At first glance, the burial beds and couches in many Etruscan tombs look very similar to those found in Lydia, Phrygia, and other parts of Anatolia. Closer inspection reveals striking correspondence of formal details like carved headrests while at the same time highlighting essential differences of arrangement and usage. Iconographic evidence for beds and couches in Etruscan funerary art (tomb paintings and relief cippi) also shows a distinctive Etruscan approach to covering these furnishings with textiles. While the formal similarities do indicate that Etruscan and Anatolian elites knew and used shared furniture styles, they cannot be used to support theories of migration or cultural influence from Anatolia to Etruria since most of the Etruscan examples are earlier than the Anatolian parallels. Key differences in usage further remind us that even with a shared vocabulary of form, distinct cultural dialects can persist.

Close examination of Etruscan and Anatolian depictions of dogs from the sixth century BCE reveals curious connections and a common artistic language. In fact, the context, medium, and style of dogs are so strikingly similar that these depictions merit review not just for their shared artistic styles but also customs and values. Dogs at banquets, chariot races, and hunting scenes speak to analogous aristocratic practices in two distinctly different regions. The premise for this study is not necessarily to discover who did what first, because our evidence from the ancient world is so fragmentary, but to explore how these two regions, separated by quite a distance, practiced artistic exchange. One exceptional example of a very unique dog-lead shows that technology was also shared vis-à-vis dogs. Since poetry and monuments have dominated the discourse in ancient Mediterranean studies for centuries, such topics as comparing detailed depictions of dogs can further enhance our understanding of exchange in the ancient Mediterranean.

This paper compares how ideas of power, rank, and status were communicated in Etruria and Anatolia in the Orientalizing period by the use of material items and images. By employing and exhibiting specific objects, elites used a non-verbal language to communicate with each other across frontiers in the Mediterranean area as well as to show their wealth and their sophistication in their own surroundings. Trade networks have been discovered, analyzed, and exhibited on various occasions in the last decade. However, we now have to deal with the significance of the selection, collection, and use of certain luxury items to the ostentation of accumulated wealth that are better known from the courtly societies of the Near and Middle East. The desire for possessing these items can be perceived in personal or private as well as social terms. As many of the items belong to the sphere of banqueting, it is mandatory to link the two worlds in question vis-à-vis this praxis of consumption and social events.

Nonelites made their own music and were also consumers of music performed by professionals in various settings. These included not only the private parties of the lower classes but public banquets at festivals and recreation in drink shops and the like, as well as the banquets held by voluntary associations to which nonelites belonged. The recreations of the lower classes took on larger public and political significance at festivals and their associated public banquets. Wealthy people and rulers used public entertainments to curry favor with the public and promote a public image of themselves. Rulers did the same. These public entertainments included banquets in theaters and amphitheaters where food and wine were served, sometimes in a fashion that amounted to a kind of mass dinner theater. This custom began with snacks and wine being provided to theatergoers in fifth-century Athens and seems to have mushroomed into something grander by the late Hellenistic era. The style was adopted by certain emperors, and one imperial format was a public banquet held in an arena where musical entertainments were provided and the gladiatorial matches and beast fights and hunts were also accompanied by music.

This chapter focuses on dining as a key social ritual in which emperors and courtiers articulated and negotiated relationships among themselves. It also includes a briefer discussion of hunting and related activities as contexts for such negotiations, attested for at least a few emperors. The chapter discusses where imperial banquets (convivia) were staged, which kinds of courtiers were present, and how participants interacted. Conviviality was a central mode of communication among emperors and their courtiers. Our sources offer many moralizing accounts about convivial practices that reveal participants’ attempts to control one another, to enhance their own status, and to seek advantage relative to other participants. Imperial hunting in the wild is attested for some emperors (especially Hadrian), and some others hunted in the arena. Representations of imperial hunting are ideologically charged, assuming that ‘the hunt is the emperor’, just as the sources assume that ‘the dinner is the emperor’.

The texts and images in this chapter illustrate events involving the Roman imperial court that can be regarded as rituals. These included regular occurrences that took place on a daily or near-daily basis, such as the salutatio, dinners, and religious sacrifices. They also included special occasions like festivals, diplomatic receptions, lavish banquets, and the acclamation of a new emperor. Some of these events occurred in court spaces, and involved a wide cross-section of the court community. These ceremonies functioned as displays of consensus among members of the court community, as their actions demonstrated shared values and expectations. Others did not consistently take place in court spaces, but merit inclusion here because they involved key members of the court community. The sources show how the rules and expectations of these rituals were subject to modification both by emperors and courtiers, who experimented with new types of address, greeting, and physical contact.

Chapter 3 considers the representation of the food gift in Shakespeare’s Pericles and Timon of Athens, and Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat. It argues that attention to hunger enables recognition of the role played by use value in gift exchange and places this in the context of the declining significance of traditions of hospitality in the period. It considers the recurrence of figures such as the discharged soldier and suggests that the soldier’s hunger constitutes a key means by which contemporary texts commented on the policies of pacifism carried out by monarchs such as James I. It emphasises the nostalgic dimension to representations of hospitality, but argues that this nostalgia frequently marks the system itself as untenable. It demonstrates that these plays manifest anxiety not simply at the scarcity and want which was produced by the nascent capitalist mode of production, but also at the problems of plenty and excess.

Cantare ad lyram reached the summit of its popularity in Rome during ca. 1490–1530. Like the humanist-trained scholars, artists, and clerics who came to Rome from elsewhere, the practice of cantare ad lyram was compelled to adapt to the unique patronage environment of the city, which was distinguished by its emphasis on Latin language, a clerical environment quite unlike the secular world of the courts, and a robust and varied patronage structure. The first part of this chapter is devoted to Latin Rome and focused on the brothers Raffaele and Aurelio Brandolini (including Raffaele’s De musica et poetica, a humanist defense of cantare ad lyram), and on the remarkable Roman banqueting scene that was the city’s primary venue for the elite poetic performances advocated and practiced by the Brandolinis. The second section on vernacular Rome seeks to place the extraordinary singer-poet Serafino Aquilano in the context of the language debates associated with Paolo Cortesi’s Roman Academy, in part through fresh readings of Vincenzo Calmeta’s biography of Serafino, and Angelo Collocci’s Apologia in defense of Serafino’s poetry. The chapter closes with a short study of Raphael’s Parnassus with a view to understanding its relationship to contemporary Roman performance practice of cantare ad lyram.