Roman Life

During high school, I was very active in my chapter of the National Junior Classical League. Aside from attending the weekly wednesday meetings and holding the office of Junior Consul (Vice President), I competed in several categories at annual Area, State, and National Competition.

My main category was Dramatic Interpretation (DI). DI involves memorizing a passage in Latin and then acting it out for a panel of judges (1-5 at any instance). Judging was based on accuracy of memorization, pronunciation, creativity, and others. My memory is fuzzy but I think that my C.V. includes medals at every level: Area (4 gold), State (3 gold, 1 silver), Nationals (1 gold, 1 silver).

The main point of this post, however, is that I also competed in the Roman Life category. While DI is a performance-based category, Roman Life involved extracurricular research and study and then taking a test at each level of competition. I grew to love studying about the daily lives of the Romans and still remember quite a bit. I'll take a little time to talk about meals of the Romans (or at least as much as I can from memory). I was inspired by the lecture on Roman meals/education/games we had earlier in the quarter.

Romans had three meals: ientaculum (breakfast), prandium (lunch), and cena (dinner). Ientaculum consisted of light options such as grapes, cheese, olives, and some bread. Lunch was very similar in that it was a light meal, usually eaten on the run by busy Roman men. Hungry Romans could stop by a street vendor who sold cold meats, nuts, bread, and cheese. Cena was the large meal of the Romans. It involved, for those who could afford it, hosting guests and usually lasted several hours. Eating during Cena was a social event and the Romans, when they hosted guests, would often eat to excess resulting in purges of each round of food. Some of the delicacies included peacock and a fish paste called garum. Slaves prepared and delivered the food to the sedentary romans who laid on their left arms while they ate. Slaves did not clear the tables in between Cena courses. Instead, they removed the entire table top and brought out the replacement table top already set with the next course of food on top. The term for this was secundus mesa or second table, naturally. So when the Romans had seconds, they literally had second's.

More about education and other Roman Life topics to come as well as an update on PBL 2...