Live entertainment for guests was an important part of the dinner party and could take many different forms, with hosts striving to impress their guests with a diverse range of entertainment. Dinner party entertainment usually encompassed both the visual and the auditory, in order to provide the most enjoyable experience for their guests. Entertainment, like other aspects of the dinner party, was intended to demonstrate the host’s wealth, status and sophistication to their guests, and so hosts often strived to include forms of entertainment that were new or different to that of other dinner parties.
Entertainment often took the form of musical performance, such as flute, lyre, or choral works.
Visual or physical entertainment often included
troupes of acrobats, dancing girls, mime, and even gladiatorial fights.
More intellectual entertainment also sometimes took place in the form of recitations of poetry and histories. The (new at the time) Roman epic, Virgil’s Aeneid, was a particularly popular choice.
Games were also played at the dinner party as a form of entertainment. According to Petronius, an Ancient Roman author, one of the favourite games of the Romans was imitating the voices of animals or people of certain professions, while the other guests would guess who they were imitating.
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