Series: The Other Hunger— A History of Food, Sex & Seduction Across Time
Part 2 of 4
If ancient Greece approached desire with the careful deliberation of a philosopher selecting the perfect argument, ancient Rome approached it the way Rome approached everything else: with unlimited ambition, no apparent ceiling, and a complete conviction that more was not only better but morally correct.
The Greeks built a word for erotic food. The Romans built an empire around the appetite — and they made very little distinction between the hunger for territory, the hunger for power, and the hunger for pleasure. All three were expressions of the same Roman virtue: *virtus*. Force. Drive. The relentless forward motion of a civilization that believed restraint was for other people.
This is the story of Rome at the table. Which is to say: Rome in bed. Which is to say: Rome being entirely, magnificently, catastrophically itself.
The Convivium: A Roman Dinner Party Is Not What You Think
The Greek symposium was, at least in theory, an intellectual exercise with erotic undertones. The Roman convivium — the equivalent dinner party — had fewer pretensions in that direction.
Convivium means “living together.” And Roman dinner parties, particularly at the upper end of the social scale, were designed to be total experiences. You didn’t arrive for two hours and go home. You arrived as the sun went down and, if the host was doing his job, you were still there when it came back up.
The triclinium — the dining room — was arranged with three couches forming a U-shape around a central table. Guests reclined rather than sat, propped on the left arm, eating with the right. This position, which seems awkward to us, was considered the mark of a civilized person. To sit upright at dinner was what slaves did.
Reclining brought bodies close. Sharing a couch with someone you’d recently met was entirely normal. Proximity was designed in.
And into this architectural arrangement came an extraordinary quantity of food.
The Menu of Excess: What Romans Actually Ate (And Why)
The Roman erotic pantry drew heavily on the Greek tradition — they absorbed Greek culture the way they absorbed everything else, with enthusiasm and a slight air of ownership — but they amplified it considerably.
Oysters remained non-negotiable. The Romans were, if anything, even more obsessed than the Greeks. The orator Cicero complained about the expense. The satirist Juvenal used oyster consumption as shorthand for decadence. The Emperor Vitellius was said to have consumed them by the thousands in a single sitting. Apicius, whose cookbook “De re coquinaria” is one of the oldest to survive, includes multiple preparations of oysters both raw and cooked. They were served at every banquet of consequence, and their reputation preceded them by centuries.
Garum deserves its own chapter — and its own warning. This was the Roman condiment, the thing that went on everything, the flavour foundation of nearly the entire cuisine. It was a fermented fish sauce made by layering fish — typically small whole fish, intestines and all — with salt in large clay vessels and leaving them to liquefy over months in the Mediterranean sun.
The smell was, by all accounts, extraordinary. Pompeii had entire garum-production districts that sat downwind of the residential areas for obvious reasons. And yet garum was not considered low or common food. It was traded across the empire. The finest grades commanded prices comparable to fine wine. It was understood to be warming, stimulating, strengthening — and its fishy, brine-heavy base connected it squarely to Aphrodite’s oceanic domain.
The Romans renamed her Venus. The association with the sea, and with seafood, remained.
Dormice in honey — glires — were considered a particular delicacy and a reliable addition to erotic menus. Small rodents, fattened in ceramic containers called gliraria (essentially tiny dormouse apartments, which is both charming and slightly horrifying), then roasted and served glazed in honey and poppy seeds. Their combination of fat, sweetness, and the warming properties of honey made them a standard feature of serious banquets.
Eggs appeared constantly. Roman physicians and food writers associated them with fertility and generative power — their obvious symbolic logic making them an easy recommendation. Hard-boiled eggs at a Roman banquet carried the same loaded meaning as oysters, just at a lower price point.
Onions, leeks, and garlic retained the Greek associations, amplified by Roman writers including the poet Martial, who recommended garlic specifically and enthusiastically for flagging performance. Martial was, it should be noted, a man who expressed opinions about everything enthusiastically.
Pine nuts with honey appeared in Apicius and in medical texts. The physician Galen — perhaps the most influential medical writer of the ancient world after Hippocrates — prescribed pine nut preparations for men requiring stamina. His reasoning was thermal: pine nuts were warming, honey was warming, and the combination produced a sustained internal heat appropriate for extended exertion.
Rocket — arugula — continued from its Greek incarnation. The poet Virgil called it salacious. Columella, writing about Roman agriculture, noted that it grew best around Venus’s altars and that this was not a coincidence.
Venus’s Kitchen: The Roman Mythology of Desire
Where the Greeks had Aphrodite, the Romans had Venus. The translation was not exact — Venus had slightly different genealogy, slightly different portfolio — but the essential connection between the goddess of love and the domain of food remained intact and was, if anything, reinforced.
The Roman poet Ovid, who wrote the *Ars Amatoria* — the Art of Love, essentially the ancient world’s most comprehensive seduction manual — was specific about food. He recommended that a man seeking to attract a woman invite her to dinner. He suggested the correct wines. He discussed the strategic positioning at the table.
He also recommended — and this is Ovid, so he frames it with considerable elegance — that a man ensure he has eaten the right things before such an occasion. Onions from Megara, rocket, eggs.
Ovid was not writing nutritional advice. He was writing a practical manual. And his audience of educated Roman men took it seriously.
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## The Vomitorium Problem (And What Romans Were Actually Doing)
We need to talk about the vomitorium, because almost everyone has this wrong.
The popular understanding is that wealthy Romans, confronted with a feast of overwhelming quantity, would periodically excuse themselves to a designated room, vomit, and return to continue eating. This image has become the defining metaphor for Roman excess.
Here is the truth: *vomitoria* were the exit passages of Roman amphitheatres — the corridors through which crowds “spewed out” after events. The word is architectural, not gastronomic.
Did some Romans induce vomiting to continue eating? The philosopher Seneca, the Stoic moralist, mentions it with obvious disgust as the behaviour of particularly depraved individuals. The emperor Claudius was rumoured to do it. But it was considered shocking behaviour even by Roman standards — not a widespread cultural practice.
What Romans *actually* did at long banquets was pace themselves. The dinner extended over hours. Courses came slowly. Wine was present throughout but rarely guzzled. Professional entertainers performed between courses. The *parasiti* — professional flatterers and dinner guests who attended in exchange for their meals — kept the conversation moving.
The excess was real. The vomitorium myth is not.
Apicius: The First Celebrity Chef and What He Cooked for Lovers
Marcus Gavius Apicius lived in Rome during the reign of the emperor Tiberius, in the first century AD, and he was — by every ancient account — the most dedicated epicure the city had ever produced. He spent a fortune on food. He invented dishes. He is said to have considered suicide when he calculated that his remaining fortune would not support his standards of dining.
The cookbook that bears his name — “De re coquinaria” , “On the Matter of Cooking” — is a fascinating document. Written and compiled over several centuries, attributed to Apicius as the presiding spirit of Roman food obsession, it is the oldest substantial cookbook to survive from the ancient world.
It contains, among other things, preparations explicitly noted for their effects on desire.
A recipe for a sauce to be served over grilled fish involves garum, wine, cumin, and honey — a combination ticking nearly every warming-food box in the Roman medical tradition. Various egg preparations appear with recommendations for when they should be served and to whom. Pine nut preparations are present throughout.
But perhaps the most interesting Apician dish for our purposes is the preparation of lagana — an early precursor to what would eventually become lasagne — served at long dinner parties where the host’s intentions for the evening were understood by everyone at the table.
The food was never just food. It was communication.
The Role of Wine: Falernian, Desire, and the Roman Calculation
Roman wine culture was, if possible, even more developed than Greek. The Romans had a classification system for their wines that was essentially an ancient version of the Michelin guide — specific vineyards, specific vintages, the right temperature of service.
Falernian wine from Campania was the prestige product — aged, rich, higher in alcohol than most. It was considered warming, strengthening, and conducive to the kind of openness that an evening of pleasure required.
The physician Galen classified wines by their humoral effects. Light, diluted wine was cooling and appropriate for invalids. Full-bodied, aged wine was warming and appropriate for — his phrase, more or less — vigorous adults engaged in vigorous activities.
The Romans took this seriously enough that the wine poured at the beginning of a banquet was often lighter — appropriate for conversation, for arriving, for the first courses. As the evening progressed and the dishes shifted in their implications, the wine shifted with them.
This is pacing. This is architecture. This is a dinner party as a choreographed experience designed to produce a specific outcome.
Petronius and the Satyricon: When the Appetite Consumed Everything
No piece of Roman literature captures the relationship between food and desire — and the point at which both tip from pleasure into absurdity — quite like Petronius’s Satyricon, written in the first century AD.
At its centre is the “Cena Trimalchionis” — Trimalchio’s Dinner — a feast hosted by a fabulously wealthy freedman for his equally vulgar guests. The dishes arrive in theatrical sequence: a bronze donkey carrying panniers of olives, a dish built to look like the twelve signs of the zodiac with food representing each sign, a wild boar dressed in a cap with sausages hanging from its tusks, pastry birds, suckling pigs, enormous fish.
Petronius was satirising Roman excess, not celebrating it. The point of Trimalchio is that he mistakes extravagance for taste and performance for desire. His banquet is technically overwhelming and emotionally empty.
But the satire only works because the real thing existed. Petronius was describing something his audience recognized.
The relationship between food and desire had, by the first century AD, become a kind of performance art in certain Roman circles. The appetite wasn’t just being fed — it was being displayed.
What Rome Got Right
Here is what the Romans understood, beneath all the excess:
Pleasure was worth engineering.
Not passively hoped for. Not left to chance. Not treated as something shameful that happened in spite of civilization — but as something that civilization existed, in part, to make possible.
Their oysters were expensive and their garum was pungent and their dormice in honey was an acquired taste. But the Roman dinner party at its best — stripped of Trimalchio’s vulgarity, in the hands of a host with genuine intelligence and genuine warmth — was a place where food and desire and conversation and wine were all understood to be working together toward the same end.
An evening worth having lived.
We still eat oysters before a romantic dinner. We still choose the right wine. We still arrange the table with some care when the occasion calls for it.
We’ve just forgotten we learned it from Rome.
*Next in the series: Part 3 — Medieval Europe: God, the Devil, and the Dangerous Spice*
It's Nicky Lynn 