The Omaha-Lincoln Society of the Archaeological Institute of America
(AIA), in partnership with the Department of Fine & Performing Arts
at Creighton University and Joslyn Art Museum, continues its exceptional
programming with another free public lecture.
"From Dinner Theater to Domestic Church: Transforming the Triclinium in Late Antique Antioch” presented by Dr. Dana Robinson, Creighton University
In the late fourth century CE, Christianity was going mainstream in the Roman Empire. Bishops and preachers across the Mediterranean became increasingly concerned with how Christian faith ought to influence the daily lives of their congregations and how it could re-shape the urban environment in which many of them lived. One renowned preacher in Antioch, John Chrysostom, taught that the ordinary Christian household could become a “little church” – if the appropriate practices were observed. These practices included prayer, Bible reading, charitable giving, and Lenten fasting.
But John also focuses a surprising amount of attention on what wealthy Christians do in their dining rooms. The late Roman dining room is a location that has a great deal in common with the Roman theater. Both are venues for popular entertainment, social and political networking, elite displays of status and wealth. Both, according to John, are dangerous places that encourage vice – not just the obvious vices of gluttony and immoral entertainment, but the subtler vices of pride, materialism, and social climbing that he believes to lie at the heart of Roman civic ideals.
We are able to read these sermons in their material context, thanks to the wealth of archaeological evidence from upper-class houses in late antique Antioch. The layout of a triclinium (the three-sided dining room typical of Roman antiquity) is inherently theatrical. It promotes social hierarchies among the guests. It directs their view into adjoining gardens and reception rooms. Slaves and hired performers orchestrate the dining experience and entertain the diners. The elaborate mosaic floors depict scenes from mythology and popular plays, food and drink, and personified values of public generosity and private luxury. These images also function as conversation starters, encouraging diners to discuss mythological tales and educated trivia, or to reflect on popular virtues and the nature of the “good life.”
This is the material setting that John Chrysostom seeks to convert to Christianity, by changing the way his wealthy congregants viewed, used, and experienced these spaces. Rather than rejecting elite dining practices outright, John harnesses the theatricality of the Roman dining room. He offers Christian diners a new script for their dinner theater, in order to transform performances of vice into performances of virtue. In so doing, he transforms the triclinium into the active center of the domestic church.
Image Credit: Roman, Mosaic pavement: drinking contest of Herakles and Dionysos, early 3rd century CE, Stone and glass 526.0 x 527.0 cm (207 1/16 x 207 1/2 in.) figural scene: 229.2 x 295.5 cm (90 1/4 x 116 5/16 in.), Gift of the Committee for the Excavation of Antioch to Princeton University, y1965-216
DANA ROBINSON is an ancient historian whose research explores the religion of everyday life in the Roman empire. Her first book project, Setting a Christian Table: Food, Virtue, and Holy Places in Late Antiquity, uses early Christian sermons, social practices, and material culture to show that the lay Christian experience of late antiquity was fundamentally shaped by creative re-use of Greco-Roman food culture. She has an MA in Classics and a PhD in Early Christian studies from The Catholic University of America. She teaches for the Honors Program at Creighton University.
Founded in 1879, the
Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) was chartered by the United States Congress in 1906, in recognition of its role in the development and passage of the Antiquities Act, which Theodore Roosevelt signed into law that year. Today, the AIA remains committed to preserving the world's archaeological resources and cultural heritage for the benefit of people in the present and in the future. The Lincoln-Omaha Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, chartered in 1995, provides the residents of Nebraska and western Iowa opportunities to attend lectures by prominent international, national, and local archaeologists.