Roman dining practices have been a source of fascination for scholars since the Renaissance. The rich evidence of the ancient literary sources has been mined repeatedly to provide accounts and analyses of the Roman convivium, notably in the classic studies of Marquardt-Mau and Friedländer.Footnote ¹ Following in this tradition in the 21st c. from modern and more critical standpoints, several German scholars have produced exhaustive studies based on the Latin texts, which between them leave little room for further progress on this basis.Footnote ² But the textual evidence offers only a very partial view, limited chronologically, geographically, and socially. We have a very large number of references to dining, of very varied nature, from the Late Republic and first century and a half of the Principate; after the opening decades of the 2nd c., it dries up to a trickle of references for the next 300 years. Moreover, the Latin writers of the earlier centuries refer overwhelmingly to the city of Rome and regions of Italy within its immediate influence; they offer little information about dining practices in the expanding Empire. Greek writers of the 1st to early 3rd c. – Plutarch, Lucian, Athenaeus – introduce a different standpoint, though a complicated one in view of their indebtedness to earlier material, especially the tradition of Hellenistic symposium-literature.Footnote ³ And all these authors were writing for an elite audience and discussing subjects of interest to that audience; they have little concern for the practices of other social groups. Attempts today to fill any of these gaps must draw on all the other sources of evidence – epigraphy, visual depictions, the material record – which have been largely neglected in the traditional text-based accounts; these sources have a vast amount of information to offer, but it is disparate and complex to handle and assess.

Among the most conspicuous of these gaps in our understanding are the ways in which the dining practices that were so characteristic of the society recorded in the traditional accounts may have changed over the centuries of the Empire, and what patterns were to be found in Late Antiquity. One change that will have affected the atmosphere among diners has been well studied, including by the present reviewer: the widespread adoption among at least the wealthier classes of the curved dining couch, stibadium or sigma, in preference to the rectilinear three-couch triclinium that was standard in earlier times.Footnote ⁴ Much more remains to be done to examine other aspects of changing customs over time and in different regions of the Empire. A book that sets out to analyze the patterns of dining behavior and experience in the later Roman Empire is therefore very much to be welcomed, especially in view of its declared emphasis on the evidence of material culture. Nicholas Hudson (H.) is a specialist in Late Roman pottery, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, and author of an earlier article on the archaeology of the Roman convivium.Footnote ⁵ In that, he analyzed ceramic assemblages from excavations that could be identified as constituting services used for dining, comparing them to the vessels used for food in services of silver, and drew some consequential conclusions about dining practices in Late Antiquity in comparison with those of the earlier Principate.

This analysis remains the centerpiece of the present book (Chapter 3), but H.’s scope here is wider. The introduction sets out his aims: “to know the range of social expressions that were encoded in meals at Roman tables… through careful observation of patterns in Roman society and the material culture of sharing food…” (1). His focus is defined as the 4th through early 7th c. CE, using the material record, the archaeological and visual evidence of dining, as his most important source (2–3). He further limits his focus to what he calls “invitation dinners in private settings,” rejecting the study of banqueting or exceptional feasting. By this he does not refer only to public banquets, epulae publicae, as opposed to dinners in private houses, but rather to the grand luxurious feasts that figure in many of the ancient sources and on which many modern accounts have concentrated. Petronius’s dinner of Trimalchio, for instance, though undoubtedly an invited meal in a private setting, is rejected as “not a useful source for our inquiry” (37 n. 7). H’s interest is in small-scale, quotidian affairs, comparatively modest and with few guests. But the distinction is not clear-cut; it excludes much that may have been significant in the development of dining practices, and its use risks selecting examples that fit H.’s purposes and rejecting those that do not.

More specifically, H. is interested in what he calls client dinners, the practice recorded in numerous writers of the Late Republic and Early Empire of a patron inviting selected clients to share his table. These occasions, which brought together people of different social ranks in a convivial setting, he sees as fundamental to the stability of the Roman social system, despite the strains visible in much of the later literary evidence; their absence from the record in Late Antiquity he takes as a mark of the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the interim. He ends the introduction with a series of imaginary accounts and digital reconstructions (Figs. 1–6), of the salutatio ceremony and a client dinner in the Principate (around 100 CE), and of a salutatio, of a patron dining with his peers, and of members of what he calls the “client class” dining together in Late Antiquity (4th–6th c.), all in settings constructed from composites of roughly contemporary architecture.Footnote ⁶ The contrast is striking, but readers must wait until later to learn the details of what these accounts are based on. H’s use of the term “client class” is, as he admits, problematic, in view of the great variety of those who might find themselves in a relationship with a more powerful individual which we might classify as that of a client with his patron, and of the reluctance of Roman writers to use the term cliens, replaced frequently with an allusion to amici.Footnote ⁷ Elsewhere, H. identifies his chosen group as “merchants, artisans, farmers, and others of reasonable means” (92) or as a “middling class”; more specifically, he chooses the distinction between honestiores and humiliores. That distinction comes from juristic writings of the 2nd and 3rd c. discussing the penalties for various crimes to be imposed on members of the two categories. H. finds the legal terms useful because each covers “a panoply of smaller social groups,” offering him a “broad spectrum of social identities” (12). But the distinction appears to be confined to specific juristic usage and not to correspond to an established social dichotomy dividing Roman society into clearly defined classes, nor should it be applied to all periods, from the 1st c. to the 4th.Footnote ⁸ Roman society was complex and changeable, and cannot be reduced to easily distinguished categories.

Chapter 1 covers the written sources. H. takes the foundation of the Principate as a starting point, largely omitting earlier writers such as Cicero and even the Augustan Horace. The emphasis is on his two main centers of interest: the “client dinner,” where a patron’s clients were invited alongside the patron’s social equals, and the “peer dinner,” a small affair between members of similar social background. For the client dinner, he cites references in numerous sources from the Principate, especially those from the end of the 1st and early 2nd c., Martial, Juvenal, and the Younger Pliny (Seneca is not mentioned). But he finds no such explicit references in the (much diminished) array of sources from Late Antiquity and concludes that client dinners disappear from our sources after the end of the 3rd c. (10, 16, 59). The clear references to such occasions that he cites are no later than the 2nd c.; moreover, all come from contexts in the city of Rome or regions of Italy directly linked to it and are associated with the behavior of the urban elite. H.’s assumption that “the form, themes, and intent of client dinners within a Roman frame” spread through the wider Empire (7) lacks solid foundations, nor is it clear why he takes the end of the 3rd c. to mark their disappearance.Footnote ⁹ We do not have the evidence to say whether the adoption of a system of patronage in regions and cities with originally very different social customs entailed also that of the practices characteristic of the city of Rome in the Late Republic and early Principate, such as the “client dinner” as we find it in the writings of Martial or of Pliny.Footnote ¹⁰ When H. makes this assumption the foundation of his reading of the developments in dining practice in Late Antiquity, as he does in later chapters, it goes far beyond what the evidence that he quotes can support.

H’s view of the client dinner and its disappearance needs to be seen in the light of the fictive narratives and digital reconstructions that he presents in his introduction (18–22).

His narrative features a miller anxious to secure a contract with the city, who succeeds in persuading his (evidently eminent) patron to invite him to a dinner at which the praefectus annonae will be present. The reconstruction shows the dinner taking place in a triclinium based on Pompeian models, using the masonry couches of the House of the Cryptoporticus (Pompeii 1.6.2–4) as a model for the couches (Fig. 2). The miller is given a place on the lectus summus, adjacent to the prefect, and in the course of the dinner he succeeds in gaining the prefect’s ear and obtaining his contract. H.’s reconstruction is intended to catch the mood and atmosphere of the event, but the scene it describes is an ideal and seems antiquated for Rome in 100 CE, in a world where invitations to clients were regularly issued by a rich man’s nomenclatores choosing among the crowd at the morning salutatio (Sen. Ep. 19.11).Footnote ¹¹ It is clear from the satirical descriptions in Martial and Juvenal of the uneven and insulting treatment clients could receive at their patron’s table, as well as from the business of sportulae, of which we hear in other poems of Martial and in other sources of the period, that the practice was under stress at this time.Footnote ¹² What H. calls client dinners are likely to have covered a range of possibilities in the early Principate, from invitations to a carefully selected number of appropriate amici to participate in the patron’s own dinners to the more socially varied occasions which interest H. Pliny’s self-congratulatory account of his moderation in sharing the food and drink that he offers his lower-status dinner guests, including his freedmen (Ep. 2.6), gives no further details of such occasions, but we may doubt whether the guests at them always also included his senatorial peers who would have to be content with the modest fare.Footnote ¹³ On the other hand, the amici or pauci with whom he shares quiet quotidian dinners in his Tuscan villa may very well refer to his local clients (Ep. 5.6.19; 9.36.4). But patrons might also decide to entertain large numbers of clients to dinner all at once, in order to perform their duties with minimal stress to themselves.Footnote ¹⁴

For dinners between members of the wealthy elite classes in Late Antiquity there is ample evidence in the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris in the 5th c., describing a variety of convivial occasions with table companions ranging from the Visigothic king Theoderic (Ep. 1.2) to the Emperor Majorian in Arelate (Ep. 1.11) to the young courtiers with whom he dined at the imperial court (Ep. 9.13) and to the Gallo-Roman landowners who entertained him in their villas as he travelled. He is writing, therefore, for and about the upper echelons of the aristocracy; his letters are concerned to stress not only the obvious wealth of the society he describes, but more importantly its high culture and maintenance of traditional cultural values. He has little to say about the workings of patronage, but in one letter he commends the behavior of a certain well-born (inlustris) and clearly prosperous man named Vettius and his treatment of his clients, which included entertaining them at his table (Ep. 4.9).Footnote ¹⁵ It looks as though here is the reference to the persistence of client dinners at this date that H. has been seeking, but he is skeptical, seeing Vettius’s hospitality more as an example of Christian charity. Vettius may, as H. suggests, have entertained his clients as a group by themselves, rather than together with guests of higher status (61–62); whatever form Vettius’s hospitality may have taken, Sidonius’s language is that of patronage, not of charity. A century earlier, Ammianus Marcellinus’s account of his treatment at the tables of the wealthy and arrogant Roman aristocracy includes a reference to the nomenclatores choosing whom to invite, as in the days of Seneca, and being bribed to admit the obscure and ignoble (Amm. Marc. 14.6.15). At least some patrons, in 4th-c. Rome and 5th-c. Gaul, not only prided themselves on the crowd of clients at their morning salutatio but also continued to feel obliged to entertain them in their houses. These may not have been the sort of intimate quotidian meals that H. is looking for, but that may have been true of the way many patrons had entertained their clients for many centuries before.Footnote ¹⁶

Few writers of Late Antiquity have much to say about the meals of those further down the social scale, apart from Christian preachers anxious to impress on their hearers the moral dangers of the luxurious dinners of the rich and to contrast them with the moderation and restraint characteristic of the meals of the poor. These accounts are obviously colored by their speakers’ proselytizing purpose, as H. is aware, but he offers readings of some of John Chrysostom’s Homilies that may at least cast some light on the dinners characteristically enjoyed, not of course by the very poor, but by the more typical members of Chrysostom’s flocks. In general, however, H. concludes that the written sources from Late Antiquity can give little robust evidence for the actual behavior of either of his social groupings at their dinners, still less of the settings that would allow us to visualize them, but are more valuable as indications of the moods of dining atmospheres (74–75).

In the following chapters, H. turns to the material record of Late Antique dining. Chapter 2 is devoted to a survey of the physical components that would have governed the atmosphere and mood for his different groups of diners. His accounts here are generalized; he speaks of a “loose framework for the consideration of disparate materials in imaginative ways,” and of a “dichotomous characterization” (78). The details on which they are based follow in the next two chapters. Chapter 3 is the centerpiece of the book, revisiting his studies of ceramic and silver dining assemblages from his article of 2010.Footnote ¹⁷ In that article he analyzed nine deposits of ceramic vessels that could be identified as services used for food when dining, ranging from the 1st to the early 7th c. and predominantly (though not exclusively) from the eastern Mediterranean. Six of these are defined as life assemblages belonging to a single context of use, preserved through events such as destruction or dumping; three are less specific in their contexts. Analysis of the composition of these sets allowed him to distinguish between two different forms of dining practice. In those from the earlier centuries of the Empire he identifies numerous sets of small plates, suggesting that diners were served individually with courses of already prepared food. In those from the later Empire, these small plates have vanished or become much rarer; in their place are bowls of a size suitable for two or three diners, suggesting that the food is being shared between several diners together, who serve themselves by dipping their hands or a piece of bread into the bowls. For detailed study he took two examples: a destruction deposit from the Villa Dionysos at Knossos, of the third quarter of the 2nd c., and one from a cistern in Maison D at Alexandria, destroyed in the early 7th c.; graphs, pie-charts, and drawings of typological forms illustrate their differing composition. He also analyzed the patterns of composition found in three preserved silver services over a similar date range and found much less variation; the pattern of small-plate individual servings is retained in the silver at both periods. On this basis he distinguished between two different forms of dining: “status dining,” with personal and individual service, the general practice in the earlier Empire and still that of the wealthy who used silver services in Late Antiquity, and “convivial dining,” with shared dishes, which had largely replaced it among those who used ceramic vessels in Late Antiquity.

Chapter 3 in the present book replicates much of the material covered in H’s 2010 article, in a more widely accessible form. H. presents first the silver services for dining, using as examples the hoard from the Casa del Menandro in Pompeii of the 1st c. CE and the Kaiseraugst Treasure of the mid-4th. Digital reconstructions show very clearly the composition of the vessels used for serving and eating in both of these sets and present suggestions for the way they may have been divided for courses.Footnote ¹⁸ The later set is simpler than the earlier, with fewer separate individual dishes, but leaves no doubt that it too was intended for personal service. Both assemblages seem to be based on a service for four diners: interesting confirmation that they were intended for small, intimate groups.Footnote ¹⁹ H. explains the greater simplicity of the composition of the Kaiseraugst Treasure as a mark of the diminished interest shown in Late Antique sources in culinary elaboration and complexity: an interesting observation that would be worth pursuing further.

Presentation of the ceramic material follows a similar pattern. The assemblages from the Villa Dionysos at Knossos and Maison D at Alexandria are presented and broken down into their constituent parts and potential categories of use. The differences emerge clearly, and H. argues effectively for the divergent patterns of dining behavior to which they attest. The question then arises how representative his examples are of wider trends: is a pattern found in Alexandria in the 6th and early 7th c. also characteristic of other parts of the Mediterranean world, and if so, when did the rupture with earlier practice start to appear? H. assures his readers that comparable patterns of use can be observed not only in the eastern Mediterranean but also in the West, from the 4th c. onwards; he does not here give further details (123–25, 142–43).Footnote ²⁰ Readers who wish to pursue this assertion further must refer to his 2010 article, where useful tables set out the main characteristics of the nine ceramic assemblages (all from the eastern Empire) that he is analyzing, with their dates and functional compositions.Footnote ²¹ There are occasional indications of variations: at Aphrodisias, where the forms characteristic of personal service appear to have continued into the 6th c.; or in the Agora at Athens, where a variety of options seem to have been available in the 3rd c. H. acknowledges that there will have been exceptions and variations; much more research is needed and the limited sample available to H. will have to be expanded before definitive patterns can be established.

In Chapter 4, H. moves to other material factors that governed the nature of dining practices in Late Antiquity: the architectural settings, furniture, and lighting. His presentation of the architecture of Late Antique houses is phrased very generally, meant “to be instructive of the physicality of different spaces in different environments representing Late Antique domestic experiences” (168). For the houses of his patron class, his account concentrates on one of the most characteristic and striking features of Late Antique domestic architecture, the apsidal hall, which might be used for the receptions of the salutatio but whose apse could also house a stibadium for dining. As an example, he takes the well-preserved North Temenos House in Aphrodisias, built in the third quarter of the 4th c., whose large apsidal hall opens directly off the peristyle court, possibly on axis with an entrance from the street. Reconstructions (Figs. 3–5) suggest how this might have worked during the salutatio, from the perspectives of both patron and client, and for the stibadium dinner.Footnote ²² For the domestic architecture of his “client class” he finds fewer examples to choose from, given the preoccupation of most excavations with the large and showy, but offers three: Maison D in Alexandria, built in the 4th c. and destroyed in the early 7th; the Earthquake House at Kourion on Cyprus, destroyed by an earthquake in the mid-4th; and the Village House at Akören in Cilicia, described as 4th– 6th c. They are very different, but all show some signs of middling prosperity. None offers any space that can be identified as designated specifically for dining, at least on the preserved ground floors; nor does there seem to be room for the storage of substantial dining furniture. H. suggests that any invited dinners in these houses will have involved the diners reclining or sitting on bolsters on the floor (or out-of-doors in the courtyard) and offers digital reconstructions for the houses in Alexandria and Kourion (Figs. 6, 30).

H.’s writing is vivid, and his reconstructions are, in their chosen context, convincing. However, for a more comprehensive analysis of dining in Late Antiquity a wider picture is called for; his selection is misleadingly restricted. He acknowledges that the type of apsed hall that he describes was not universally used for both the salutatio ceremony and dining, and that designated dining rooms in wealthy houses could take other forms (174–76) but does not pursue this further. Thus he offers a “representative list of comparable Late Antique houses” (170 n. 15), but many of the houses listed there differ markedly from his typical example at Aphrodisias. Some have no sign of the sort of grand apsed hall that he is discussing; others, like the Maison de Bacchus at Djemila in Numidia, have multiple spaces clearly intended for reception, of a variety of forms.Footnote ²³ Masonry stibadia like that at Faragola in the South of Italy are considerably more common than his account suggests, though mainly in the western Empire; their frequent combination with fountains and water features makes them incompatible with use of the room for reception and audience.Footnote ²⁴ More than one room in a grand house might be designated for dining, depending on the nature of the occasion and the number of guests; some are particularly suited for the sort of small intimate group that H. has been discussing.Footnote ²⁵ Thus one of the two sigma tables in the Maison du Cerf at Apamea-on-the-Orontes in Syria was found in a small apsidal room (F) measuring only 4.26 m × 4.17 m; the other, larger, table of green marble was found in the grand rectangular hall (A).Footnote ²⁶ Elite domestic architecture in the 4th–5th c. showed a variety and inventiveness which is lost in H.’s account, and the spaces used for the dining of the wealthy did not aim only at the display of power, important though this might have been.

The provision of designated spaces for dining also extended to a wider socio-economic range than his account suggests. Especially telling (though not unique) in this context are the locations of three marble sigma tables from Sardis, recently published by Marcus Rautman.Footnote ²⁷ All were found in situ in buildings destroyed probably by earthquake in the early 7th c. The table from House MMS/S came from a room (D) with a raised rectangular alcove, whose space allows the reconstruction of a regular set of stibadium couches holding perhaps six diners. The seemingly rather grander House of the Bronzes also had a well-decorated room with a raised alcove (S/13), but the oddly shaped space does not leave room for the table surrounded by a set of couches; Rautman suggests that the diners probably sat on stools or possibly benches. Other objects found in the room showed that they maintained additional features of elegant dining, such as the use of metal vessels and authepsae. The third sigma table came from a much smaller building (Field 55 Room A), closer to a commercial structure in setting and plan and containing various artefacts for household crafts or agricultural activities. There is certainly no room here for a full stibadium setup; again, stools or benches seem likely, and the table-top could have been stored elsewhere when not in use.Footnote ²⁸

In comparing the dining practices of the (earlier) Principate to those of Late Antiquity, H. passes over the intervening centuries with minimal consideration of the changes that took place during them. This is especially evident in his treatment of the furnishings, where he quotes the typical triclinium of the Late Republic and early Principate, with three couches, each for up to three diners, set closely around a small central table, and its classic hierarchical placements as if they can safely be taken to have continued until they gave way to the stibadium in the 4th c. (190–95).Footnote ²⁹ He does not mention the pattern that is so common in houses and villas of the 2nd and 3rd c. throughout the Mediterranean provinces, where a large and often centrally placed room is marked out by mosaics in the so-called T + U design. In this, the pavement is decorated in a Pi-shaped rectilinear layout that is widely accepted to indicate the settings for the couches at top and sides, with a wide space in the center and entrance open for service and entertainment.Footnote ³⁰ This is no longer the small three-couch triclinium of the Republic and early Principate, where each couch could hold up to three diners; these rooms could have held several times the traditional number of nine guests. In view of their size, there can never have been a single table for all diners, though it is impossible to tell whether there would have been individual tables, shared tables for two or three, or even a ledge along the front of the couches, as there are sometimes on masonry couches. A different hierarchical arrangement of the seating would have operated, with guests of honor on the central couch and those at the far ends a long way down, very remote from any communication with those further up.Footnote ³¹ The rooms seem designed, even more than the earlier traditional triclinium was, for formal, stratified dining with a large number of guests of different status. H. may have avoided discussing the T + U pattern on the grounds that dinners with this number of guests fell into his category of banquets, but the existence of these rooms is relevant to his topic and needs to be recognized.

The omission of any reference to the triconch rooms found in houses and villas in Late Antiquity, especially but not exclusively in the western Empire, may also be the result of H. wishing to avoid discussing dinners that fall into his banquet category. If, as normally assumed, such rooms could hold a stibadium in each apse, clearly they made it possible to adapt the format to much larger numbers.Footnote ³² They also suggest the possibility of more socially stratified dining than with a single stibadium, with lower-status guests placed in the side apses – an arrangement that recalls Caesar’s visit to Cicero 400 years earlier, where Caesar’s followers were entertained at three separate triclinia, his immediate entourage lavishly (copiose), while the treatment of the freedmen distinguished between the lautiores and the minus lauti.Footnote ³³

Chapter 5 (“Images of communion”) looks at images of dining in Late Antique art. Most of these images depict elite dining and are designed to appeal to an elite audience, but the paintings in the Roman catacombs clearly have a different purpose. H. acknowledges the difficulties inherent in ascribing any one meaning to the catacomb scenes and accepts their polysemy, but analyzes them in view of the different moods that they convey. The sober scenes of a group reclining on a bolster on the ground, such as those in the Catacombs of Priscilla and of Callixtus, he takes to represent members of his “client class,” and the several dishes of food placed before them as indications of shared dishes, suggesting a message of communion (233). More problematic are the paintings in the Catacomb of Peter and Marcellinus, which he defines as more festive Agape scenes. These undoubtedly suggest a higher-status environment, both from their location in individual arcosolia and from the images of diners reclining on the stibadium, attended by servants who bring wine from an authepsa, while a single plate with a whole fish or chicken stands on the table. H. concludes that they are probably to be associated with his wealthier patron class; but even if the catacomb is rightly thought to be associated with “relatively high-ranking families in fourth century Rome” (237–38), these are hardly aristocratic patrons like Sidonius and his friends nor the presumed owners of the grander houses that he discusses. Here again, the paintings seem to testify to the persistence of the ideals of traditional dining further down the scale among the not-quite elite, at least in the early 4th c.Footnote ³⁴

H. says little about diet in the dinners that he discusses.Footnote ³⁵ Working with the very different material available from excavations in Roman Britain, Hilary Cool posed the question how far changes in the pottery assemblages of the 4th and 5th c. indicate changes in patterns of consumption and cooking.Footnote ³⁸ The excavations used by H. do not provide the sort of archaeobiological material that would permit an answer to this question. The scenes in art show that the prestige foods continued typically to be things like a fowl, whole fish, a piglet, set on a plate before the diners on the stibadium or borne on large dishes in the hands of servants; all these would require prior preparation before being served to the diners.Footnote ³⁶ Communal eating from bowls suggests a different sort of food, more liquid stews or small portions that could be scooped up with bread; but only in one rendering of the Last Supper, where it is required by the text, is this portrayed.Footnote ³⁷ Art is not going to be helpful here, but the question would be worth raising.

Chapters 6 and 7 give an overview of the meals of the two classes that H. distinguishes: “patrons” and “clients” at the table. For the patrons he stresses, rightly, the importance of common cultural values among the elite, which led to the replication of common practices across so much of the Empire, and the role of education in maintaining these. His client group is more problematic, given its indeterminate nature and the absence of textual accounts that refer to it unequivocally. He raises the question whether there is evidence of his “client class” dining socially in domestic settings in Late Antiquity but concludes that a passage in Chrysostom shows that they did.Footnote ³⁸ Only the archaeological evidence, however, can illustrate what form such meals might have taken and how they differed from earlier periods.

H. then turns to an attempt to explain the changes that he has identified in the dining habits of his “middling” class in Late Antiquity through an exploration of the sociohistorical background. Here he returns to the disappearance of the client dinner and the breakdown of the patron-client relationship. He suggests that the clients, lacking the traditional support from their patron, developed their own horizontal networks as mechanisms for social protection; a “movement among the masses…. to consolidate their power and wield it as a collective” (257). As examples, he cites a growing dependence on professional guilds and the increased power of the circus factions, as well as the prevalence of mob riots like that which burnt down the house of Symmachus’s father (Amm. Marc. 27.3.4). This is a heavy construction to place on very shaky foundations. All three phenomena had been around for a very long time: mob riots had been a feature of life in Rome ever since the Republic, as they were in other cities of the Empire.Footnote ³⁹ Collegia and similar associations had long been fundamental to social, professional, and religious life in Roman and Italian cities, as in much of the Empire, and their communal meals provided a major source of social commensality for the non-elite.Footnote ⁴⁰ And the factions similarly had been providing a focus for partisan fervors and sometimes disorders.Footnote ⁴¹ To see these phenomena as a collective movement among the lower classes in Late Antiquity to establish a new form of community building would require much more detailed analysis of changes to them at that time than they receive here. Finally, H. turns to the impact of Christianity and the possible influences of Christian attitudes to hospitality on the dining practices of the non-elite. The place of communal meals in domestic settings among early Christian communities is well studied, yet he concludes that these developments cannot by themselves explain the more general shift to shared portions in society at large that he is trying to document; rather, they belong among the expressions of wider social needs (291).

H. writes vividly, and his pictures of dining practices in Late Antiquity will appeal especially to non-specialist readers and introduce them to much unfamiliar material. But readers should be aware that the pictures he presents are partial; his emphasis on a dichotomous system of dining (29, 78) simplifies and obscures a more varied and complex picture. That the ultra-rich and powerful live differently and dine differently from the less wealthy hardly needs demonstration, at any date; more informative are the ways in which those lower down the socio-economic scale manage to adopt or adapt the practices of their superiors. These are not necessarily homogeneous, as the differing solutions adopted in the Sardis houses discussed above indicate.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in Roman dining practices, which has done much to bring out a sense of their variety, beyond the traditional emphasis on the upper-class triclinium of the Late Republic and early Principate. This journal alone has recently published articles on a kitchen in a comfortable house in the legionary camp at Vindonissa, on the evidence for dining on shipboard in Late Antiquity, and on food-preparation and production in Mithraic sanctuaries, in addition to the sigma-tables at Sardis.Footnote ⁴² These examples alone illustrate the complexity of the subject, chronologically, geographically, and socially. To approach a question such as the changes that can be observed between practices in Roman Italy during the period of our main written sources and those of three to four centuries later over the wider Empire, a much more finely differentiated manner is needed. The ceramic record that H. has analyzed provides a valuable insight into one important way in which customs were changing in the 4th–5th c.; we need a much fuller breakdown of this material before its full force can be assessed. And many other questions remain, for instance, the extent to which the changing ceramic record corresponds to a change in diet; or the stages by which reclining to dine may have become a more narrowly exercised privilege, eventually confined only to the most traditionally minded in certain settings and in ceremonial contexts.Footnote ⁴³ Archaeology cannot hope to provide answers for all these questions all at once, nor can it by itself offer a basis for social history. But it can raise new questions and offer new insights far beyond what the written sources reveal.Footnote ⁴⁴