The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (review)

Anyone interested in the banquet's role in early Christianity, especially the status of women and the practices of mixing and serving wine will be grateful for Dunbabin's new book on the Roman banquet. Here collected together are 120 black-and-white images of Roman dining. Some are familiar but many are new, and thanks to a subvention from Harvard's Classics Department, sixteen color plates have also been added. Dunbabin's purpose is "to explore how art can be used as evidence for social and cultural history, while giving due weight to the conventions and pressures that governed the production of the images themselves" (xv). The result is a work that bridges a traditional iconographic and comparative approach to the material with the significant discussions that have emerged from recent art and cultural theory. These discussions include the relationship between representation and 'the real', the interplay between text and image, the communication of visual imagery, viewer response, and practices of looking. That Dunbabin manages to accomplish her aim so seamlessly suggests a methodological preference for the traditional art historical approach. Perhaps this is why the author is able to clearly state in the introduction that "from such sources [images, archaeological remains and artifacts], much information can be derived that illuminates the patterns of behavior at the banquet and the social intercourse of the diners, more clearly often than any surviving written material" (6).

But, as Dunbabin warns, this information is not as self-evident as the imagery suggests, and for the unwary it can be a hall of mirrors rather than a window into ancient behavior. If approached carefully, however, with an appreciation for its visual complexity and context, the graphic information contained in banquet scenes, as the author amply demonstrates in this book, can shed light not only on the ideology of Roman dining and its visual rhetoric of status and power but on the changing convivial practices of real men and women in the self-representation of life and death. Thus, this book becomes an invaluable resource for better comprehending the art and archaeological remains of table fellowship in early Christian art and early Christianity.

The early chapters trace the history of the banquet scene and the differences between Greek and Roman conviviality as interpreted through evidence provided by archaeological remains and the rather frequent references to classical sources. This part of the study is particularly insightful when Dunbabin touches on drinking rituals and the changing place of women at the banquet (63–68). It is the latter half of the book, however, that will be of most interest to readers of JECS. Here Dunbabin examines banqueting scenes on funerary monuments, including those from early Christianity (chapter 6). Presented first are significant iconographical differences between Roman pagan and some of Christianity's earliest banquet scenes in the Roman catacombs of Callistus and Priscilla. The author draws attention to the addition of baskets topped up with bread in the earliest Christian scenes but also notes what is absent from the earliest Christian scenes, i.e., servants or attendants who lavish the participants with platters of sumptuous delicacies or jugs of wine. Drinking cups are also conspicuously absent from the diners' hands.

Dunbabin's discussion of scenes from the Peter and Marcellinus banquet, however, is more problematic, especially when the author imports a Roman-pagan template to interpret the status of standing and seated female figures. Here Dunbabin seems determined to end the scholarly controversy over the status of the female figures bearing cups by declaring the standing figures to be "high-status attendants comparable to the elegant male wine-waiters" (184) seen in pagan banquet scenes. The seated female figures, on the other hand, are honored meal participants (183). In this analysis, little attention is paid to the other figures' gestures, and no attention is given to the looks and communication among the figures as a whole. Would that we could interpret the significance of the female figures simply from their banquet posture. Dunbabin's...