Horrible History: did Roman slaves hand-feed their masters?

Found on the website Twinkl, “Ten short facts about the Romans” was posted on December 8th, 2020 by unknown author possibly based in Ireland. Regardless, but bearing in mind that the “facts” are intended to educate children, number seven elicited a raised eyebrow. The whole text reads as follows, with our highlighted emphasis:

“7. Rich Romans had slaves who served them some exotic foods.

There was a variety of wealth in Roman times. The richest of the Romans would have slaves who would feed their owners. The rich Romans would lay down as their slaves would feed the most exotic foods into their mouths. They were known to eat things such as Flamingo, Stork and roast parrot.”

Being charitable, the emboldened part of “fact” number seven is fine as it stands, but the paragraph that follows is best described as imprecise bordering on plain wrong. By dissecting the text, we hope to correct some general misconceptions and add a few facts to improve the piece. So, beginning with the first sentence, this is fine as there certainly was a vast difference in wealth between the richest Roman and the poorest. Sentence two, however, is only partially correct as slave ownership was not limited just to the richest as implied. Rather, slave ownership was widespread in the Roman world, and further afield in other societies and cultures. Essentially, if you could afford to buy, inherit or otherwise obtain a slave, feed and care for them, then far more Romans seem to have done so.

The next sentence begins well enough as there is documented evidence, epigraphy and imagery that shows wealthier Romans reclined on couches (Latin: lecti, sing. lectus) at dinner parties hosted in a formal dining room known as a triclinium (pl.: triclinia). The latter word was adopted from the Greek triklinion (τρικλίνιον) where tri- (τρι-) meant “three” and klinē (κλίνη) referred to a type of couch rather like a chaise longue. Collectively the three lecti were called triclinares (“of the triclinium”) and were set around three sides of a low square table; the fourth side facing the dining room entrance was left free to allow service to the table. Each lecti was sized to accommodate a diner who reclined, semi-recumbent, on their left side on cushions. Household slaves served multiple courses brought from the culina, or kitchen, while others entertained guests with music, song, poetry or dance.

The second part of sentence three however, caused some alarm. As highlighted above it claims: “slaves would feed the most exotic foods into their [the diners’] mouths”. Admittedly the host could have instructed his slaves to physically feed his guests, but that was not the norm. Even the 1st-century AD Roman satirist Petronius, in his work of fiction “Satyricon”, does not mention such behaviour while parodying Roman etiquette during his character Trimalchio’s ostentatious dinner (Cēna Trīmalchiōnis, “Dinner with Trimalchio”) [1]. Rather, polite Roman diners would have selected choice foods from the dishes presented to them and used their own fingers, or the appropriate cutlery, to feed themselves.

The final sentence states Romans “…were known to eat things such as Flamingo, Stork and roast parrot.” Wealthy Romans were seemingly unafraid to consume exotic creatures, or parts of them at least. The flamingo, for example, was only occasionally eaten by Romans, with Apicius suggesting a sauce for the bird (Apicius 6.2.21):

in fenicoptero: fenicopterum eliberas, lauas, ornas, includis in caccabum; adicies aquam salem anetum at aceti modicum. dimidia coctura alligas fasciculum porri et coriandri ut coquator. prope cocturam defritum mittis, coloras. adicies in mortarium piper cuminum coriandrum laseris radicem mentam rutam, fricabis. suffundis acetum, adicies caroenum, ius de suo sibi perfundis. reexinanies in eundem caccabum, amulo obliges. ius perfundis et inferes. idem facies et in psittato.

“Sauce for flamingo: pluck, wash and dress the flamingo and put in a pan; add water, salt, dill, and a little vinegar. Halfway through the cooking, bind up a bundle of leek and coriander to cook with it. Near the end of the cooking, add defrutum [2] for colour. Put in a mortar pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root [3], mint, rue; pound. Pour on vinegar, add caroenum [4], pour on some of the cooking liquor. Pour back into the same pan, thicken with starch. Pour the sauce over the bird and serve. You also make the same sauce for parrot.”

(Grocock & Grainger, 2006, 228 & 229)

In his Natural History (Latin: Naturalis Historia), Pliny the Elder attributes the vogue for eating flamingo tongue to the aforementioned Apicius. Considered a special delicacy, to kill the bird just for its tongue was a demonstration of truly conspicuous consumption (Dalby, 2003, 147). Flamingo tongues are also mentioned by Suetonius [5] as one of the ingredients, alongside pike livers, pheasant brains, peacock brains and lamprey milt, in a dish dedicated and named “The Shield of Minerva the Protectoress” by the Emperor Vitellius (reigned 19 April – 20 December AD 69). Again, it is the lavish nature of such a dish that should be stressed, not that it was widely eaten. As for stork, the meat of this large migratory marsh bird was only “briefly and undeservedly fashionable in early imperial Rome” (Dalby, 2003, 312). The implications are twofold: storks being eaten only appear in the historical record for a short time and only in Rome. To extrapolate that storks were popularly and widely eaten by Romans across the Empire, wealthy or otherwise, is stretching the known facts too far.

As for “roast parrot”, presumably these birds would have been of the African Grey variety native to equatorial Africa ranging from Kenya to the eastern part of the Ivory Coast. Given how far south their habitat is from Roman territory, these birds can only have been imported into the Empire as an expensive luxury through its North African provinces. Interestingly, the venerable Apicius does not suggest a recipe for parrot, and the only reference to Romans eating them must be assumed from the brief, oblique mention that flamingos and parrots can share the same sauce (see above).

Like the oft quoted “Romans ate dormice”, evidence for the widespread consumption of flamingos, storks or parrots is thin at best. Unqualified statements that seemingly imply “all Romans ate” such creatures are really intended to disgust modern sensibilities, be sensationalist to attract attention, and are plain misleading.

If you are, therefore, interested in discovering the sorts of food ordinary Romans routinely ate, then the following links may be of interest: “What did the Romans ever do for us: Roman Food?”, “Food History: A Roman soldier’s diet” and “Roman Fast Food”. We even have a select few recipes from Apicius for readers to recreate in “Fast Food or Dinner Party?”. If you would like more information or further Roman recipes, then do please get in touch. Bon appétit!

References:

Dalby, A. (2003), “Food in the Ancient World from A to Z”, London: Routledge.

Grocock, C. & Grainger, S. (2006), “Apicius”, Totnes: Prospect Books.

Suetonius, “The Twelve Caesars: Vitellius”, London: Penguin Classics (2007), p. 270.

Widger, D. (trans.) (2004), “The Satyricon, Vol. 2 (The Dinner of Trimalchio) by Petronius Arbiter”, Project Gutenberg EBook #5219, Available online (accessed 28 September 2024).

Endnotes:

1. The nouveau-riche host, Trimalchio. is an arrogant former slave who has become quite wealthy as a wine merchant. Essentially, the character is everything a respectable Roman should not aspire to be.

2. Defrutum is a reduction of must in ancient Roman cuisine, made by boiling down grape juice or must in large kettles until reduced to half of the original volume. Defrutum helped preserve and sweeten wine but was also added to fruit and meat dishes as a sweetening and souring agent. It was also given to food animals such as ducks and suckling pigs to improve the taste of their flesh.

3. Laser root (also known as laserwort or Silphium; Ancient Greek: σίλφιον, sílphion) is an unidentified plant used in classical antiquity as a culinary seasoning, a perfume, aphrodisiac, and medicine.

4. As for defrutum, but the grape juice or must for Caroenum was reduced to two-thirds of its original volume.

5. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (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 Twelve Caesars, a set of biographies of 12 successive Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian.