Dining-BED, lectus tricliniaris or discubitorium, that whereon the ancients lay at meals. The dining or discubitory beds were four or five feet high. Three of these beds were ordinarily ranged by a square table, (whence both the table and the room where they ate were called triclinium) in such a manner that one of the sides of the table remained open and accessible to the waiters. Each bed would hold three or four, rarely five persons. These beds were unknown before the second
cond Punic war: the Romans, till then, sat down to eat on plain wooden benches, in imitation of the heroes of Homer, or, as Varro expresses it, after the manner of the Lacedemonians and Cretans. Scipio Africanus first made an innovation: he had brought from Carthage some of those little beds called punicani, or archaici; being of a wood common enough, very low, stuffed only with straw or hay, and covered with goats or sheep's skins, hædinis pellibus strati. In reality, there was no great difference, as to delicacy, between these new beds and the ancient benches; but the custom of frequent bathing, which began then to obtain, by softening and relaxing the body, put men on trying to rest themselves more commodiously by lying along than by sitting down. For the ladies, it did not seem at first consistent with their modesty to adopt the mode of lying: accordingly they kept to the old custom all the time of the commonwealth; but, from the first Cæsars, they ate on their beds. For the youth who had not yet put on the toga virilis, they were long kept to the ancient discipline. When they were admitted to table, they only sat on the edge of the beds of their nearest relations. Never, says Suetonius, did the young Cæsars, Caius and Lucius, eat at the table of Augustus; but they were set in imo loco, or, as Tacitus expresses it, ad lecti fulcra. From the greatest simplicity, the Romans by degrees carried their dining beds to the most surprising magnificence. Pliny assures us, it was no new thing to see them covered over with plates of silver, adorned with the softest mats, and the richest counterpanes. Lampridius, speaking of Heliogabalus, says, he had beds of solid silver, solido argento habuit lectos et tricliniarios, et cubiculares. We may add, that Pompey, in his third triumph, brought in beds of gold.—The Romans had also beds whereon they studied, and beds whereon the dead were carried to the funeral pile.