Still-Life Paintings Of Food, from Herculaneum. According to Vitruvms, such paintings were called xenia ('guest-gifts') after the gifts of poultry, eggs,
vegetables, fruit, and the like, provided by hosts for their guests. One panel shows a hare and a plucked game-bird; the other a brace of partridges
and a pair of eels.
If an owner could not afford silverware, the next-best thing was bronze or glass. Both these materials were in much wider use in the home than is
generally realized, since the process of recycling has militated against the survival of specimens in domestic contexts. The excavations at Pompeii and
Herculaneum have again done much to set the record straight; among the finds are numerous graceful bronze jugs and wine-jars with applique reliefs
at the base of the handles, and a rich, but barely known, series of glass vessels of all types: bottles, phials, cups, beakers, plates, jugs and the like,
translucent or coloured, blown or cast, plain or decorated. Deluxe items of glassware are the so-called 'cameo-glass' vessels, of which the most famous
are the Blue Vase from Pompeii and the mysterious Portland Vase, decorated with figures in white relief on a blue-black ground. During the second,
third, and fourth centuries the use of glass became more widespread, largely replacing bronzeware (the snobbish Trimalchio makes excuses for using
glassware rather than antique Corinthian bronze), and the later imperial period saw the production of further expensive lines, such as various kinds of
figured cut glass and the cage-cups with openwork decoration manufactured probably in Italy and the Rhineland.