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.