What Did the Romans Eat?
A look at the three courses of the Roman cena, common foods like bread, olive oil, garum, dormice and peacock, and the differences between rich and poor at the table.
The Romans ate a Mediterranean diet built around grain, olive oil, and wine, with the evening meal — the cena — serving as the main social and culinary event of the day. A formal cena was divided into three sequential courses: the gustatio (a light appetizer of olives, eggs, or shellfish), the prima mensa (the substantial main course of meat, fish, or fowl), and the secunda mensa (dessert of fruit, nuts, cheese, and sweet cakes). The rhythm of these courses shaped Roman hospitality, politics, and even literary satire, with hosts competing to impress guests at dinner parties called convivia.
The Staples of the Roman Table
For the urban plebeian and the legionary alike, the foundation of the daily diet was bread (panis), baked in communal ovens from wheat imported in vast quantities from Egypt, North Africa, and Gaul. A typical adult consumed roughly one kilogram of grain a day, much of it distributed free or at subsidized prices through the grain dole (annona), formalized under Augustus and reaching as many as 200,000 recipients in the time of the emperor Trajan. Alongside bread, Romans consumed olive oil in nearly every dish, drank wine cut with water and often seawater or honey, and seasoned their food with garum, the pungent fermented fish sauce produced in factories along the coasts of Spain, North Africa, and the Black Sea. The wider context of how these foods were prepared, served, and consumed in Roman daily life is covered in Roman society and daily life.
Rich and Poor at the Table
The gap between patrician and plebeian kitchens was enormous. A poor family in the Subura might subsist on porridge, lentils, turnips, cheese, and cheap wine, supplemented by handouts from patrons during the saturnalia and other festivals. A wealthy senator, by contrast, could feast on exotic fare recorded by the first-century gourmand Marcus Gavius Apicius in his cookbook De re coquinaria: roast peacock (often served to display wealth more than flavor), stuffed dormice (glires) raised in special terracotta jars called gliraria, boiled cuttlefish in its own ink, and flamingo tongues. The poet Juvenal complained bitterly about such excess in his Satires, and the emperor Vitellius reportedly served a single dish — the legendary census — that combined ingredients from across the empire in tribute to the gods.
Meat, Fish, and the Markets
Meat was relatively rare for ordinary Romans, who ate pork, goat, and lamb more often than beef. Pork was the most popular, appearing as sausage, ham, and the festive roast sucking pig. Fish, however, was ubiquitous among the wealthy: the poet Martial wrote smugly about the freshness of mullet from the Bay of Naples, while the statesman Cicero famously dreamed of a dinner date that turned out to be modest on fish. Fresh produce came from the bustling macellum (meat market) and the forum, where traders from across the Mediterranean sold asparagus from Italy, cherries from Roman Britain, and dates from Roman Egypt.
The Grain Dole and the Annona
The Roman state recognized early on that feeding the city of Rome was a political necessity. By the late Republic, subsidized and free grain distributions were common; under Augustus the praefectus annonae was appointed to manage the supply, and under Claudius and Septimius Severus the dole was expanded to include free olive oil. Ships of the Roman navy and merchant fleets, organized from the great port of Ostia, brought grain from Egypt in a six-day voyage from Alexandria during the summer monsoon.
Apicius and the Art of Roman Cooking
The single most important surviving source on Roman cookery is the cookbook attributed to Apicius, a first-century gourmet who allegedly poisoned himself when he calculated that his remaining fortune could only fund a modest menu. The work, compiled in its current form around the fourth century, contains nearly 500 recipes — including a celebrated honey-and-pepper sauce for dormice and a surprisingly sophisticated method for caramelizing vegetables. Roman cooks used herbs such as silphium (now extinct), lovage, rue, and coriander, as well as imported spices that grew costlier as the empire aged: pepper from India, cinnamon from Arabia, and cloves from the Spice Islands. A legionary far from home, stationed on the Roman frontiers, might receive a ration of grain, bacon, salt, and posca (sour wine) — a far cry from Apicius’s feasts, but built on the same Mediterranean foundation.