Dispelling Some Myths: Vomitorium

It is thirty years since the immensely popular ‘Horrible History’ series was launched, which was followed soon after by a television series of the same name. Author Terry Deary claims (tongue firmly in cheek) that the series is his revenge on the boring and badly taught history lessons he had to endure at school. If you are familiar with the books, they are not to be taken too literally (or seriously) but are a superb introduction for children to different historical periods. Just occasionally little mistakes are regurgitated. Yet these are not to the author’s discredit, rather they represent the inclusion of the common errors that still populate mainstream notions about history. One such is the ancient Romans’ use of vomitoria (sing. vomitorium).

Surely the purpose is obvious - the clue is in the name - the vomitorium must have been the place where Romans went to purge themselves of whatever excess (food or drink) they had indulged in? Well, no.

The idea of inducing vomiting and quick trips to the “vomitorium” is a modern misinterpretation attributed by the Oxford English Dictionary to Aldus Huxley in 1923, but it may have an even earlier 19th-century origin [1]. To cultured Romans public drunkenness was considered a sign of weakness and could lead to social disgrace. Indeed, the excessive consumption of food and drink was entirely disapproved. This notion is evidenced by three examples in the writings of the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca [2] and the Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus [3].

Having been exiled in AD 41 for adultery with Julia Livilla, sister of Emperor Caligula, Seneca wrote to his mother to console her on his fate. In the resulting work De Consolatione ad Helvium Matrem, dated to AD 42/43, he writes:

“They bring together from all regions everything, known or unknown, to tempt their fastidious palate: food, which their stomach, worn out with delicacies, can scarcely retain, is brought from the most distant ocean: they vomit that they may eat, and eat that they may vomit, and do not even deign to digest the banquets which they ransack the globe to obtain.” (De Consolatione ad Helvium Matrem, 10.3)

In a similar manner, Suetonius also refers to induced vomiting in his work of AD 121, De vita Caesarum (“The Lives of the Twelve Caesars”), when recounting the lives of emperors Claudius and Vitellius. The following two quotes are drawn from a translation by Robert Graves in 1957 for the Penguin Classics series of books:

“It was seldom that Claudius left a dining hall except gorged and sodden; he would then go to bed and sleep supine with his mouth wide open – thus allowing a feather to be put down his throat, which would bring up superfluous food and drink as vomit.” (Suetonius, De vita Caesarum: Claudius, 33)

“Vitellius’ ruling vices were gluttony and cruelty. He banqueted three and often four times a day, namely morning, noon, afternoon and evening – the last meal being mainly a drinking bout - and survived the ordeal well enough by vomiting frequently.” (Suetonius, De vita Caesarum: Vitellius, 13)

The quote by Seneca is clearly critical of the wealthy Roman elite. His allusions to wasteful behaviour, lavish spending and conspicuous disregard of social decency may be regarded as a barbed commentary on the very people who had seen him exiled. To his mother, however, Seneca expresses a seemingly positive outlook on his own exile playing to his Stoic philosophy that teaches one should not be upset by uncontrollable events. Even so, one cannot help detecting a sulky undertone and a belief that he has been treated unfairly.

In a somewhat similar manner, Suetonius’ narrative is, in places, also highly critical of his subjects the twelve emperors from the first Julio-Claudian, namely Julius Caesar, to the first of the Flavian rulers, Vespasian. In both the quotes above, Suetonius refers to induced vomiting probably to shock his readers with tales of excess. Significantly, however, neither Seneca or Suetonius mentions a “vomitorium” - perhaps the best evidence that such a thing did not exist.

Vomitoria did exist, however. The term was first used by the Roman writer Macrobius in the 5th-century AD. In his ‘Saturnalia’, he describes how crowds of people would ‘spew forth’ through the passages inside public venues. In other words, they were the means by which audiences could enter or leave places like amphitheatres, circuses or theatres. The Amphitheatrum Flavium (the ‘Flavian Amphitheatre or, more popularly, the ‘Colosseum’) in Rome, for example, had 80 vomitoria, 76 of which were for the general public, plus four Grand Entrances for Rome’s elite citizens. The arches one can still see today gave admission to corridors that ran around the building that gave access to the staircases and passages leading to the building’s seats. These passages were called vomitoria and were situated below or behind the tiers of seats in the amphitheatre. It was boasted that, at the end of a performance, the Colosseum could be emptied in just 15 minutes. Our notion, therefore, of vomiting comes from the Roman crowds literally ‘spewing forth’ from the exits.

References:

Graves, R. (Trans.), (1957), “Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars”, Penguin Classics (revised 2007).

Malik, S., (2023), “Q&A”, BBC History magazine April 2023 edition, p. 32.

Endnotes:

1. Victorian writers and journalists in the 19th-century spread the misconception because it suited their biased notions of ancient Roman excess. Such ideas likewise pervaded the public’s imagination back then, and sadly still do today.

2. Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – AD 65), usually known only as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, dramatist, and in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature.

3. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, commonly referred to as Suetonius (c. AD 69 – after AD 122), was a Roman historian writing during the early Imperial era of the Roman Empire. His most important surviving work is De vita Caesarum, commonly known in English as “The Lives of the Twelve Caesars”, a set of biographies of twelve successive Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian.