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Good and bad table manners in ancient Greece

by Eugenia Prina Ricotti

TABLE BEHAVIORS AT GREEK BANQUETS

It was in the period immediately following the VII cent B.C. that the Greek dinner completely changed its form, uses and customs, and among the more notable elements of the new trend were the tricliniar couches that created in Assyria during the VIII cent B.C. were imported in Greece at the end of the VII cent B.C. With this kind of furniture a new form of banquet entered in scene. It was enthusiastically adopted and, apart minor changes, continued to survive up to the end of the classic civilization.
Of course banquets had always been a very popular form of entertainment and long before the VII cent. B.C. they had offered the best possible way to spend the time and meet friends; now the new dinner was even better and people were not obliged to perch on a stool or sit on the ground to eat their evening meal. Banquet had become an elegant party during which people, leaning on comfortable pillows, reclined on the precious cloths laid over soft mattresses; a luxurious surroundings. Also many of the objects used during these banquets, were of great value and some of them were also particularly charming as the nice perfume vials that were offered to the guests at the end of the meal. It is in the graves that we find this sort of things connected with banquets: artistic ceramic cups, silver trays and, forged in immortal gold, the convivial wreaths that, in normal life, were made of perfumed flowers.
However, flower’s wreaths apart, not everything in the banquets were roses and violets. During the new dinners shocking vulgarities and coarse actions that never took place in the Homeric epoch were tolerated. For instance, as Atheneus point out, every time that during the meal a noisy quarrel aroused between the heroes of the Trojan war, they hurled themselves one against the other like two tigers and furious brawls took place, but the scene never degenerated in scurrility and in bad taste: those strong men simply tried to kill one another, but they always abstained from the vulgarity that V cent. B.C. comedy writers - describing events they that they had often witnessed in their triclinia - attributed to them.
So, in a satiric comedy, Aeschylus, ascribing to the Homeric heroes assembled for dinner the V.cent B.C. customs, describe them so drunk that they broke their chamber pots on the head of their contestants. Even Sophocles takes pleasure in the description of a similar scene and in the Achaean guest he writes:
“In a fit of rage he threw the stinking vase at me and he didn’t miss”
It was what could often happen in the great dramatist’s life, but it was also an act that never occurred in the Homeric times. Even when the dissolute Proceans, stone drunk, fly into a rage against Ulysses, the only thing that they hurled at him was a beef foot. It is clear that if these gentlemen had the habitude to bring chamber pots at their dinners, they would have used them, and they would have done it with much enthusiasm, but evidently at those times their useful vases were left at home.
Not so in the V cent B.C. when these serviceable, but quite stinking vessels, were considered an indispensable accessory of the banquets. To Eupolis question, asking
“Who was the first man who, at the middle of a symposium, yelled “Boy! Bring me my chamber pot”
We can only answer that he must have been one of Sophocles contemporaries and that, unluckily, he succeeded in setting a fashion.
In the V cent B.C. ceramic we find even representations of those chamber pots and on a kilix we see a young man who, laying on a tricliniar couches, is satisfying his human needs in a special vessel with a particular shape. A beautiful flute girl, naked and with only the light cloth with which guests of a banquet covered the lower part of their body draped around her, leans against him playing a gay convivial song, and she doesn’t look interested or shocked by what is happening behind her.
The use of chamber pots in the dining rooms was then transmitted to the Roman world, and this custom was interrupted only by the refined Hadrian who solved the problem circling his triclinia with elegant individual W.C.s maintained spot clean by water always running in them. However even the brilliant emperor did not succeed in banning from the dining rooms those useful but unbecoming vessels. Just after him chamber pots re-entered triumphantly in the Roman triclinia. Of course people ordered deft artisans to shape for them very elegant chamber pots and, some time, made them with precious metals. Important persons of those times had chamber pots made of onyx and Heliogabalus went so far as to employ the “murrina” the mysterious precious stone used to fashion the high priced and highly coveted “murrinae” cups; all materials that seems really wasted to be used for fashioning chamber pots but it is also understandable because they had to be paraded in public and their owners wanted to cut a fine figure.
Also women had their particular vessels shaped like a small boat and called “scaphia”. Usually those would never be shown “coram populo” and certainly they would never be seen in the Greek banquets, where wives and daughters were not admitted and never took part to dinner with strangers.


Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, A pranzo nell'antica Grecia in Archeo 10, December 1984, pp. 40-43.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L'alimentazione nell'antichitá in l'Eterno Banchetto: l'arte culinaria dell'Antica Roma 22-29 June 1987.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier: L'alimentazione nel mondo greco in Archeo, nº 44, October 1988, pp.48-91
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Monograph Le ricette più antiche del mondo in Archeo: le attualità del passato. Anno VIII, n° 1, febbraio 1999

Books
– L’arte del convito nell’antica Grecia. L’evoluzione del gusto da Achille ad Alessandro Magno , L’ERMA DI BRETSCHNEIDER, ROME, 2005.