Review of: Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World

In 1990, Oswyn Murray suggested that the history of pleasure be "established as an autonomous field of investigation", particularly in terms of pleasure "as an essential motivating force in the development of cultures".1 Murray's student James Davidson has written an exciting history of pleasure in classical Athens, concentrating especially, though not exclusively, on food, drink, and sex.2 Andrew Dalby (D. henceforth), though he does not explicitly place himself within this scholarly tradition, certainly is closely linked to it.D.'s Empire of Pleasures is in a sense a companion volume to his Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece (London and New York 1996) (reviewed by Gwen Compton-Engle at BMCR 96.04.29).Just as the latter is a useful starting point and sourcebook for any investigation into food in ancient Greece, Empire of Pleasures is a solid introductory study of food in the Roman Empire.It is an ambitious, attractive, and sensuous work full of a great deal of very fascinating and wide-ranging material, beautifully presented, nicely written (with lively translations), and extremely well cross-referenced between pages (though a reference to the elusive p. 000 appears at 155, 189, and 241).It is a book which causes one to be hungry and thirsty, and which makes the Roman world come alive as few non-fictional monographs can.In the introduction (Chapter 1) D. explains that his enterprise is an attempt at reconstructing the mental "geography of luxury" as portrayed in the literature of Imperial Rome; thus he is dealing not with how things were but how they seemed or how they were sensed or imagined by the average ancient reader (ix and 2) and how they were portrayed by litterateurs or "generalists" rather than experts (see 228-229 on the poetic imagination).D.'s maxim is "never trust documents" (248).The main sources of the book are thus the poetry and literary prose of the Roman Empire, mostly from about 50 B.C. to A.D. 150 and mainly in Latin and Greek, but also Aramaic (3); other literature (called "secondary" sources) are used to clarify but not, at least ostensibly, supplement this evidence (273, n. 4).In fact this book is on the whole an impressively large collection of sources, and one which often goes beyond a Greco-Roman purview: for instance, we find Arabic (3-4 and 184), Armenian (4 and 185), Anglo-Saxon (13 and 99-101), Indian (14, 191,(194)(195) 188, 194, and 244), and Chinese (199, 268, and 295, n. 9) evidence as well.Chapter 2 (Imperium sine fine) is a brief but interesting look at the general nature of the Roman Empire, including its vastness, uniqueness, and greatness, but also its immorality, greed, and

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