Posted on 02/07/2015 9:01:27 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Let's pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar's father-in-law and a consul of Rome...
You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat more often and likely in larger quantities.
They had pork chops and a form of bacon. They even served sausages and prosciutto; in other words, a meal not unlike what you'd find in Rome today -- or in South Philadelphia...
MacKinnon and Trentacoste are zooarchaeologists... They rummaged through ancient garbage dumps or middens, and occasionally even ancient latrines looking for the bones of animals and fish people ate. People would sometimes dump the garbage in the latrine... can deduce a great deal from the bones about what life was like.
They also can often piece together a typical diet based on recovered porcelain shards.
They can look at bones in a dump and can tell what the animal was, sometimes how it was slaughtered, where it came from, and how the food supply worked...
Zooarchaeologists also have literary evidence of what was eaten from writers such as Juvenal and the poet Martial, often in satirical plays where writers mocked the ostentatious indulgence...
Some historians believed the lower class was mostly vegetarian but that is not true... generally ate the same things the upper class did, but not the same cuts (think mutton versus lamp chops) and probably not in the same quantities.
(Excerpt) Read more at insidescience.org ...
Helen Thomas Memorialized for the Ages! oh noooo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitorium
> The term vomitorium does not appear until the 4th century AD, about 400 years after Caesar and Cicero.[5]
* McKeown, J.C. (2010). A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the World’s Greatest Empire. Oxford University Press. pp. 153-154. ISBN 978-0-19-539375-0.
Modern Italian women (with one her got her looks from her Swedish mother). I don’t think women got really attractive until the latter half of the 20th century. Too matronly before that.
They conquered other civilizations for a reason....
I clicked on your response and got a face-ful of dust from this old thread. :-P
It was pretty disappointed to find out that vomitoriums were just hallways and not facilities for purging. All these colorful images of Roman barf-o-ramas dashed.
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