Concepts
What are we talking about here?
Sociality. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "the state or quality of being sociable; (the enjoyment of) friendly social interaction; sociability." For our purposes, we can understand it as culturally conditioned ways of being together and getting along — or, as the case may be, not getting along, which has its own word: "antisociality." Some of that will have taken the form of socializing in domestic spaces. And this last will have involved bringing outsiders into one's house, and experiencing, as an outsider, another's domestic spaces
agōn. That one's easy: it's competition in all its various forms — formal contests, informal rivalries, even solo efforts to show oneself at one's very best
Agonism. That's the culture of competition, what we've been studying all along, especially as evidenced in the Roman Imperial East.
Agonistic. All that pertains to agōn and agonism.
Emotion. Obviously, feelings and all that. What we're concerned with here are what, if any, feelings might have been aroused by experiencing another's domestic spaces, and how those feelings might have mattered.
Quiz Response Prompt
How, in your experience, does the socializing of your here-and-now resemble what you encounter in readings for this this assignment? How does it differ?
Assigned Readings and Access
- Introduction, below, to symposium-convivium culture, and to domestic hospitality more generally, in the Roman East
- Susan Alcock's "Power Lunches in the Eastern Roman Empire." (Michigan Quarterly Review 42.4, 2003, pages 591-606, as web page)
- Select portions of my own 2021 article, "The Unwelcome Guest"
- Read only pages 335-342 top (translation of the entrance hall poem), and 351 bottom ("Emotion") through 359 top ("Conclusions"). You can access that either via webpage or via PDF.
That's comes out to thirty, maybe thirty-two pages of reading: by no means excessive! Some of it may, though, prove to be of a slightly technical character. What follows is meant to help.
Introduction to Greco-Roman Domestic Socializing (sumposion, convivium)
In Greek, sumposion refers to a "drinking together," and that pretty much was what the symposium was, namely, a semi-ritualized dining-and-drinking party, especially for members of the elite. Non-elites could play key roles as serving staff, entertainers, and guests. The "classic" Greek symposium of archaic and classical Greece (ca. 800-300 BCE) was, though, a predominantly elite male affair. To host one, you needed a house with a room for it (an andrōn, a "men's" room); plus, you needed the financial wherewithal to cover the cost of catering and entertainment. Women, if present, ordinarily would have been brought in to entertain the (male) guests. Wedding feasts were different, with female family members in attendance.
(FYI, not for the test, as they say. In classical Greece, costs could be born by the guests in common. Also, groups, sort of like clubs, could be formed for the purpose of cost-sharing for socializing. The word for either was eranos, plural, eranoi.)
Before arriving, one would bathe and dress in something nice; things typically got started around sundown. Upon arriving, slaves might wash your hands and feet, apply aromatic oils to your person, and provide you with a wreath woven from grape vines, this last in honor of Dionysus, god of wine.
Festivities began with the dining phase, the deipnon. Then came the symposium proper, the drinking phase, during which one was to get pleasantly inebriated, not disgustingly drunk, though it didn't always work out that way. What was drunk was wine mixed with water. Guests reclined on couches during the festivities. In the archaic and classical periods, guests might sing or recite poems, tell stories, or play drinking games like kottabos. Professional entertainers might be brought in: musicians, singers, dancers, etc. Performers might double as sex workers. Very generally, the archaic-classical Greek symposium was a space giving play to fantasy, an occasion for free men to indulge in pleasure and imaginative escape.
Later, and under the influence of the Roman convivium or cena, that is, the Roman version of the deipnon-symposium, respectable women started being invited as guests. Particularly under the Empire, the Greek symposium was a stage on which dramas involving class, status, and gender were played out, as the Alcock reading ("Power Lunches in the Eastern Roman Empire") helps us grasp.
For the Roman convivium, and thus for Greek symposia influenced by Roman customs, the seating arrangements could be quite hierarchical. The word for a Roman formal dining room, and for the seating arrangements in it, was triclinium, meaning "three-couch arrangement." Ideally, an aristocratic Roman banquet-convivium involved nine diners arranged on three couches, three to a couch. Stretched out on one's left side, one ate with one's right hand. (Spoons might be used to serve oneself, but one basically ate with one's right hand.) The couches would form a kind of letter Pi (Π), with individual couches partly overlapping, and with tables in the middle for food and drink. See the diagram below for seating and status. Note that the guest of honor typically will have reclined on the lectus medius (Latin for "middle couch"), perhaps in the middle of that middle couch, and thus with a good view of the garden that often will have been just outside the dining room entrance. The host will have reclined on the lectus imus the "lowest couch," and thus with a good view of the important guests.
That number nine won't have been invariable. Among other things, weddings could involve many more guests and a more complicated seating arrangement. Nor is it clear that Roman customs were always followed faithfully in Eastern houses, though they clearly exercised an influence over status-consciousness elites.
Evidence from the second century CE on suggests that couches began to be merged into a single, Pi-shaped or semi-circular structure referred to as a stibadium or sigma (sigma because the letter sigma at this time was usually written as a semicircle, C). Dining while reclining seems to have persisted well into the middle ages in the Greek East, maybe till around 1000 CE.
As for what was eaten and other details, please refer to the Alcock reading. I would also suggest that you (optionally) take a look at "Reclining and Dining (and Drinking) in Ancient Rome," on the Getty Museum iris site.
Introduction to Specific Readings
The Alcock article pretty much introduces itself.
As for my own 2021 article,* that could use some explanation.
* Scholtz, Andrew. 2021. "The Unwelcome Guest: Envy and Shame Materialized in a Roman Villa." TAPA 151 (2): 335-361.
It's about a floor mosaic from a villa on the Greek island of Kephalonia, in the modern seaside town of Skala. Villa and mosaic date to about the year 200 CE; the mosaic is located in what clearly was the villa's main entry hall. There, it seems to have played an apotropaic role, that is, it protected the structure in which it was found. Protected it from what? From Envy's evil eye.
More broadly, my article addresses the ways one might protect houses and other structures against against the aforementioned threat, known in ancient Greek as baskania. We know that the evil eye was a key concern for people settled all around the Roman Mediterranean. It shows itself in, among other things, the imagery of floor mosaics set in or near the entrances to houses, rooms, etc.; also in inscriptions embedded into those mosaics. Images of the snake demon Medusa, of the sea god Ocean, of Heracles, just to name a few, were thought to provide the necessary protection.
Why worry? Let's say you invite so-and-so to your house, and he says, "Wow, this is amazing, I really admire it!" How do you know that so-and-so doesn't actually resent it or the success and good fortune that it embodies? How can you be sure that behind his flattering words doesn't lurk the wish that your house and good fortune would just collapse? You can't be sure. Indeed, even an innocent expression of admiration could activate malign forces: bad luck and the like. If so-and-so is careful, he'll try not to say anything liable to cause harm, but even if he says nothing, how do you know what he's thinking? Well, there actually was a way to see into the souls of others: physiognomy, which we have studied. Still, it never hurts to be prepared.
Nothing, in fact, needed to be said to harm persons or things resented by the envying subject. It was enough simply to glance at the object of one's envy. Vision was understood as the product of a beam emitted by the beholder's eye and bounced off external objects, sort of like radar. That beam could transmit toxins generated by the envier's inner resentment, toxins harmful to whomever or whatever those beams struck. But envy also harmed the envying subject, who typically experienced envy as choking and/or physical wasting.
The evil eye, and the envy that caused it, were, in fact, taken quite seriously in the Roman Mediterranean. What to do about it? In my article, I briefly talk about amulets and other protective measures. Entryways to houses and rooms were points of particular concern in this regard. Unprotected, those thresholds risked allowing envy and its malign effects into vulnerable spaces; hence objects like the mosaic I write about.
More on that in my article. Here, let me comment on some terminology:
Apotropaic. All that means is "warding off evil." For instance, amulets are apotropaic insofar as they ward off evil.
Amulet. Amulets are an example of apotropaic object. Christopher Faraone applies the term "amulet" very broadly to a whole range of objects, including apotropaic floor mosaics, endowed with the power to protect or otherwise benefit people and their things. (The Transformation of Greek Amulets, 2018)
Mosaic. A mosaic is a picture or abstract pattern, or a combination of the two, created by the insertion of small, colored tiles into a medium holding those tiles in place. Ancient mosaics were usually set into floors and were considered an opulent form of decoration. Mosaic floors, with their patterns and pictures, when viewed as they normally would have been, which is to say, horizontally (see photo above), would have created drama for the viewer, a sense of internal space extending away from one's vantage point, and leading one deeper into the structure.
Emblēma. This is obviously where the English word "emblem" comes from. In ancient Greek, it means an "insertion." When creating floor mosaics, much of the decorative-geometric detail work was done on site. Often, the central figurative panel was created in a studio off-site, then transported to the destination structure, where it would be inserted into a space left open for it. That insert is the emblēma.
Roman villas. The term "villa" comes from Latin, where it refers to a country farmstead for the purpose of agricultural production: grains, wine, olive oil, wool, etc. Starting in late Republican Italy (first cent. BCE or so), villas took on the additional function of vacation houses, places of leisure and repose for the wealthy. They additionally served as venues to entertain guests and to show off — and to compete. As I write in my article, "Kim Bowes, noting that 'the traditional locus of elite competition and distinction in the Roman world was the home,' describes domus [urban domestic residences] and villas as 'machines for competition,' 'physical sites of social rivalry.' " By late antiquity, these sorts of "Roman villas," as they're generally called, had spread all over the Empire.
Finally, a brief word on villas in relation to the ancient Mediterranean economy. By the time of the Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, society in many parts of that region had become highly stratified. Under Rome, social-political stratification was, if anything, reinforced, with the ruling power, Rome, enlisting the aid of local elites, both to maintain order and to guarantee the flow of tribute. Those elites derived their power in large measure from their wealth, and their wealth, in large measure, from agriculture, that is, from farms owned by them and worked by slaves or tenants. In general, the countryside fed the cities, with the latter sucking agricultural produce from the former, almost like a vacuum cleaner. (The concept comes from historian Peter Brown, though I don't believe he quite puts it that way.) Not every estate owned by the elite will have had a stately residence attached to it. Nor were all stately residences in the countryside attached to farms; some were just vacation homes. Nor was every farmer a wealthy landowner. But the wealth supporting the lifestyles of the Polemons, the Herodes Atticuses, etc. etc. of that world, whether in the cities or in the country, derived in large measure from the possession and exploitation of agricultural land.