How realistic is the ‘Cena Trimalchionis’ as a portrayal of Roman Dining in the Early Imperial Period? Illustrate your essay with specific examples.

The Cena Trimalchionis is a description of an outrageously extravagant and luxurious dinner given by a fictional Roman freedman (ex-slave) called Trimalchio. It appears in the Satyricon (or Satyrica), written by Petronius. The Satyricon is the earliest Roman novel, and as such shares some features with Greek novels, which preceded it, but it is also a satirical work. Satire was a Roman genre which comprised elements of parody, invective and diatribe, as well as Old Comedy and mime. A genre with these elements will obviously make use of exaggeration and stereotypes to parody and mock the subjects being attacked, and it is important to bear this in mind. The Cena Trimalchionis is full of exaggeration and over-the-top details and occurrences, and it is important to bear this in mind when assessing whether it is realistic.
The first thing to note is that dinners like the one given by Trimalchio were not at all the day-to-day experience of most ordinary Roman citizens at the time. Because most of our sources are written by members of the two top classes in Rome, the senators and equestrians, and because these are also the classes which the sources mainly tell us about, it is easy to forget that the majority of Roman citizens were not noble or rich. The lives of the ordinary people did not feature great banquets given for, or by, their friends because the ingredients required were far too expensive. Plebians, the non-noble class, would have eaten simple, boring, cheap food most of the time. Many did not even have facilities to cook food safely in their flammable high-rise apartments, so a lot of their diet would have consisted of street food. The fact that the luxurious cuisine provided by Trimalchio was totally out of the reach of most people is underlined by the existence of the bread dole, which was a free portion of bread and sometimes other staples given to those in the city of Rome who were deemed poor enough, to prevent them from starving or rioting. Under the Emperor Augustus, at the very beginning of the Imperial Period, 320,000 people in are recorded as receiving this dole, which may have added up to as much as one third of the population of the city. Even those of the educated classes who could afford to invite their friends round for dinner would usually not be able to offer whole boiled pig, or fruit and cakes loaded with the expensive spice saffron, such as Trimalchio served. Martial describes a more normal dinner to which he invites his friend, listing lettuce, leeks, chickpeas, and broccoli from the garden as some of the food on offer.
It’s a pretty scanty snack – no point denying it – but you won’t need to put on an act … just relax, be yourself. I won’t bore you with endless readings from my latest book.
Martial’s words are a reference to the circumstance under which a poor but well-connected Roman might be able to enjoy a dinner of the kind described in the Cena Trimalchionis – if he had a rich patron to invite him. The system of patronage was very well established in the Early Imperial Period, and a poorer or less influential man would often seek out a richer and more influential man to be his patron, to help him get ahead, or simply to subsidise him. The patron, in return, could expect his clients to vote for him in any elections and to listen to readings of his literary works. Many of the lower-class guests at Trimalchio’s dinner may be clients of his. Giving a meal for his clients was a very common way for a patron to reward loyal clients, as Juvenal records:
“An invitation to dinner counts as payment in full for all your previous service.” Patrons would not always treat their guests with Trimalchio’s generosity, however. Juvenal goes on to describe the humiliation of attending a banquet at which the client guests were served food of a much lower quality than the host, for the host’s amusement. To complain was to risk losing valuable patronage so the clients simple ground their teeth and bore it. They were, as Ganymede in the Cena Trimalchionis has it, “a lion at home, a fox in the street.” Not all patrons would be malicious, though, and certainly some clients would have had the chance to sample quite luxurious food and wine when dining at their patron’s expense, as in the Cena Trimalchionis.
Encolpius, the main character of the Satyricon, is not a client of Trimalchio’s, and is in fact of higher social standing, but he joins in with the flattery of the other guests because he is enjoying a free meal, much better fare than what he could afford himself. This was another way in which a Roman might be able to experience this kind of luxury, by fishing for a dinner invitation. The excessively polite Agamemnon in the Cena Trimalchionis is described as someone “who certainly knew how to get invited back to dinner”, and it was he who seems to have obtained the invitation for himself and his friends in the first place. People like this, known as parasites, did really exist. Martial mentions an acquaintance of his called Menogenes who would simply hang around his chosen host and flatter him with such persistence that in the end it was almost impossible not to give in and invite him to dinner.
While not the normal experience of the ordinary Roman citizen, banquets were certainly part of the life of a number of Romans who were connected to the wealthy and influential, whether as clients or acquaintances. Is it realistic, though, that the host of the lavish feast described in the Cena Trimalchionis is an ex-slave? Trimalchio is very open about the fact that he is a freedman, and therefore used to be a slave. He is also very open about how he made his fortune, despite the fact that, it is implied, it involved sexual favours granted to both master and mistress. Becoming his master’s heir, Trimalchio was then able to increase his wealth through trade until he became a millionaire. This is not as unlikely as it may seem to the reader today. A slave could gain his freedom in many ways, and freedmen in the late Republic and early Empire were frequently able to live more comfortably than citizens, since there were no cultural conventions preventing them from working for pay or engaging in trade. Example of extremely rich freedmen can be found in the sources; Pliny tells of a freedman who became rich enough to leave 4,116 slaves in his will, and Nero was so jealous of the wealth of his uncle Claudius’ favourite freedman, Pallas, that he is said to have had him poisoned. This Pallas had been chief financial controller under the Emperor Claudius, a demonstration of just how high freedmen could climb.
The opulence and excessiveness of Trimalchio’s dinner, too, although easy to dismiss as gross exaggeration, does have parallels in Roman life. Lucullus, a rich politician, was the first of the great gourmands, who kept fish ponds, aviaries and a game park on his estate to provide the best meat for his table. Julius Caesar attended a banquet at which there were ten starters, ten main courses and numerous desserts. Tiberius auctioned off one turbot, a particular delicacy, which was bought for 30,000 sesterces (several thousand pounds). The Emperor Vitellius was said to dine out three or four times a day, never at a cost of less than 400,000 sesterces a meal. He was able to consume so much by means of regular induced vomiting. Most of the examples we have concern the imperial family, but there must also have been plenty of senators and perhaps even rich equestrians who entertained the emperors, or were entertained by them, in this extravagant way.
The extravagance of Trimalchio’s meal, then, is not unrealistic of some of the more opulent dinners of the time, and could have been given by a freedman. But there are two important caveats before accepting Cena Trimalchionis as an example of Roman dining. The first is that there are many elements of the Saturnalia to be found in the Cena, and the references to this feast throughout the meal give more than hint that this in not accidental. This religious feast, which took place in December, featured the inversion of social norms and roles, especially with regard to masters and slaves, and also often featured “joke” food, made to look like something else. The invocation of this feast means that we should not take the high regard shown to the slaves, or the elaborately constructed food jokes (e.g. the “un-gutted” pig in chapter 49), as realistic portrayals of Roman society at the time.
The second thing to take into account is that a lot of the satire in Cena Trimalchionis is directly as the expense of the emperor Nero. The Petronius Arbiter who is recorded as the author of the Satyricon is almost certainly the same Petronius who was Nero’s “Arbiter Elegentiae” (Master of Elegance) and whose life and death are briefly summarised by Tacitus. He was a close friend of Nero, until false allegations forced his suicide, and he knew court life intimately – so intimately that in his will he was able to list all of Nero’s sexual partners, both male and female. Some of the extravagances of Trimalchio, Petronius has lifted directly from Nero’s real life,
His banquets he drew out at length, eating and drinking from noon to midnight, frequently refreshing himself by warm baths, and, in the summer season, having the water cooled with snow. … It was also his habit to invite himself to supper with his friends; at one of which was expended no less than four millions of sesterces in chaplets, and at another a good deal more in rose water and aromatic oils.
Trimalchio’s banquet also features baths (Satyrica 72), melted snow (31.20), aromatic oils (70.3, 78.1), and huge expenditure. The ceiling which opens is also copied from Nero’s own palace, and even the place where this dinner seems to be set, modern-day Puteoli, is a town sponsored and encouraged by Nero. It is clear that Nero is the butt of many of the jokes about extravagance in Cena Trimalchionis, and so while Trimalchio’s dinner can be seen as “the culinary ostentation of rich upstarts trying to imitate the style of the court”, which may have happened, it cannot in itself be seen as reflective of ordinary Roman life.
This is not to say, however, that the Cena Trimalchionis is not to some extent realistic. In fact, its basis in the life of Nero means that we know that some of the aspects which seem most ludicrous or unrealistic (such as the opening ceiling) are in fact not only realistic, they were actually real. That excessive expenditure and conspicuous consumption were a real problem in the early Empire we know not only from isolated examples, but also from the occasional imposition or reinstatement of sumptuary laws, regulations outlawing large parties and excessive luxury. The average Roman, whether on the bread dole or managing to make ends meet himself, would never in his life attend a dinner such as Trimalchio’s. The better-connected and higher born citizens could look forward to attending posh dinners occasionally, or even regularly, but not at this level of luxury. But at the absolute top end of the scale, in the realm of the emperors and their rich friends, this kind of extravagance was not only known but often expected and even obligatory. While remembering that a lot of the horseplay would only usually have taken place during the Saturnalia, and being very clear about the fact that this banquet was only within the reaches of the extremely rich, it is still possible to treat the Cena Trimalchionis as a reasonably accurate parody of upper class opulence in the Early Imperial Period.