Roman Taverns: Drinking, Gambling, and the Night
The Roman tavern — the caupona or taberna — was the social space of the working poor and the urban transient, serving wine, hot food, and a place to sit to the vast majority of Rome’s population who had neither the household space for entertaining nor the social standing for the formal dinner party. It was also, in the view of the Roman elite who wrote most of the surviving literature, a place of moral danger: noisy, crowded, frequented by the wrong people, associated with cheap wine, dice games, prostitution, and the general dissolution of Roman values that the upper classes perpetually feared was eroding the foundations of society. The complaints were consistent across centuries and the taverns thrived regardless, which is usually a reliable indicator of genuine social function.
Pompeii’s archaeological record provides the most detailed picture available of what Roman taverns actually looked like and how they operated. The city has over 150 identified thermopolia — establishments serving hot food and drink — which works out to roughly one for every 125 inhabitants, a density that suggests the street food and tavern economy was not a marginal feature of Roman urban life but a central one. The typical thermopolium occupied a ground-floor shop space opening directly onto the street, with a stone counter built into the front through which L-shaped openings provided access to the terracotta storage jars — the dolia — sunk into the counter and used to hold hot or cold food and drink. The counter was the Roman equivalent of a bar top: you stood at it, were served from it, and consumed standing or seated on benches nearby. Tables existed in some establishments, particularly those with back rooms or upstairs dining areas.
The wine was the primary product and the primary profit center. Roman wine was typically diluted with water — drinking undiluted wine was associated with barbarians and with the alcoholically reckless — and flavored and preserved with additives that included honey, seawater, resins, and spices that modern palates would find unusual. The wine offered in taverns was the cheap end of the market — the dregs of better production, local stuff without the aged complexity that wealthy Romans’ private cellars contained — and was served in earthenware cups rather than the glass or silver that graced elite tables. The price was low enough for wage laborers to drink regularly, which they apparently did.
Gambling was the tavern’s most reliably controversial feature. Roman law periodically prohibited gambling except during the Saturnalia — the mid-December festival during which social conventions were temporarily relaxed — and the prohibitions were as regularly ignored. Dice games were the most common: three dice, thrown from a cup, with the combinations ranked from the Venus throw (all different faces, the best) to the dog throw (all ones, the worst). Knucklebones — the ankle bones of sheep, used as dice — were also common gaming implements. Board games with pieces moved according to dice throws were played in taverns, scratched into pavement outside them, and documented in the equipment recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum. The law’s concern was primarily about the debt and violence that gambling disputes produced, and the tavern walls at Pompeii preserve painted scenes of gambling disputes — including a remarkable sequence showing an argument over a dice game escalating to physical confrontation and the players being expelled from the establishment — that suggest the concern was not unfounded.
The association with prostitution was real but probably overstated as a generalization. Some taverns were also brothels or functioned as brothels on some occasions; others were simply places that served food and wine without any such services. The ambiguity was partly definitional — the Roman categories for establishments providing food, drink, lodging, and sexual services overlapped in ways that the Latin vocabulary does not always resolve — and partly a result of the elite literary tradition’s tendency to conflate any lower-class commercial establishment with the full range of vices associated with the lower classes. A Roman matron of good family would not have entered a tavern; this did not mean that everyone who entered one was involved in commercial sex.
The nighttime operation of taverns was a recurring urban problem in Rome. The city had no street lighting by modern standards, and taverns that served into the night concentrated large numbers of people, including drunk ones, on streets where darkness both facilitated crime and concealed its perpetrators. The noise was also a constant complaint in Roman literature — Martial’s epigrams include complaints about being kept awake by tavern noise that any urban apartment dweller in any century would recognize. Municipal regulations governing tavern operating hours were issued at various periods, and their recurrence suggests that enforcement was imperfect and the problem persistent.
What the tavern economy reveals about Roman urban life is the scale of the population for whom home cooking, formal dining, and domestic service were simply not options. The insulae — the apartment buildings that housed most of Rome’s population — frequently lacked kitchen facilities; even those that had them lacked the space, fuel, and equipment that food preparation at home required. The street economy of food and drink was not a supplement to domestic life but a substitute for it, and the establishments that provided it were the spaces where most Romans spent much of their social time. The formal dinner party of the literary tradition was real, but it was the dining experience of a small minority. The caupona on the corner was Rome’s dining room for everyone else.