The Romanitas of Macrobius’ banquets

Abstract

Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, in his Saturnalia, draws upon the Platonic archetype in making overt allusions to the Symposium and yet follows Athenaeus, whose work he seems to know thoroughly, albeit does not acknowledge its influence openly. Besides the Greek paradigms, Macrobius used Roman models, i. e., Cicero’s dialogues, to infuse his literary banquet with Roman flavour. The author of Saturnalia was severely criticised, especially by representatives of the Quellenforschung movement in the second half of the 19th century, for allegedly being a poor plagiarist. His compilatory method is described in this article, and two other plausible Macrobius’ sources are proposed: Juvenal’s Satires and Seneca the Younger’s On Tranquility of the Mind. In Roman History Ammianus Marcellinus depicted the people inhabiting Rome of his times as degenerate parasites hostile to any form of intellectual activity who fritter away time on vulgar entertainment and obsessively overfeed themselves. Many scenes of so-called sober merriment shared by the prominent Roman personages of the IV c. AD were, in all probability, introduced to Saturnalia to counterbalance Ammianus Marcellinus’ harsh criticism of Roman morals. Macrobius’s familiarity with both Juvenal and Seneca manifests itself in the list of similes, yet, as the author of the present article proposes, there are passages in the oeuvre of both writers that may have instilled the vision of frugality typical of Romans in Macrobius’s mind, so that he may have used images borrowed from both earlier writers to Saturnalia.