Two Liturgical Traditions

Origin and History to Modern Times

Paul F. Bradshaw, Lawrence A. Hoffman, Paul F. Bradshaw, Lawrence A. Hoffman

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780268159139
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Passover and Easter constitute for Jews and Christians respectively the most important festivals of the year. Although sharing a common root, the feasts have developed in quite distinct ways in the two traditions, in part independently of one another and in part in reaction against the other. Following the pattern set in earlier volumes in this series, these two volumes bring together a group of distinguished Jewish and Christian scholars to explore the history of the two celebrations, paying particular attention to similarities and connections between them as well as to differences and contrasts. They not only present a convenient summary of current historical thought but also open up new perspectives on the evolution of these annual observances.

Volume 5 in the series focuses especially on the origins and early development of the feasts and on the way that established practices have changed in recent years. Volume 6, also in the series, focuses on the contexts in which they occur—the periods of preparation for the feasts in the respective calendars and their connection to Shavuot/Pentecost—as well as to their traditional expression in art and music. At the same time, the essays raise some fundamental questions about the future. Have modern human beings so lost the sense of sacred time in their lives, for instance, that these great feasts can never again be what they once were for former generations of believers? And what about recent attempts by some Christians to enter into their heritage by celebrating a Jewish Seder as part of their annual Holy Week and Easter services?

Specialists and general readers alike will find much to interest and challenge them within these two additions to what has become a highly regarded series in the world of liturgical scholarship.

PART 1

Origins in Antiquity

Meal Customs in the Greco-Roman World

BLAKE LEYERLE

There has been a proliferation of studies on the Greco-Roman background of Jewish and early Christian festive meals since Gordon J. Bahr wrote his influential article, “The Seder of Passover and the Eucharistic Words.”¹ Many aspects of contemporary Greco-Roman dining practices, however, remain frustratingly obscure due to the nature of our sources, which are not only fragmentary and elitist but cover a very wide geographical and temporal range. Much of our most detailed data is further complicated by its location in satirical sketches in which exaggeration plays an essential role.² We must therefore struggle against a desire to neaten the rough edges of our knowledge and fabricate a picture more complete than accurate. Salient differences separate not only the social classes but also those living in the eastern from those in the western part of the Roman Empire. The considerable time span covered by our disparate sources must also be borne in mind. True, the deeply conservative nature of meal habits³ sometimes justifies the use of data from earlier or later centuries to fill in lacunae in the intervening period—in our case, the first century B.C.E. and C.E.—but as Bahr himself remarked, a casual disregard for date remains a deficiency in many works on this subject. Our focus on the main meal of the day⁴ also bids us be alert to the ways in which family dinners overlap with communal banquets and secular meals merge with sacred ones. For as Ramsay MacMullen has reminded us, in this period there existed no formal social life that was entirely secular, except among the very wealthy.⁵

Despite such necessary cautions, however, there is much we can know about Greco-Roman meal customs. Let us then ready the room, set the table, and watch who comes and how they behave.

Dining Facilities

Festive meals usually took place late in the day, three to four o’clock being perhaps the most usual time.⁶ Typical dining rooms were furnished with an uneven number of stone or wooden couches made comfortable by cushions and draperies. Our literary sources speak most often of three couches, which in turn give the dining room its technical name of the triclinium, or “three-couch-room.” Dining rooms, however, could in fact be of any size. The layout of eastern dining rooms shows a preference for rooms of seven or eleven couches, each of which was equipped with its own small table.⁷ These rooms are therefore easily recognizable by their slightly off-center door, designed to accommodate the length of a couch on one side and the foot of a couch on the other. In the Roman world, the couches tended to be arranged around three sides of a central table; the one side left open facilitated table service as well as an unobstructed view of the after-supper entertainment. Each of these couches could hold up to three diners in comfort. It was one of Cicero’s accusations against Piso that at his dinner parties he packed in his guests five to a couch, but sprawled in solitary splendor on his own couch.⁸ Depending upon the configuration of individual dining rooms and the number of guests invited, these patterns varied; for example, when the guests were many, couches tended to be clustered into sub-groupings to encourage conversation.⁹

At festive meals, men reclined to eat.¹⁰ Lying parallel to the table upon which the food rested, the diner propped himself on his left elbow, leaving his right hand free to convey food and drink.¹¹ One end of the couch was raised for support, but if there was more than one diner to a couch, the others had to make do with cushions. At ordinary meals, however, Athenaeus (fl. c. 200 C.E.) suggests that men customarily ate in a seated position—as they would in taverns or other informal circumstances.¹² The great majority of people always ate in a seated position; reclining was a sign of elite dining.¹³ At certain ritual or political meals, therefore, men ate seated on simple chairs in order to demonstrate their proletarian sympathies.¹⁴ If women, children, and other inferior persons were present at festive meals, they would sit on the end of the men’s couches, or on chairs or low benches.¹⁵ In the Greek East, Plutarch (46–120 C.E.) alone mentions women lying down to eat (and that only once),¹⁶ but in Imperial Rome, high-status women customarily reclined with the men. It was a habit that shocked the Greek world.¹⁷

These differences in posture reflect a fundamental tension within festive meals. While celebrating friendliness and commonality, they also served as public proclamations of status.¹⁸ Not only was reclining itself a sign of social superiority,¹⁹ but the couches themselves, especially in the West, were carefully ranked so that one could tell at a glance who was the most honored guest—and who the least.²⁰ The most honorable couch was the first to the right upon entering the door, and the host was easy to spot on the last couch to the left of the doorway; if he was joined by others, he was the one in the best position on that lowest couch. By tradition cherishing the ideal of equality, the Greeks resisted such sharp gradations at table. In Plato’s Symposium (early fourth century B.C.E.), guests sit according to friendliness rather than honor, and Plutarch, at the end of the first century of our era, raises the question of whether a host should seat his guests at all, or simply allow them to seat themselves.²¹ The fact that these sources discuss this issue suggests, of course, that precedence in seating was routinely observed. Dinner parties in the East, however, tended to be more homogeneous. Perhaps precedence was less at issue precisely because the gatherings were of the same sex, family, class, city, or age groups.²² There was, nevertheless, always the question of where to sit, and upon examination we discover that their concept of equality in these matters was less absolute than our own. Philo (30 B.C.E.–45 C.E.), for example, praises the “equality” presiding over the meals of the Egyptian Therapeutae, an ascetic Jewish group in the first century of our era. As evidence, he points to the presence of women reclining at table and the absence of slaves. To our eyes, however, such equality is compromised, if not altogether abrogated, by the separation of the women’s couches from the men’s, and the rigorous ranking of both sets of couches according to seniority.²³

Provisions for dining outside, in gardens or vineyards, was a common feature in luxurious private houses.²⁴ These couches might be permanent fixtures of stone, or made of wood and moveable. Such garden triclinia of various sizes were also available for hire in inns and taverns. Similar public facilities were also commonly found in temple complexes around the Mediterranean basin.²⁵ Plutarch makes reference to the custom of holding private parties at a shrine, as does Paul in his letter to the Corinthian Christians (c. 54 C.E.).²⁶ Archaeological excavations at Corinth have revealed three public dining rooms dating to the Hellenistic period (c. 323–31 B.C.E.). Cheery with red painted walls, they were furnished with eleven couches which were repainted many times in red and yellow, testifying to their regular use throughout the Roman period (c. 31 B.C.E.–476 C.E.).²⁷ Aelius Aristides, an educated man of the second century of our era, spent long sojourns at many of the great healing shrines. From him we know the meaning implicit in this architectural feature: at meals held in temple dining rooms, the god was considered to be the party’s true host.²⁸ Dinners honoring a particular god, however, need not be held at that god’s temple. For example, one papyrus invitation informs its recipients that “Dionysius asks you to dine on the twenty-first at the couch of Helios, Great Sarapis, at the ninth hour, in the house of his father.” Such flexibility of locale, as Ramsay MacMullen suggests, probably helped to ease the crush of would-be diners on prominent feast days.²⁹

By the high empire (second to third centuries C.E.), couches of stone had become rare. We must surmise the presence and layout of these dining rooms from mosaic flooring and the cuttings made in it to secure the couches made of wood or other, often precious, materials that have not survived. Mosaics can also suggest the arrangement of couches; many feature scenes oriented in several directions, presumably so that the diners, no matter what the angle of their seat, could all contemplate something pleasing.³⁰ Two mosaic patterns dominate. One is a simple U pattern, in which a central area is flanked on three sides by a continuous mosaic pattern. The other combines this arrangement with an inset T pattern, wherein the central area is extended over either side of the open legs of the U, providing more ample space for entertainment and table service. Excavations of houses in Pompeii, Africa, and Antioch attest the popularity of this U + T pattern across the Roman Empire.³¹

In our period, the trend was towards largeness. Once the ideal party was no longer limited to seven, nine, or eleven guests, the size and fittings of dining rooms were set free to advertise the economic resources of the host. In Roman North Africa, excavations have revealed a huge dining room of 13.2 meters long and 10.3 meters wide.³² Such a space could accommodate three to four times the number of guests recommended by earlier writers. With this increase in size, the method of serving also shifted. Even in the Roman world, food and drink were now set before the diners on individual tables or on low ledges running along the front of the couches. Recently, Pauline Donceel-Voûte has advanced the hypothesis that the room filled with benches and small tables, excavated at Qumran and previously thought to be a library or scriptorium, may in fact have been a large communal dining room similar to the one discovered in North Africa.³³

In addition to the typical triclinia layout, literary and figurative sources confirm a different arrangement, namely, the use of a large semi-circular couch, or stibadium, set before a round or D-shaped table.³⁴ Divided into wedge-shaped segments, these couches could comfortably hold five to nine guests, with the usual number being seven. Rooms built for stibadium dining included an apse into which the couch would fit while still leaving plenty of room for table service and entertainment. Given this distinctive shape, many of these dining rooms have been mistakenly identified as Christian worship spaces; once the perishable couch has disappeared, the remains resemble a small stone altar dividing an open rectangular space, often with attractive mosaic flooring, from an apsidal recess or chamber.³⁵ This was, however, a common arrangement for secular dining rooms. Martial twice refers to it, as does the younger Pliny (both writing at the end of the first century C.E.).³⁶ While a stibadium couch could not hold as many guests as the large triclinia looked at above, wealthy patrons who wanted to host extensive parties of this design could construct dining rooms with more than one apse; three were not uncommon (the tri-conch). The largest excavated hall of this design has seven apses and could probably accommodate up to fifty guests.³⁷

The stibadium couch may have originated from arrangements for informal outdoor dining. Early figural representations of picnic meals show cushions arranged in this same semicircular pattern.³⁸ The attraction of the stibadia design may have lain in precisely this connotation of a relaxed setting in which precedence in seating would not be observed. The semi-circular couch, however, soon developed its own hierarchy of seating. Initially, the middle position was the most honorable, but by the late empire (fourth-fifth century C.E.) the guest of honor could be seen reclining in the right-hand corner facing the host.³⁹

Dishes

The typical Greco-Roman “food event,” to borrow Mary Douglas’s terminology, had three parts: the hors d’oeuvres, the main course, and the dessert.⁴⁰ Written-out menus were known in ancient Greece and Rome, but it was more common for the host or his appointed slave to introduce the different dishes, announcing their ingredients, mode of preparation, and any unusual attractions.⁴¹ Athenaeus gives us the most detailed information on the types of food that might be served—so detailed, in fact, that only a selection can be given here. Hors d’oeuvres were usually served at table.⁴² They might include olives, eggs, a variety of salad-stuffs like celery, herbs, and l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introductory Overviews
• Part 1 Origins in Antiquity
• Part 2 Medieval Developments
• Part 3 Modern Transformations
• Contributors
• Index