Garden Dining Area In The House Of The Ephebe At Pompeii (between AD 62 and 79). The masonry couches formed a []-shaped triclinium, on which
diners reclined round a low central table, shaded by a vine-covered pergola. In the background water played from a small fountain shrine; in the
foreground a cylindrical pedestal supported the bronze statue of a youth who held candelabra to light the evening banquets.
The delights of more modest dinner-tables are celebrated by the succulent fruits, game-birds, and sea foods represented in Pompeian still-life
paintings. These xenia ('guest-gifts'), named, according to Vitruvius, after the provisions Greek hosts supplied to visitors on self-catering holidays, call
to mind menus described by Martial and Juvenal. Martial, for instance, offers a dinner in which the hors d'oeuvres are listed as mallows, lettuces,
leeks, mint, rocket, sliced eggs and anchovies, and sows' udders in tunny sauce; the main course was a kid and cutlets with haricot beans and tender
green-sprouts, with the addition of a chicken and the residue of a ham which had already served three suppers; and the dessert consisted of ripe fruit
and a vintage Nomentan wine. Wine was, of course, the essential concomitant of good eating, and no meal was complete without a jar of a fine
vintage-preferably the 'immortal Falernian', the Chateau Lafite of Roman Italy.
To serve a sumptuous repast the host needed the best silver and tableware. Discoveries of silver hoards hidden by their owners in Pompeii and nearby
Boscoreale at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius reveal both the quality of the plate in domestic use during the early imperial period and also the zeal
with which it was prized and protected. The superb beakers, cups, bowls, and dishes decorated with repousse reliefs of plant arabesques or
mythological scenes, together with the simpler, but still elegant, spoons and ladles, lend significance to Petronius' gibes at the extravagance and
tastelessness of his millionaire freedman Tri-malchio, who used a chamber-pot of silver and gave orders for a silver dish which had been dropped
during his banquet to be swept away like broken pottery. The quality of silverware was maintained during the later Empire. It is to this period that we
must ascribe such masterpieces as the octagonal dish from Kaiseraugst in Switzerland, adorned with scenes from the life of Achilles.