SITTING
A third figure depicted in the Orpheus relief is a woman. Neither reclining nor standing, she is presented in an intermediate position – sitting – and she is holding Orpheus’s hand. She is inferior to the man but superior to the slave, and she is modest in this public setting: the reclining state was linked to female sexual promiscuity. According to Marcus Terentius Varro, writing in the first century BCE and later cited as an authority on outdated dining practices, both men and women originally sat, but afterwards ‘men began to recline and women sat, because the reclining posture was deemed shameful in a woman’. This practice of women sitting while men reclined is similarly found in the pages of Valerius Maximus, also writing in the first century CE about ‘old Roman customs’:
women ordinarily dined sitting next to men who reclined, a custom that passed from human dining practice to the gods: for at the feast of Jupiter, he himself was treated to dinner on a couch, while Juno and Minerva sat in chairs.
He then explains how this contrasts with the time in which he was writing, a suggestion that women had taken to reclining in their own homes, seen by Valerius as symptomatic of moral decline. It is an important observation that reveals a difference between how women were ‘supposed’ to behave and how they actually did in practice:
Our own age cultivates this type of discipline more assiduously on the Capitol than in our own homes, evidently because it is of greater consequence to the state to ensure the orderly conduct of goddesses than of women.
Within the literary and visual evidence there are plenty of examples of women who reclined during meals, but these women tended to be prostitutes, actresses, the drunk and the debauched, or women of very high status whose reclining posture often preceded sex.
CHILDREN
Evidence for children’s posture is far more limited than that for adults, but from what we have at our disposal it seems that children did not recline. In cases where children were in the company of adults it appears that they sat, and boys only began to recline when they adopted the toga virilis (‘the toga of manhood’) and formally became an adult.
In Suetonius’s writings, we learn that the emperor Augustus invited his adoptive sons Gaius and Lucius, along with his own child and the offspring of other aristocratic families, to dinner, making it clear that the young offspring should sit on the ends of their adults’ couches. While these children clearly dined at the convivium, therefore, it is clear that they were not equal participants in the food and events, by token of their seating arrangement.
A funerary relief dating from the second century CE that survives in Geneva appears to confirm this: a privileged woman is shown reclining, attended by a slave who is standing, as was conventional. But seated nearby is what appears to be a longhaired child. From the woman’s body language and the dress of the youth it has been suggested that this does not signify that she is the mother of the child, but conceivably that the figure is some kind of diminutive pet slave with an unusual status as a favourite.
At precisely what age children ceased sitting with adults is uncertain, but Suetonius does offer a clue. A passage concerning the murder of Britannicus intimates that his friend and companion Titus (the future emperor of Rome) was reclining beside him when he drank the poison. We know that Britannicus was near his fourteenth birthday when he died and Titus a year older, which suggests that, as elite males on the verge of adulthood, they were able to practise this adult act.
Written by Sam Willis & James Daybell in "Histories of the Unexpected - The Romans", Atlantic Books, Londom, 2019, chapter 3. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.