Richard Hunter

Daddy’s just do it better

[Daddy Dan 🇮🇹 @DanDivorced]

Good afternoon boys!

[Daddy Dan 🇮🇹 @DanDivorced]

Show me your leaking cock

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced Glad I stuck around too

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced Anytime

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced Love that round ass

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced I could be your father but I still want to sit on your lap

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced @zamatakis Please. All over me

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced Irish or not that’s mighty hot

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced What are those devices?

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

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[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@paperssil 5 and 6

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

You might have heard that the Romans built special rooms called vomitoriums where they would go to vomit between courses so they could keep eating. History teachers have said it. The History Channel documentary has implied it. The Hunger Games built an entire civilization around it. There is just one problem: It is completely made up and the actual truth is both more interesting and considerably weirder.

A vomitorium was real. It was just not what anyone thinks it was. The word first appears in the writing of a fifth century author named Macrobius, who used it to describe the passageways beneath the seats of Roman amphitheaters, the corridors that spewed tens of thousands of spectators out into the streets after a performance. The Colosseum had 76 of them, so efficiently designed that 50,000 people could reach their seats in under 15 minutes. Macrobius coined the word from the Latin vomere, meaning to spew forth, because he thought the image of a crowd erupting from a corridor looked like something being disgorged. It was an architectural metaphor about crowd flow, not a dining room feature, and no ancient Roman source, not a single one, ever uses the word to describe a place where people went to purge their dinner.

So where did the myth come from. The most likely answer is a French journalist named Felix Pyat, who wrote in 1871 about a Christmas feast being a gross Roman orgy in which the vomitorium was not wanting. By that point the linguistic confusion between the architectural term and the act of vomiting had already taken root, and the image of decadent Romans emptying their stomachs between courses was simply too vivid and too satisfying to correct. Aldous Huxley used it wrong in a 1923 novel. Will Durant repeated it in his influential history of civilization. Hollywood ran with it and never looked back.

But here is the part that complicates the clean myth bust. Some Romans actually did vomit at banquets, and Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who had every reason to exaggerate Roman excess, wrote about it directly. In a letter he described watching slaves clean up vomit at Roman banquets, and in his Letter to Helvia he summarized what he saw as the depths of Roman gluttony in one line: they vomit so they may eat, and eat so that they may vomit.

The Emperor Vitellius, who ruled for eight chaotic months in 69 AD, was documented vomiting between meals. The Emperor Hadrian reportedly used a feather to clear his stomach after overeating. These were real accounts about real people, but they were accounts about extreme excess at the very top of Roman society, not standard dinner party behavior, and Seneca was a Stoic moralist writing with an agenda, not a dining room correspondent filing a neutral report.

The truth is somewhere in the middle and it is exactly what makes Rome fascinating. The dedicated vomit room with the feather and the basin never existed and no ancient source ever describes one. But the Romans who could afford to eat like emperors sometimes behaved like emperors, and the line between a metaphor about moral decay and a literal description of what happened in a triclinium on a Tuesday night is harder to draw than most myth bust articles want to admit.

© Eats History

#archaeohistories

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced Raw?

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced I’d keep trying until you let me swallow it

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DanDivorced Tell me when and where

[Richard Hunter @HunterRichard69]

@DamagedGoods50 @DanDivorced I’m strangely turned on by this