Rob Goodman: Gluttony, Roman Style

Rob Goodman, a former congressional speechwriter, is co-author of Rome's Last Citizen, a book on Cato the Younger and the Roman Republic, to be published in 2012 by Thomas Dunne Books.

...For those of us left numb by the Internet, it might help to consider the ways in which gorging on information parallels (and has, for many of us, replaced) gorging on sensual pleasures. And if we want to take that comparison seriously, there is no better guide than the pioneering Roman novelist of decadence, Gaius Petronius Arbiter. Few have ever described—or lived—the attractions and exhaustions of overindulgence more vividly.

In the court of the Emperor Nero—his friend, partner in excess, and the man ultimately responsible for his death—Petronius was employed as the official "arbiter of elegance." In short, he was a style consultant to the Roman elite. The historian Tacitus describes him as an expert "in the science of pleasure." Unmatched in his day as a trendsetter, Petronius is best known in ours as the probable author of one of the earliest surviving novels, the Satyricon. And out of this picaresque story, which has come down to us in fragments, the most outrageous figure by far is Trimalchio: the nouveau-riche ex-slave whose wildly gluttonous banquet forms the Satyricon's centerpiece. "Trimalchio's Feast" became such a byword for decadence that F. Scott Fitzgerald very nearly gave The Great Gatsby a different title: "Trimalchio in West Egg."

Trimalchio—if only he would stop shooting dice, or loudly discussing his constipation problem—could be a master entertainer. He is a man of abundant means and an almost-pitiful eagerness to please, but his party turns into a feast of steadily diminishing returns. Good food isn't enough for Trimalchio's table: Nothing can be served if it isn't in disguise. Visual jokes were a fashion among Roman chefs, but in Trimalchio's household they are taken to absurd heights: olives disguised as rocks; sausages "roasting" over pomegranate seeds disguised as coals; pastry eggs hiding roast songbirds; a pig prestuffed with sausages; fruit filled with saffron perfume; more pastry birds, and fruit stuck with thorns to resemble sea-urchins; goose, fish, and game all made out of a pig; oysters in the water pitchers; a whole roast boar surrounded by suckling sweetmeat "piglets," stuffed with live birds, complete with droppings that turn out to be fresh dates. The boar is also wearing a hat....