Literature’s most notorious dinner party, Trimalchio’s Feast, is a riotous caricature of dining in Imperial Rome. Attributed to Titus Petronius Niger, the wealthy poet, writer, and courtier to the Emperor Nero (r. 54-68 CE), the biting parody is the largest surviving chapter of his novel Satyricon and is a fascinating take on Roman hospitality and conspicuous consumption in the mid-first century.
Petronius was uniquely qualified to lampoon the mores of elite dining. He was one of Nero’s favorites and his trusted arbiter elegantiae, or judge of taste and elegance. This invented title (Tacitus referred to him as “Petronius Arbiter”) carried no official duties, but Petronius frequently choreographed Nero’s extravagant parties in
the newly-constructed Domus Aurea, Rome’s ultimate party space. Many of the luscious details found in Trimalchio’s Feast were art imitating life, albeit on a gross scale. Petronius hid Trimalchio’s Feast until just before his death, when revealing the subversive text could no longer harm him.
The character Trimalchio is a portrait in vulgarity ab ova ad mala (‘from eggs to apples,’ the traditional opening and closing dishes in a Roman meal and the equivalent of our ‘from soup to nuts’). A nouveau riche emancipated slave who hails from a distant province, Trimalchio is a rube who can only aspire to true elegance.
He wears pounds of gaudy jewelry, wipes his fingers on a napkin with an Imperial purple stripe (thus answering any question of whether Trimalchio is an avatar for Nero), noisily farts without inhibition, and threatens to beat his slaves mercilessly for minor mishaps. In one of the clearest jabs at Nero, the coffered ceiling of Trimalchio’s dining room opens to drop jars of toiletries on the guests, brutally mimicking Nero’s mechanical ceiling in the Domus Aurea that opened to shower perfume and rose petals on revelers.
For all his crassness, Trimalchio entertains lavishly. When the wine arrives, Trimalchio flaunts the label tied to the tightly sealed bottles before his guests: “Falernian of Opimius’s Vintage, One Hundred Years in the Bottle…”
Trimalchio’s Mysterious Vintage
by Cathy K. Kaufman
Literature’s most notorious dinner party, Trimalchio’s Feast, is a riotous caricature of dining in Imperial Rome. Attributed to Titus Petronius Niger, the wealthy poet, writer, and courtier to the Emperor Nero (r. 54-68 CE), the biting parody is the largest surviving chapter of his novel Satyricon and is a fascinating take on Roman hospitality and conspicuous consumption in the mid-first century.
Petronius was uniquely qualified to lampoon the mores of elite dining. He was one of Nero’s favorites and his trusted arbiter elegantiae, or judge of taste and elegance. This invented title (Tacitus referred to him as “Petronius Arbiter”) carried no official duties, but Petronius frequently choreographed Nero’s extravagant parties in
the newly-constructed Domus Aurea, Rome’s ultimate party space. Many of the luscious details found in Trimalchio’s Feast were art imitating life, albeit on a gross scale. Petronius hid Trimalchio’s Feast until just before his death, when revealing the subversive text could no longer harm him.
The character Trimalchio is a portrait in vulgarity ab ova ad mala (‘from eggs to apples,’ the traditional opening and closing dishes in a Roman meal and the equivalent of our ‘from soup to nuts’). A nouveau riche emancipated slave who hails from a distant province, Trimalchio is a rube who can only aspire to true elegance.
He wears pounds of gaudy jewelry, wipes his fingers on a napkin with an Imperial purple stripe (thus answering any question of whether Trimalchio is an avatar for Nero), noisily farts without inhibition, and threatens to beat his slaves mercilessly for minor mishaps. In one of the clearest jabs at Nero, the coffered ceiling of Trimalchio’s dining room opens to drop jars of toiletries on the guests, brutally mimicking Nero’s mechanical ceiling in the Domus Aurea that opened to shower perfume and rose petals on revelers.
For all his crassness, Trimalchio entertains lavishly. When the wine arrives, Trimalchio flaunts the label tied to the tightly sealed bottles before his guests: “Falernian of Opimius’s Vintage, One Hundred Years in the Bottle…”