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Rome . Special triclinia

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

Triclinia
Apart of the traditional pubs’ triclinia or the ones connected with some holy ceremony, in ancient Rome there were lots of other kind of dining rooms starting from the modest ones of the small people like workers and artisans to end with the most luxurious halls of the rich families. In the houses of the Campanian towns, that, covered with ashes and “lapilli” by the Vesuvius’s eruption, were found still in good conditions, the huge patricians’s dining rooms and the modest abodes of the poors are so well preserved that one gets the impression to still see their inhabitants moving around.
Many of them are interesting and among those there was an austere and modest trliclinium set in a small room entirely filled by three masonry couches while all the space in their middle was occupied by a large table. Here evidently, as in our modern standing buffets, all the different dishes were put in the middle, and the guests had to help themselves. No beautiful frescoes in this room. Only simple colored panels that sternly decorated its walls, and even more stern was a harsh admonitions written in one of them. It bluntly advised all the guests that any improper behavior would not be admitted.
“Keep away your lascivious eyes from other man’s wife!
Don’t use obscene language. Behave yourself.
Abstain from hideous quarrels, if you can.
Otherwise, go home.
Not for nothing the house was called “The Domus of the Moralist”.
Also when we don’t find the big masonry couches typical of pubs and of the more modest dining room, rich triclinia can be identified by their decorations. Many times the frescoes we see on their walls are beautiful still life representing a quantity of perfect fruits just as beautiful as the ones we can find in the shows of any farming fairs, and with them are depicted wild fowls and many other appetizing foods.
Often the triclinia are also characterized by their floors. In some of them the space destined to the couches is marked by the mosaic pattern. In other cases the mosaic is of the special kind that in Greek was called “asaratos oikos”, an expression that we can translate as “house that has not been swept”. At those times people ate with their fingers and, as they didn’t have any kind of plates, they threw on the ground whatever was left, and these mosaics represents just these floors covered by all kinds of left overs. Some of those mosaics are splendid as the one that is kept in the Vatican Museums and as another one of the Aquileia’s museum where huge fishbones with their heads are the highlights of the decoration.
They were adroitly made as “trompe l’oeil” and, apart from their beauty, they also informs us on what was served in a well organized 2000 years ago Roman dinner. There we find the leftovers of lettuce that, together with hardboiled eggs, was offered in the “hors d’oeuvres” as an appetizer, a salad that, according to the ancient men, tended to quell the ardor of love; thus, just to counteract this effect, it was always served accompanied by a huge quantity of rocket, a herb considered by the Romans as the best of all the aphrodisiacs. Nearby we see sea urchins’s shells cut in half and then leftovers of oyster and snails and others very appreciated Roman appetizers. Of course we see also all the entrées remains, as lobster carapaces, chicken bones, mullets heads with their well cleaned bones, grapes, cherries, nuts and so on. To sum it up all the best food was represented there and often represented was also its shade so that it looked pretty well real. Thus if for instance something thrown on the floor would escape the slaves’s broom it would only look as a part of the mosaic.
Of course beside the mosaics the ground could also be covered by “opus sectilia”, the multicolored cut marbles patterns. Those were the most luxurious and expensive floorings and were only done for the finest triclinia where masonry tricliniar couches, used only for their beautiful gardens’s open air triclinia, would never enter. Here the couches were made of precious wood inlaid with ivory or silver and in the middle of the usual three couches of the triclinium there was never a stable central mensa that would have hampered the the guests when, arriving, they had to climb on the couches or when at the end of the dinner, they had to got down from them. The stands on which the trays with the dishes were laid were mobile and often fashioned in precious metals. They were brought with each entrée and each tray had its own stand.
However all those were normal, and traditional forms of triclinia. Beside them, in the Roman world there were other ones and already at the end of the Roman Republic the Roman higher class families had the means to have more than one kind and, amusing themselves, selected the most original between the different ones listed in Vitruvius’s treaty on the architecture. Here one could choose between Exedra, Corinthian, Aegyptian ones and also set Cyzigeni pavilions in their gardens.
Moreover Rome’s wealthiest men also invented a gamut of special triclinia where to give their most fantastic banquets and amaze their guests, forms that have been described in the literature sources.
Thus once, Lucullus, Cicero’s and Pompeius’s contemporary - known best for his unbridled luxury than for his great talent as general, strategist or for his fortunate Asian campaigns - ordered a triclinium that had walls covered by aviaries full of the most beautiful birds of the world. Thus, when dining on the meat of rare fowls, his guests could amuse themselves admiring swarms of the same fluttering birds. A very original idea and everything looked as it could splendidly work, but for his misfortune, also if the birds were fascinating and exceptionals, the aviaries smelled as a hen-house. The intolerable stench could not be borne and the great gastronome was obliged to destroy his prodigious triclinium.
More lucky were those country house triclinia created in the store rooms of the farms, places where in ancient times the proprietor stored fruits for the winter. Apples and pears artistically disposed around those barns were more decorative than the still life frescoes painted around the traditional triclinia and, moreover, the display filled the air with its perfume. The fashion took immediate roots and many of the Romans who owned farms and villae rusticae decided to dine there. Unfortunately at the end of the republic not one of those tycoons still cultivated his property or kept store room for fruits and so many had to restore the rustic parts of their old villae, and many more had to build new ones. And what about the apples and the pears of the inexistent fruit groves? Well, every one of those hosts filled his rustic triclinium with very expensive fruits bought at high prices in the Roman markets and then brought there. Nevertheless I am sure that they amused themselves a lot.
However those were the simplest among the creative arrangements for giving a banquet. Fascinating and completely new were the ones that I called “water triclinia”. It was through Pliny the Younger, nephew of the great naturalist Pliny the Older, that we learned of their existence. As a matter of fact Pliny had one of this water triclinium in his Tuscany’s villa, and in a letter to one of his friend he described it explaining how it worked. This triclinium consisted in a semicircular tricliniar couch sert under a pergola, built in masonry and covered with marble. It was set on the edge of a semicircular basin. On the opposed site of the pool there was a space where the servants stood and on their back there was an euripus with a central jet. At the end of all this arrangement there was a pavilion of white marble where if during the dinner some one felt sleepy, he could go and get a rest.
In this water triclinium, after the guests were all reclined on the semicircular couch, the servants set the heavy trays on the ground where they stood, and, having cut the foods in convenient pieces, put them in wooden containers shaped as boats or birds. Then they set them on the water and pushed these vessels toward the guests who with their fingers took the food. It is evident that the containers must have been painted with gay colors and the scene must have been very pleasant. The idea was certainly brilliant and elegant and the fact that the leftovers were thrown in the water maintained always clean and in order the place. Moreover if in the basin there were fishes they would eat everything there still was to bite and left only bones and shells.
It is evident that such a nice triclinium could not have been the only one existing. It was too interesting and I was sure that there must have been many others. In effect another one was soon found out. It was a Pompeian one and by some years preceded Pliny’s “stibadium” (Loreius Tiburtinus’ domus was destroyed by the Vesuvius’ eruption, and at this time Pliny Younger was only 18 year old: too young to have a water triclinium). The Pompeian one had been built in the house of Loreius Tiburtinus and its scheme was very similar to the one described by the Latin writer. The few differences among them were more formal than substantial. Of course in Pliny’s water triclinium the couch was semicircular, while at Pompeii there were two couches set at the two sides of a basin, but this did not change the way in which the two triclinia worked and for the rest they had a lot of common characteristic. Thus in both people dined under a pergola; in both just outside the basin there existed a space where the servants stood and in both, at the servants back, there was a decorative sheet of water. Pliny doesn’t describe his own and tells only that in the middle of it there was a jet of water, thus and we don’t know what shape it had. We can however assume that it could have been similar to the one in the house of Loreius Tiburtinus. Here the sheet of water consisted in a canal that a little bridge cut in two asymmetric part and therefore by the perspective effect looked much more long that in reality it was. Apart of this, essential was the fact that at the opposite ends of both those water triclinia there were pavilions created to offer a place where to rest during the long dinners.
Pliny’s and Loreius Tiburtinus water triclinia could both be dated to the second half of the I cent. A.D, but there had been others done nearly a century before them. Just at the beginning of my career I had discovered a more ancient one, a water triclinium that must have been built still in republican time. It was in the villa of Sperlonga’s. This locality set along the Tyrrhenian coast between Rome and Naples is very beautiful. A long beach extends itself between two rocky promontories and at the southern sea level of it there is a huge grotto. Around the half of the I cent B.C., maybe because he was attracted by the possibility to utilize the spectacular cavern as an enhancing element of the villa he was building there, some very rich patrician created a large fish pond, part inside and part outside the grotto.
The part that was under the grotto was a large circular basin where a pedestal slightly emerging from the water sustained a colossal marble group representing Scylla, the sea monster, who, having grabbed Ulysses’ boats in her coils was devouring his seamen. Today only a few fragments of this statuary chef d’oeuvre were found and, basing him on them, Prof Andreae, a well noted archaeologist, has reconstructed it. It is a magnificent group of the Hellenistic school that was probably destroyed in the Middle Age by the inhabitants of the place who took the mythological monster as a representation of the devil.
On the edge of the round basin toward the grotto interior there was another very important Hellenistic group also connected with Ulysses’ myth. The central statue, high about 5 m, represented the Cyclop Polyphemus being blinded by Ulysses and his companions. The giant was lying along a low, unfounded wall where two irregular curves had been fashioned only to follow the monster’s body contour. At sunset the splendid statues were magically lighted by the sun rays that at this time of the day entered directly in the cave. Surely this was the reason for which in an islet set in the larger sector of the fishpond a water triclinium had been made. On the cavern side the front of the small ait had been cut forming an inlet limited at the fishpond side by a little bridge, a place where the servants could stay, cut the food in appropriate pieces and set it in containers similar to the ones described by Pliny. The guests ate their dinner looking the menacing interior of the grotto and admiring the splendid sculptures. Their dinner, as the Roman used to do, began around three o’clock p.m. and reached its top just at sunset times when the spectacle of the Hellenistic groups highlighted by the rays of the setting sun became unique and unforgettable. The guests after having eaten at their heart content savoured it completely.
However Sperlonga’s cavern is not only remembered by its beauty and the perfection of its statues. It stands prominently in history for the incident in which Tiberius was involved. The old emperor was on his way to Rome when he decided to stop at this villa and he was just dining in the water triclinium when the grotto’s mouth caved in.
For Tiberius’ luck the mass of rocks hit just the little bridge where the servant stood, thus, as Tacitus tells us, only slaves died. But when the dust settled down everyone could see that, to protect him with his body, Seianus had thrown himself over Tiberius. For Tacitus the courtier did it to win the emperor’s favor, but for me Seianus must have been really attached to the old man. Nobody could have had the time to make any calculation in the middle of the falling sand, the roar of the blocks of stone hitting all around and all this summed with the yelling, the crying and the shock. Seianus’ act must certainly have been a sudden and not calculated impulse. Thus I can’t believe Tacitus.

Bibliogaphy
from one of my dossier in Archeo
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Cibi, cucine e triclini in L'alimentazione nel mondo antico. I Romani: etá imperiale, Rome 1987. pp. 70-140

Academic articles
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Il gruppo di Polifemo a Sperlonga - Problemi di sistemazione. in Rend. Pont. Acc. Rom. di Arch., Vol. XLII, 1968-1970, pp.118-134, plates 1-3, figg. 5-9.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Forme speciali di triclini in Cronache Pompeiane, V, (1979), Naples, pp. 102-149
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Il ferculum dello Zodiaco in Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia., Vol. LV-LVI, (1982-1983-1984) , pp. 245-264.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – The Importance of Water in Roman Garden Triclinia in Ancient Roman Villa Gardens (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection), 1987, pp. 137-169, figg. 2-7, figg; 35-37.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Tende conviviali nell'antichitá in Festschrift in honor of Wilhelmina Jashemski , Caratzas, Flushing, New York, June 1989, pp. 199- 239
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI – Cibi, cucina e banchetti in Vita quotidiana nell’Italia Antica: vita in famiglia. Verona, 1993. Arnaldo Mondadori publisher, pp 111-144.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI - Le Grotte di Polifemo, in Palladio N°37, Gennaio - Giugno 2006, pp 1-29 figg 1-19