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Grasping the Pangolin: Sensuous Ambiguity in Roman Dining
- Arethusa
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 3, Fall 2003
- pp. 309-343
- 10.1353/are.2003.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
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This chapter examines the cultural geography of Roman dining, arguing that the food, seating arrangements, entertainment, and decoration of triclinia worked together to construct the body as more than a "slightly porous jug" (M. Douglas). The half-open body in Plutarch's Quaestiones Convivales and Petronius's Satyricon is compared to the treatment of the wall surface as membrane in fourth-style painting: both types of evidence point to dining as a process of unwrapping the body/self from layers of formal deportment. Neither simple decadence nor Bakhtinian carnival, dining functions as a dynamic metaphor for social change in the early empire.