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There is an abundance ‘to eat’ in the pages of Roman literature, where lavish and exotic dishes crowd the tables at banquets that flatter and fortify indulgent and insatiable appetites in unrestrained festivals of eating and drinking. As Emily Gowers explains, ‘Imperium had turned Rome into the world's emporium: its alimentary choices are presented as almost infinite, from the turnips of Romulus to the larks' tongues of Elagabalus’. Nevertheless, in Roman society, where the food a person ate (its quality, quantity, and presentation) reflected their station in life and where large numbers of the population struggled at subsistence levels, these literary banquets are neither reliable, nor even factual, accounts of a Roman meal. In fact, food or events of consumption appear to have occupied an ambivalent, even undistinguished, place in Roman literature, which typically saw their inclusion in comedy, satire, epigram, and the epistle but not the serious genres of epic, tragedy, elegy, or lyric. Generic considerations could possibly therefore influence an author's inclusion of culinary description in ancient literature, although food details did not merely satisfy these expectations and were typically shaped by the attitudes, social values, or artistic insights of an individual author.
