Roy Strong on Convivium

What must strike the contemporary observer about the convivium in its restrained form, devoid of the later decadent excesses, is the modernity of so much about it — its order, its culinary excellence, its sense of style and ceremony, to say nothing of its delight in all the appurtenances of civilised living: conversation and music, the reading of prose and poetry, what in effect often amounted to a cabaret attached to a meal — what we would now call dinner-theatre.

But that modernity was underpinned by a vast substructure of slavery, which was in turn based upon brutality, violence and every form of cruel subjection. At no other period in the history of eating does such a startling and frightening polarity occur.

Roy Strong - Feast (A History of Grand Eating)