This is a book about space and how people fill it, and how the objects used to fill that space are interpreted and understood, and the importance of all of this for defining hierarchies and delineating power in the Roman world at the end of empire. Drawing on a variety of textual sources and diverse examples of material culture, and resting on the foundation of his 2006 dissertation and 2010 article in the American Journal of Archaeology—and a good deal else, as this is a considerable update of his initial foray into foodways—Nicholas F. Hudson sets out to examine the importance of the apparatus of a specific type of meal in the Roman world from the Principate through late antiquity, with a focus on the latter.[1]
Hudson’s introduction provides the book’s framework, noting that he is interested in specific examples of the convivium, or communal dining by invitation, and how transformations of this practice reflect larger social and political dynamics that occurred over the first several hundred years of the Common Era. He looks not only at dining between peers, both patron and client, but also meals that involved commingled groups from these ranks. This is a narrative, as are many books on late antiquity, of continuity, transformation, and loss. The sense of loss is poignant, as Hudson will spend the book identifying and contextualizing the developments that led to the end of these mixed-class meals, a move he convincingly argues was both enervating for society and had class-estranging repercussions. The introduction includes imagined examples of dining based on the archaeological evidence, stories told from the viewpoint of a client dining with his patron during the Principate, a late antique patron hosting a meal, and a late antique client visiting the home of his patron. These are fun anecdotes, ones that suggest Hudson is willing to mold evidence from the material culture and literary sources into a larger pastiche, and are supported by digital recreations of these meals. I particularly enjoyed the elite scenes, with their natty suit-clad figures milling about an atrium reminiscent as much of the bon vivants of Mad Men socializing at the Savoy-Plaza as nameless figures from the ancient world; such blurring of temporal boundaries, something Hudson does often throughout the book, makes the connection to wealth more vibrant and comprehending the status of the diners more accessible. I confess that one of Hudson’s key points—the importance of silver and ceramic vessels for defining hierarchy—was lost on me in many of these and subsequent reconstructions, as I had difficulty determining, even when squinting, which vessel was of which material.
This is a book that is most interested in what foodways can tell us about transformations regarding power and access to it in late antique culture as displayed via social meals. Chapter 1, however, which investigates textual sources, largely examines the Principate. The reason for this, and why Hudson’s expertise in material culture is so important for this study, is that the majority of textual sources that discuss invitation meals are from the first two centuries CE, which means Hudson will largely have to extrapolate conclusions for late antiquity based on evidence from the archaeological record and what he can glean from earlier texts. The few late antique texts that discuss dining focus on elites dining with fellow elites, a detail that will matter in his later analysis.
The second chapter, which opens with a letter of Sidonius Apollinaris regarding a dinner party, marks the book’s pivot into the physical world of dining. Well-read on the theoretical work on things and their agency and aware that such literature is often impenetrable to the non-specialist, Hudson here seeks to break down the varying physical aspects of the meal, which he will investigate in detail in subsequent chapters. What did the flooring of a dining space signify? The waiting areas? The wall decorations? Each of these, and more, is classified and scrutinized, with attention paid to the relationship of these factors to the patron and client classes. One comes away from this chapter marveling at the sheer number of ways objects were used to delineate space, power, and hierarchy; such a conversation helps fill the dining spaces we see when visiting archaeological sites and makes sense of the objects we encounter in museums, far from their place of use.
The third, fourth, and fifth chapters focus on aspects of this materiality. The third, which discusses almost every aspect of morphology of an array of dining vessels, from plates to stands to spoons, is right in Hudson’s wheelhouse. This chapter should be mandatory for anyone who works with domestic pottery (as well as the lucky few who examine silver or other precious material!), as it nicely describes how to think about serving vessels of different sizes and their use. In short, there was a move to using larger, shared vessels in late antiquity, but this change is only present in ceramic assemblages. Silver assemblages remained mostly consistent in terms of vessel size, with some exceptions, from the Principate to late antiquity. This suggests, to Hudson, the development of a tradition of late antique shared meals, but only for the lower classes. This is the crux of the book, and the center around which the rest of the argument turns. I was somewhat surprised to see late antique food deemed simpler than what was prepared in previous centuries (138-9); while Sidonius celebrates simplicity, other texts, such as the Vinidarius excerpts, indicate a complex array of foods and spices were also consumed.[2]
The impact of this dining transformation is further studied in the fourth chapter, which examines architecture, furniture, and lighting. Examples from different structures, including the large apsidal Basilica of Constantine in Trier and the Earthquake House in Kourioun, are employed to determine what dining in physical space felt like, how spaces for dining were used, and the impact of lighting, decoration, and seating arrangements on the diners. This is an important study, as it reveals more about dining practice than is obtainable from another potential source, scenes from contemporary art, which Hudson examines in Chapter 5. He looks at depictions of outdoor picnics and festive meals, scenes of the Last Supper, and images of meals from catacomb art, all of which he believes reflect less about actual performance and more about mood and sentiment related to such meals.
The sixth and seventh chapters, meanwhile, turn from objects to people. Chapter 6 focuses on members of the patron class, who maintained a continuity of dining culture but increasingly came to exclude the lower classes from it. Though from the outside these meals seemed either jejune or hedonistic, they served a very significant social purpose, namely reinforcing and celebrating the status of those who ruled. Hudson encourages us to view these meals as part of a larger culture of paideia, or the foundational system of education that bulwarked elite identity. The client classes, examined in Chapter 7, no longer had the same access to their patrons; instead of dining together, clients would show up only for the salutatio, or ritual acknowledgement of clients by patrons, which became increasingly impersonal in late antiquity. But the client classes still ate, and still continued to dine together. Their more-humble dining spaces and the shared meals eaten in them reflected the new social realities of their world, including the rise of circus factions, guilds, and the transformational new faith of Christianity. Hudson mulls over the impact of the loss of dining together in his concluding eighth chapter, arguing that the inability of patron and client to break bread communally marked the end of a period of social justice. No longer could a member of the lower classes count on the direct patronage and support of an elite that was extended to him in part because he ate with that person. The increasing impenetrability of the social fabric is, to Hudson, a forerunner of the vast chasm that would separate lord and peasant in the Middle Ages.
This is a good book, one that builds on observations about variations in the ceramic record to make an argument that is instrumental for understanding larger issues of social history. One thing I could not help noticing as I read, although it is about aspects of dining, from the wall decorations of the rooms food was consumed in, to the tables that displayed meals, to the plates that bore the food that sat on those tables, there is very little in the way of food itself. There are some exceptions: a discussion about the courses of a meal on p. 134, the famous example of King Henri IV of France and poule au pot on pp. 309-310, the reference to different quality wines served to different ranks of guest on p. 44. But there is a hole here related to ingredients and to the senses, one of smell and taste and crunch, and one that would nicely enhance a conversation about hierarchy and identity in the dining room. Certainly, the foods served to different peoples could delineate hierarchy and, therefore, promote and define the identities Hudson is looking for. Textual sources would offer additional context, but this is primarily a book on archaeological material, which does not provide this information as readily.
But I am reminded of a well-known story left to us by Anthony Bourdain and wonder if perhaps Hudson hasn’t come up with something truly exciting precisely as a result of this potentially deliberate lacuna.[3] A catalyst of Bourdain’s career and life took place in France when he was 9 years old. Handed a raw oyster by a relative’s neighbor, he found himself transformed by the transgressive bite of this exotic, still-living morsel, an experience that he later felt would directly lead to a life associated with food and earthy vice in equal measure.
That intoxicating bite, and the shock and revulsion it inspired in his family, would be key for molding his emerging roguish identity, at least as he would later present it. M.F.K. Fisher once urged us to “Consider the Oyster.”[4] Hudson seems to ask us not to. When we exclude the substance of this transformative mouthful we are left with a variety of equally important but less-discussed details, all necessary for understanding the emergence and reification of a nascent identity. We are left with a boy from New Jersey, lucky and wealthy enough to be on a multi-month holiday in France with his family. We are left with an audience, his family, whose rapt attention at this outré action reinforced how he would later need to be viewed. And we are left, ultimately, with a gift: of an old man in an exotic space handing a parvenu an item that would change his life. This was a defining moment, or at least later would be perceived to be.
In other words, we don’t need the oyster to understand this story. Maybe we understand its significance even better without it. The genius of Hudson’s book is that it strips down the meal to its component parts, reminding us of the tremendous variety in the details, and the importance—the necessity—of those details in shaping and defining identity, space, and place.
Notes
[1] Nicholas F. Hudson, “Dining in the Late Roman East.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2006; idem, “Changing Places: The Archaeology of the Roman ‘Convivium.’” American Journal of Archaeology 114 (2010): 663-695.
[2] Hugh Lindsay, “Who was Apicius?” Symbolae Osloenses 72 (1997): 145-6; Liliane Plouvier, “L’alimentation carnée au Haut Moyen Âge d’après le De observatione ciborum d’Anthime et les Excerpta de Vinidarius.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 80 (2002): 1357-1369.
[3] Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Updated Edition. New York: Ecco Press, 2001, 15-17.
[4] M.F.K. Fisher, Consider the Oyster. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.