Nicole Benazeth joins ghostly guests from the past at an exhibition in Marseille that charts the history of the banquet from ancient Greece to Rome.
‘Now,’ said Trimalchio, ‘let us have dinner. This is sauce for the dinner.’ As he spoke, four dancers ran up in time with the music and took off the top part of the dish. Then we saw in the well of it fat fowls and sow’s bellies, and in the middle a hare got up with wings to look like Pegasus. Four figures of Marsyas at the corners of the dish also caught the eye; they let a spiced sauce run from their wine-skins over the fishes, which swam about in a kind of tide-race. We all took up the clapping which the slaves started, and attacked these delicacies with hearty laughter. Petronius: Satyricon
Anyone who has seen Fellini’s film Satyricon of 1969 (loosely based on the book attributed to Petronius and written in the late 1st century AD) will remember the decadent images from Trimalchio’s banquet scene. But how much can archaeology tell us about ancient banqueting? We get most of our information on fine dining in antiquity from images on frescoes, mosaic floors and vase-paintings, and also from the actual vessels, both metal and ceramic, that were used at such banquets.
In The Banquet from Marseille to Rome: Pleasures and Power Games, on show in Marseille at the Vieille Charité Musée d’Archéologie Méditerranéenne, visitors can find out how Greeks and Romans ate, drank and enjoyed sharing a meal and entertainment together.
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