Abstract

Applying Claude Grignon’s typology of commensality to the full range of meal practices of Greco-Roman associations provides insight into how various meals served as locations of social interaction and group self-definition while inscribing community boundaries. Literary, epigraphic, and papyrological evidence from these associations suggests that their meal practices were not limited to one particular type of commensality, as argued previously by John Donahue. Rather, a broad examination of the data demonstrates that associations undertook, at various times and places, segregative commensality, exceptional commensality, transgressive commensality, and, in some cases, “extra-domestic” commensality.

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