be an hour or so later.  In an amusing story given as a rhetorical illustration in the work known as Rhetorica ad Herennium, iv. 63, the guests (doomed never to get their dinner that day except in an inn) are invited for the tenth hour.  But in the city it must have often happened that the hour was later, owing to the press of business.  For example, on one occasion when the senate had been sitting ad noctem, Cicero dines with Pompeius after its dismissal (ad Fam. i. 2.3).  Another day we find him going to bed after his dinner, and clearly not for a siesta, which, as we saw, he never had time to take in his busy days; this, however, was not actually in Rome but in his villa at Formiae, where he was at that time liable to much interruption from callers (ad Att. ii. 16).  Probably, like most Romans of his day, he had spent a long time over his dinner, talking if he had guests, or reading and thinking if he were alone or with his family only.

The dinner, cena, was in fact the principal private event of the day; it came when all business was over, and you could enjoy the privacy of family life or see your friends and unbend with them.  At no other meal do we hear of entertainment, unless the guests were on a journey, as was the case at the lunch at Arcanum when Pomponia’s temper got the better of her (see above, p. 52).  Even dinner-parties seem to have come into fashion only since the Punic wars, with later hours and a larger staff of slaves to cook and wait at table.  In the old days of household simplicity the meals were taken in the atrium, the husband reclining on a lectus,[442] the wife sitting by his side, and the children sitting on stools in front of them.  The slaves too in the olden time took their meal sitting on benches in the atrium, so that the whole familia was present.  This means that the dinner was in those days only a necessary break in the intervals of work, and the sitting posture was always retained for slaves, i.e. those who would go about their work as soon as the meal was over.  Columella, writing under the early Empire, urges that the vilicus or overseer should sit at his dinner except on festivals; and Cato the younger would not recline after the battle of Pharsalia for the rest of his life, apparently as a sign that life was no longer enjoyable.[443]

But after the Second Punic war, which changed the habits of the Roman in so many ways, the atrium ceased to be the common dining-place, and special chambers were built, either off the atrium or in the interior part of the house about the peristylium, or even upstairs, for the accommodation of guests, who might be received in different rooms, according to the season and the weather.[444] These triclinia were so arranged as to afford the greatest personal comfort and the best opportunities for conversation; they indicate clearly that dinner is no longer an interval in the day’s work, but a time of repose and ease at the end of it.  The plan here given of a triclinium, as described by Plutarch, in his Quaestiones conviviales,