Bars and Restaurants in Ancient Rome

There were no fancy restaurants in ancient Rome. Wealthy Romans ate at home, attended by regiments of cooks and servers. The poor, by contrast, lived in apartments that usually lacked kitchens, fireplaces, or any other facilities for preparing meals. If they wanted hot food, they usually had to get it from a local bar. Just as the English words bar, tavern, and pub have similar meanings but slightly different connotations, the Latin terms taberna, popina, caupona, and thermopolium seem to have been almost, but not quite, synonymous. Some of these establishments only served food, others only wine, some had seats for customers, others only service counters, some doubled as hotels, brothels, or both. Without losing sight of those distinctions, I'll use taberna as a generic term for the places where most Romans drank their wine and ate hot meals. The majority of what we know about Roman bars comes from the excavations at Ostia, Herculaneum, and, above all, Pompeii. Pompeii had more than 160 tabernae, roughly one for every 60 inhabitants. Almost all of Pompeii's tabernae were open to the street, with heavy wooden shutters that could be closed at night. Inside was a waist-high service counter, usually L- or U-shaped. For greater visibility, the front of the counter was often veneered with marble or coated with stucco. The counter of Pompeii's most recently excavated bar was painted with scenes ranging from a nereid riding a seahorse to a fierce-looking guard dog. The counter was sometimes complemented by the Roman equivalent of a pub sign painted on a wall near the entrance. Next to the caupona of Eucinus in Pompeii, for example, was a fresco of a phoenix, apparently the name of the bar, with the caption, Equally eye-catching, at least to modern observers, were the elaborate lamps and wind chimes hung over the counter, which often featured an apotropaic phallus or two. Although some Roman bars only served food to-go, most had a seating area for customers who wanted to eat and drink on the premises. Usually, this was a small room adjacent to the service counter, provided with wooden stools and tables. A few bars had private rooms and gardens. At the Praedia of Julia Felix in Pompeii, for example, patrons could recline on masonry couches that imitated those in the triclinia of elite houses. The caupona of Eucinus had a private vineyard, complete with shady alcoves that were probably reserved for guests. Wine came to Tabernae in delivery carts wobbling with wineskins. It was stored in amphorae, which were lined along walls and stacked on racks. Servers poured wine into pitchers or cups, ideally made of bronze or glass, but often simple pottery. This wine was usually cheap, local, and weak. Bartenders were routinely accused of adding water to save money. Some establishments, however, served or claimed to serve more expensive vintages. A sign outside a Pompeii bar advertised the famous Falernian variety, available for four times the cost of ordinary wine. At another bar in Pompeii, amphorae containing wines from every part of the empire were stacked around the bar, ready to be served to discerning patrons. Earthenware containers, dolia, filled with food, were often embedded in the service counter. Although it used to be theorized that they held soups and stews, this seems unlikely, since few containers were waterproofed with pitch. At Herculaneum, vestiges of carbonized grain, chickpeas, and beans were discovered in dolia. Analysis of the most recently excavated Pompeii bar found duck, fish, goat, and pig bones in a single container, along with a few snail shells. Unless these were the remains of an extremely unorthodox dish, they should probably be identified as scraps, tossed aside by the bar staff or customers. Another dolium in the same bar contained fava beans, which the Romans sometimes used to purify spoiled wines. A fresco in Pompeii shows sausages, cheeses, and dried fruit hanging from the rafters. Cooked foods were also on the menu. A Roman poet mentions pike being grilled outside a taberna. Heated or otherwise, the average quality of bar food does not seem to have been high. One poem describes it as greasy. Another alludes casually to the cockroaches that flourished around service counters. Insalubrious though they may have been, Rome's bars seldom lacked customers. Some were open all night. A late antique urban prefect tried in vain to prohibit the sale of wine before mid-morning. At any time of day, bars were places to gather, talk, and relax over a cup of wine. A comic strip-like fresco in Pompeii's Caupona of Salvius captures the atmosphere. Two men throw dice and banter with a serving maid. Another pair, playing a game similar to backgammon, argue over the score. In the final panel, the squabbling players are thrown out by the bartender. Women who worked in bars were widely regarded as promiscuous. Some bars functioned as brothels. In an inscription set up by a pair of tavern keepers, who jokingly called themselves Lucius Callidus Eroticus and Fania Voluptas, the services of a girl are tallied on a customer's bill alongside bread and wine. To judge from the graffiti describing the bedroom prowess and prices of various barmaids in Pompeii, this sort of accounting was far from exceptional. Literary descriptions of Roman bars dwell on their seediness. Juvenal described a bar in Ostia as a place where thieves and fugitive slaves drank with eunuchs and undertakers. Centuries later, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus complained that Rome's lower classes spent half their lives in bars, gambling, arguing about chariot races, and, for some reason, snorting. Some of the bars in Rome's rougher areas were genuinely dangerous. A praetor was murdered in one by his political enemies, and at least two future emperors, Nero and Lucius Verus, had their eyes blackened while slumming in Tiberii. Bars owed much of their bad reputation, however, to elite snobbery. To wealthy Romans, the brawling, boisterous bars of the commoners always seemed unsavory, immoral, and more than a little threatening. It was a criminal offense to bring the young son of a respectable gentleman into a bar. A series of emperors, convinced that Tiberii were potential hotbeds of conspiracy and unrest, limited the foods they could serve or closed them altogether. Ultimately, the bars of ancient Rome were nothing more or less than restaurants, meeting places, and refuges for the hundreds of thousands who had few other places to gather. As today, each bar was different, but many Romans would have found something familiar in the epitaph of a woman from Tiberii who had, the inscription claimed, drawn visitors from far and wide to the haven of her bar. My new book, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines, is now available as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook. You can buy your copy through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookstore. For more Told-in-Stone content, check out my channels, Told-in-Stone Footnotes, and Scenic Routes to the Past, which are linked in the description. Please consider joining other viewers in supporting Told-in-Stone on Patreon. Thanks for watching!