A typical banquet among Roman nobles:their binges have remained famous
It is an image that we all have well impressed in our minds for having seen it hundreds of times in books, in frescoes and even reconstructed in successful films: the "binges" of the ancient Romans are the most famous in history .
But is that really the case?
Did the Romans really used to indulge in abnormal meals wasting immense quantities of food that they couldn't finish?
Indeed i convivia (from cum vive, "Stay together") took place exactly in this way:we met with a wealthy aristocrat and spent hours talking, laughing and joking, eating and drinking from the beginning to the end of the banquet, to organize which the host did not spared expenses.
In the end there were so many leftovers that they had to be thrown into the Tiber.
The main purpose of these meetings was indeed conviviality, enough to make Cicero say that “ the pleasure of the banquet does not must be measured by the delicacy of the food, but by the company of friends and their dissertation ", However, it is equally true that such behavior greatly clashed with the difficult everyday life that concerned those who belonged to the most popular classes of the city, for whom not only being able to eat every day was anything but taken for granted, but also in the if they enjoyed such luck, they were forced to settle for much more frugal meals.