What the Romans Ate, Drank, and Did Between Courses
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 8 September 2026.
The Roman dinner party was far more than a meal. It was an arena for pleasure and performance, but also for the delicate negotiation of friendship, reputation, and rank. Where a guest reclined, what he was served, and even what he took home in his napkin all said something about his place in the world.
At the grandest dinners, the food could be fantastically elaborate. But beneath the peacocks, dormice, and sows’ wombs lay a cuisine of considerable subtlety, built upon fresh produce and the careful balancing of sweet, sour, bitter, and savoury flavours.
Apicius: The Man Who Ate a Fortune
Our most important source on Roman gastronomy is the cookbook of Apicius, compiled in or around the late fourth century CE, and containing recipes for such delicacies as larks’ tongues, sterile sows’ wombs, and milk-fed snails.
The Apicius in question is not to be confused with Marcus Gavius Apicius, the gourmet extraordinaire of the first century CE, who fed dried figs to his pigs and then finished them on wine to produce the porcine equivalent of foie gras.
According to Pliny, Apicius was ‘born to enjoy every extravagant luxury that could be contrived’ (ad omne luxus ingenium natus). It is said that, after spending 100 million sestertii on his kitchen, he discovered that he had only ten million left and committed suicide rather than face the prospect of poverty.
From Breakfast to Dinner
By the late Republic, Roman meals consisted of breakfast, or ientaculum, at dawn; a small lunch, or prandium, around noon; and a large dinner, or cena, in the evening.
A simple family dinner normally took place in the atrium and might have consisted of vegetables and salads accompanied by eggs, cheese, and beans, and rounded off with fruits and nuts.
By the end of the Republic, the cena had come to consist of three distinct courses. In the presence of guests, it could segue into a late-night drinking party, or comissatio—the Roman equivalent of the Greek symposium.
Inside the Triclinium
On more formal occasions, the feasting took place in a dining room called a triclinium (Greek, triklinion, ‘three couches’), with couches arranged on three sides of a central table. The fourth, open side usually faced the entrance and afforded space for slaves to serve the diners.
Each couch admitted up to three people, who reclined on their left elbow with their heads pointing towards the table. The posture would have been uncomfortable had the couches not been covered with cushions and inclined towards the table.
The various positions were not equal. The host seated his guests according to social status and closeness or intimacy, turning the dining room into a diagram of his relationships.
Unlike in Greece, women could be present. During the Republic, they generally sat on chairs, but by the imperial period they too could recline on a couch.
Grander houses often featured a second, summer triclinium in or overlooking the garden. The grandest had three or four—or even more—allowing the host to choose a setting according to the season, occasion, or company.
How to Behave at a Roman Dinner
Upon arrival, guests removed their sandals and washed their hands. The host did not provide napkins: each guest had to bring his own.
Napkins served to wipe the hands and mouth, but also to take home leftover titbits and, in some cases, a gift or souvenir from the host.
Food was conveyed from plate to mouth with three fingers or with one of two spoons: the larger ligula for soups and pottages, and the smaller, prong-like cochlear for eggs and shellfish.
Between the three principal courses, diners rinsed their fingers in perfumed water while slaves washed the table and swept away the bones and shells that had been tossed onto the floor.
After the main course, the host made an offering of meat, cake, wine, or some combination of the three to the household gods, or Lares.
Conversation, Poetry, and Dancing Girls
Conversation made up the bulk of the evening’s entertainment. It might be supplemented by a recital of literature or poetry, or by performances from acrobats, conjurers, musicians, singers, or dancers—although the diners themselves never got up to dance.
At the end of the evening, guests called for their sandals. Hence the expression soleas poscere, ‘to ask for one’s sandals’, meaning to prepare to leave.
If the dinner had gone well, they might depart with leftovers, a present, or some other souvenir bundled into the napkin they had so prudently brought with them.
The Roman dinner party is a popular and recurrent theme in Roman literature. In one of his letters, Pliny the Younger chides his friend Septicius Clarus for failing to turn up to dinner:
All ready were a lettuce each, three snails, two eggs, porridge, with mulsum and snow … olives, beetroot, gourds, bulbs, and a thousand other things no less appreciated. You would have heard comic actors or a poetry reader or a lyrist, or, such is my generosity, all three. But you chose to go to someone else’s for oysters, sows’ wombs, sea urchins, and dancing girls from Cadiz.
Two thousand years later, the grievance remains entirely recognisable.
The Feast of Trimalchio
The best—if most lurid—description of a Roman dinner party is Trimalchio’s Feast (Cena Trimalchionis) in the Satyricon, a salacious novel attributed to Petronius, a courtier at the time of Nero.
Trimalchio’s Feast is arguably the most celebrated section of the Satyricon, even though—or perhaps because—it has done untold harm to the reputation of the Roman dinner party.
Trimalchio, a freedman who has acquired enormous wealth, entertains his guests with ostentatious and grotesque extravagance. He brings out Falernian wine claiming to be from the celebrated Opimian vintage, already almost two centuries old.
One course contains a multitude of disparate ingredients, each representing a sign of the zodiac: a lobster for Capricorn, the udder of a young sow for Virgo, testicles and kidneys—which come in pairs—for Gemini, and so on.
The evening culminates with Trimalchio ordering his entire household to enact his funeral. Even at dinner, the point of being rich is to make other people rehearse your death.
What Did the Romans Eat?
The Romans ate such a wide variety of foods that it is easier to list what was absent from the ordinary Roman kitchen.
The principal absentees included refined sugar, tomatoes, potatoes, maize, tea, coffee, chocolate, peanuts, and chilli peppers. Rice and butter were known, but neither occupied anything like the place they do in many modern cuisines.
The eastern conquests of Alexander the Great had brought to the Mediterranean such delicacies as citrus fruits, peaches, pistachio nuts, and even the prized peacock. As they grew increasingly rich and cosmopolitan, the Romans left behind their ancestral diet of emmer-wheat gruel and adopted and adapted the sophisticated cuisine of the Greeks.
In time, Roman cuisine became even more exciting and exotic than Greek cuisine—not entirely dissimilar, in fact, to modern Indian cuisine, with a single dish enhanced by as many as 15 different herbs and spices.
The Romans had something of a sweet tooth. Many dishes balanced the sweetness of honey or concentrated grape juice (defrutum) with the acidity, sourness, or bitterness of vinegar, fish sauce, and a vast array of fresh and dried herbs and expensive spices.
From the first century CE, these spices included pepper from southern India and cloves from the Spice Islands: small luxuries carrying within them the astonishing extent of Roman trade.
Garum, Dormice, and Red Mullet
Fish sauce, known as garum or liquamen, was not dissimilar to Thai nam pla. It was made from whole small fish such as anchovies, sardines, mackerel, sprats, and herrings, which were macerated in salt and left to liquefy over several weeks.
This liquefaction resulted not from bacterial putrefaction, which the salt prevented, but from proteolysis by enzymes contained in the fishes’ viscera.
Meat was relatively expensive. Cattle were valued principally as draught animals, and pork, poultry, game such as hare and rabbit, and fish were generally preferred to beef.
Red mullet was particularly sought after. Upon dying, it passed through a succession of colours and shades with which to entertain the guests before being carried off to the kitchen.
Dormice were typically stuffed with minced pork, pepper, pine kernels, and garum. At Trimalchio’s Feast, they appear in ‘a row of dormice, glazed in honey and rolled in poppy seeds’.
But despite such extravagances, many Romans took great pride in the freshness and simplicity of their produce—all the more if it had been sourced from their country farm.
How Ordinary Romans Ate
Most Romans could not afford peacocks, mullet, and dormice. Their diet consisted largely of wheat bread, supplemented with fruit, vegetables, pulses, and whatever else they could find or afford.
In imperial times, many inhabitants of Rome lived in cramped apartment blocks without access to a kitchen or open fire. Rather than cook at home, they bought food from street stalls and shops, or ate in taverns and restaurants.
In his Letters to Lucilius, Seneca complains about the constant noise from the street below his apartment: ‘the cakeseller with his varied cries, the sausageman, the confectioner, and all the vendors of food hawking their wares, each with his own distinctive intonation’.
The poorest inhabitants could not always afford even street food and came to rely upon the free grain ration issued in the city.
Following the annexation of Egypt, vast grain ships ploughed the route from Alexandria to Ostia to supply Rome with the enormous quantities of wheat needed to feed its population. After being shipwrecked on Malta, St Paul reached Italy on just such an Alexandrian grain ship.
The Empire at Table
The Roman dinner table reflected the empire that sustained it. Pepper arrived from India, cloves from the Spice Islands, grain from Egypt, wine from every corner of the Mediterranean, and guests were arranged upon their couches according to the invisible but exacting geometry of Roman rank.
At the top of society, dinner could become an exhibition of wealth so elaborate that the food almost ceased to be food. At the bottom, people queued for their grain ration or listened hungrily to the cries of the sausageman in the street.
Between these extremes lay the real achievement of Roman cuisine: fresh produce, complex seasoning, conviviality, and the understanding that dinner is never merely about eating. It is also about status and friendship, theatre and conversation—and deciding, at the proper moment, to call for one’s sandals.
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