Recreating an Ancient Roman Dinner of Death

03.12.2024 - 22:53 / atlasobscura.com

It’s the year 89. A group of Roman senators has arrived at a banquet hosted by Emperor Domitian. Instead of a warm, convivial scene of free-flowing wine and comfortable couches, they find a totally black room, from the walls to the dishes. At each of their seats stands a personalized tombstone. Boys, naked and painted black, enter “like phantoms” and dance about the room. And the food? Not only is it black as well, but the menu consists of foods typically offered to the dead.

According to the third-century historian Dio Cassius, who provides the sole account of the dinner in his Roman History, the effect was pure terror. As they tucked into their meal, their host talked “only upon topics relating to death and slaughter.” Each senator, Dio writes, “feared and trembled and was kept in constant expectation of having his throat cut the next moment.”

Ever since I first wrote about this hellish banquet in 2021, I haven’t stopped thinking about the emperor’s macabre meal. I’m not the only one obsessed with the story. Mary Beard, a Cambridge professor and the author of SPQR, considers it one of her “favourite ancient anecdotes.” Food historian Jane Levi calls it “emblematic of Domitian’s dark status as a murderous Emperor.” And Classics expert Charles Leslie Murison describes it as “a classic illustration of autocratic sadism.”

But it’s almost too perfect. While everyone seems to agree that it’s a great story, few believe it actually went down as Dio Cassius describes. That’s why I embarked on a mission to investigate the dastardly dinner, its host, its historical context, and its possible menu. What would a Roman emperor serve to scare the hell out of his guests? How might palace cooks have colored these foods with that terrifying black hue? And what can the horror show of Domitian’s dinner tell us about the fears, social mores, and dining customs of first-century Roman elites?

To answer these questions, I teamed up with culinary archaeologist Farrell Monaco. Our journey took us from culinary-themed graves and excavated offerings in the cemeteries of Timgad and Pompeii to the banquet tables of other morbid Roman hosts to the pages of ancient cookbooks. We consulted historians, pored over the diaries and letters of Roman elites, stained our fingers with cuttlefish ink, and kneaded dark orbs of bread dough.

After a few months, I sat down to my own Black Banquet. With recipes by Monaco, the menu offered a night-hued spread of ancient loaves, roasted fish, sweet stuffed dates, and more—a meal fit for a macabre-minded ruler in first-century Rome.

But before we dig in, it’s only polite to meet our host.

On the part of everybody but Domitian there was dead silence, as if they were already in the realms of the dead,