I'll have what he's having

A peculiar vice of the Imperial Roman rich was to invite their poorer supporters to dinner, put on a sumptuous spread for themselves and feed scraps and gruel to their 'guests'.

Juvenal describes a humiliating party in his Fifth Satire at which the host drinks the "finest wine of the Republican aristocracy" while the guests are given muck you wouldn't even use to cleanse a wound; at which the top table dines on lobster "whose very tail looks down haughtily at the tables below"; river fish for one, sewer fish for the rest; truffles for Himself, dodgy mushrooms for every other self. And so on.

I read this passage again on the plane back from Capetown. I had not thought about it for a long while, not since a strange lunch with a prominent British businessman about a decade or so ago.

There were only two of us in his private dining room that day. So it was rather obvious that my host had succulent fish  ("one sent from Corsica or the Tauromenian cliffs", to borrow Juvenal's words) and that I had a plate of blotchy meat and cabbage ("with added whiff of oil lamp", or so it then seemed to me). He sipped fine white burgundy; I had my own vinaigrette claret.

Being of  a charitable nature, I assumed that my host was on some special healthy diet that he did not wish to inflict on anyone else. Yet even his dessert apple had a smell "that was a meal in itself". While my own tarte, though doubtless from the top range of the office canteen, owed rather less to the legend of "the Phaeacians or Hesperides".

It was hard honestly to see what advantage my host could have seen in these tactics of the nouveau riche Romans towards their desperate (and, in Juvenal's mind, almost equally despicable) groups of clients. His personal platefulls probably did give him a certain superiority over his visiting journalist. But they hardly helped his cause - unless establishing superiority over a 'reptile from the print' was his prime aim.


The best modern fictional account of this phenomenon (as far as I can think of now) comes in Graham Greene's 1980 novel Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party.

Dr Fischer is a toothpaste billionaire whose fawning friends ("the toads") have to endure dishes of salt porridge while the host has caviar. The guests accept their humiliation in order to get the generous 'goody bag' with which they can go home - and Greene has various portentous points to make about this, not all of them very clear, in what is far from his finest work.

Greene must have known his Juvenal.

Did my host of all those years ago know his Fifth Satire too?

I didn't think so then?

Now I am not so sure.

Comments

[Dion Per Sona]

It's just as difficult to sit through the opposite ordeal, where one is hampered by dietary constraints and unwilling to impose these on guests. And what should a guest suppose when he notices his host eating boiled spuds and string beans while truffled goodies and tiramisù are set in front of him?

[peter stothard]

Oliver Nicholson cites an even more egregious example of dining discrimination than Juvenal's. Pliny is warning a friend against the practice of offering three classes of food and wine, one for the master, one for lesser guests and one for former slaves who have found their way to his table. 'Nothing is more to be shunned than this new association of extravagance and meanness', he writes, 'vices which are bad enough when single and separate, but worse when found together'.
'Worse' indeed in rather interesting ways. Yes, I perhaps should have sent this letter to my host. I doubt he would have seen the point.

[pat gough]

Had it been me I would have tipped the blotchy meat and cabbage over my host and left.

[andy botham]

I find it hard to believe anyone would treat Sir Peter with such bad manners. Should he grace my home my wife, no mean hostess, would serve Sir Peter with the finest food and drink! It goes to show the Romans did not know everything.

[Oliver Nicholson]

Perhaps you should have sent your host a xerox of Pliny ep. II,6" "nihil magis est vitandum quam istam luxuriae et sordium novam societatem" OPN