The Romans knew the dangers of December overindulgence

Christmas is a time of feasting. So too was the Roman festival of Saturnalia, held in honour of the god Saturn, which took place between 17 and 23 December, when even a poor peasant might kill a pig fattened up for the occasion or, if not, hope to join the company of someone who had. Drinking and riot too were all part of the festivities. Such self-indulgence was fair – or fare – enough once a year, but throughout the year? That was what made Roman moralists reflect sadly on the corruption of that frugal and simple life which they judged to have been the key to Roman greatness.

Romans traced this decline back to their overseas victories against Carthage, Greece and Asia (2nd-1st century bc), which did indeed bring billions into Roman coffers but also, it was claimed, an unhealthy taste for art collecting, sex and exotic wines and foreign food. The millionaire philosopher Seneca, adviser to the Emperor Nero, inveighed vehemently against the medical and social effects of such indulgence. His point was that, since doctors taught that keeping a balance in the body was the key to health, excess of any sort was asking for trouble, especially if it involved consuming foods that did not seem to be somehow ‘compatible’:

‘Medicine once amounted to nothing more than a knowledge of a few plants to stop bleeding and to heal wounds. Only a hungry person could actually enjoy the sort of food available in the old days. People’s health was simple then, for a simple reason: it takes a plethora of dinner-courses to create a plethora of diseases… That is why nowadays there are as many ways to be ill as there are to live… Bring on all the courses at the same time – oysters, sea-urchins, shellfish, mullet, cook them all together and serve them up all together. The food that people vomit could not be more mixed up. The complexity of such dishes is matched by the illnesses to which they give rise: complex and diverse diseases, defying analysis and taking many forms.’

That was bad enough, but the consequences of excess alcohol were even more serious, especially for women. Here Seneca referred back to the famous Greek doctor Hippocrates (5th century bc), who ‘remarked that women never lost their hair or suffered from pain in the feet’. But since women were now rivalling men in gross drinking habits, he went on: ‘They also rival men in the ills to which men are heirs.’ Thus, he concluded in a note of mock triumph, the Romans had proved wrong the greatest doctor of them all. For ‘nowadays women too are gouty and bald!’. (Doctors were of course ignorant of the physiology of gout, but they knew from long observation what was likely to cause it.)

It is, however, hardly surprising that in the largest city of the ancient world there were plenty of people for whom high living of the sort that attracted Seneca’s wrath held little appeal. Such was Pliny the Younger (d. c. ad 113), who in his letters gives us a clear idea of what he regarded as the ideal dinner party. The food should be a mixture of sweet and savoury courses, so that the palate would not be dulled by repetition but rather stimulated by the contrast.

He admired his old friend Spurinna, now 77 but still hale and hearty, who served up simple meals on fine plates of antique silver, but without making the slightest fuss about them, and interleaved discussion at table with comedies.

That too was important: for Pliny, there should also be a variety of agreeable diversions, combining the serious with the light-hearted. In a mock-angry letter he threatened to sue a chum who rejected a simple dinner with him, at which his chum ‘would have heard a comic play, a reader or lyre-player, or all three, if I had felt generous’, instead of one with ‘oysters, sow’s innards, sea urchins and Spanish dancing girls’. Think, said Pliny, of the entertainment, laughter and learning we would have enjoyed.

Cômitâs is the delightful term with which he characterised the genial atmosphere that such occasions generated: it embodied ideas of attentiveness, graciousness, courtesy, generosity and good taste.

Felix Natale Domini!