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It might sound glamorous but eating out was actually a necessity for many ordinary Romans because they usually didn’t have the facilities to prepare and cook food or were too busy to make meals at home. New discoveries in Pompeii show that they had a wide range of choices – from takeaway food from bar counters facing on to the street, to private dining rooms mimicking the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The rich ate in!

The rich and the famous, meanwhile, ate in! Even if restaurants mimicked the reclined posture that the Roman elite would adopt to eat, the elite themselves – despite rumours of Emperor Claudius frequenting bars in Rome in his youth and Nero sneaking out of his palace to visit them – regarded eating out as low class.

Allison Emmerson of the American Academy in Rome says that those Romans making a night of it and going out to eat were really doing what some of us do today. “If we go to a very fancy restaurant,” she says, “we're dining like the British upper classes of the 19th century, where people are serving us, and serving us multiple courses.”

Because of the class divide, our concept of Roman bar culture is skewed, as the historical accounts were mostly written by members of the elite. Claire Holleran, professor of Classics and Ancient History at Exeter University cites writers such as Horace, Juvenal and Martial giving the impression of Roman bars as “greasy, dark and gloomy” and also as “hot, dirty places”.

Calidius and Fannia's stone

Claire adds that the archaeological evidence suggests there is truth in some of these assessments; however, because a lot of the food cooked in the bars was greasy (and smoky, when cooked), pork products such as sausages, meatballs, ham and tripe were common. The physician and philosopher Galen even suggested some innkeepers served human flesh because it was so similar to pork!

The bars would not pass a hygiene test today

While there was plenty of repeat custom, the bars were sometimes rudimentary in their operation. It wasn’t uncommon for the kitchens to be next to the latrines for ease of waste disposal.

Meanwhile, some of the bar food – such as snails, fish, broad beans and, yes, pork – was served in unglazed terracotta pots and certainly had the potential to be unhygienic!

They served a wide range of foods

Analysis of fecal remains reveals that other foodstuffs served in Roman bars include nuts, fruit and mutton. “A complete diet,” as Allison describes it.

The bars certainly had access to a lot of fresh products, with local bakeries and wineries being used. For some items, bars would go the extra mile – for example to import peppercorns, a sign that, as Allison says, “people cared about the flavour.”

They were boisterous places

As the publican couple named Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas suggest, bars could be boisterous places, and somewhat bawdy too.

Calidius and Fannia are immortalised on a “tombstone” or possible pub advert that jokes about services offered in their bar in Isernia including prostitution. Meanwhile in Pompeii, where remains give us the best idea of what the bars looked like, there are frescoes depicting various scenes including patrons playing board games, accusing each other of cheating and another age-old one of a barman telling two men that if they want to fight they can go outside!

The stone tablet for Calidius and Fannia’s tavern depicts a traveller settling up his bill and being told that the wine, bread and relish he has consumed costs a few pence, “then there’s the girl, she costs eight pence. Oh, and then there's hay for the mule that cost tuppence.” Then the customer says, “that damn mule, you’ll be the ruin of me!”

The comic scene suggests a link between hostelries and prostitution, one that Allison believes is possible although she warns that “it's all linked together under that category of things that low status people do, and so that should make us at least a little bit suspicious.”

Listen to A Bag of Snails and a Glass of Wine: Mary Beard joins Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas for a Roman bar crawl.