Thermopolium
In the Antiquity , the thermopolium (plural thermopolia) correspond to today.
It served hot meals (in Greek thermos meaning "hot" and Poleo, "buy"), beverages (wine, hot water infused or not). It was a busy little shop, the type tavern , including the famous L-shaped counter, masonry block encompassing earthenware pots and covered with marble slab.
These institutions offered a catering and beverage to all those who lacked the means or inclination to cook, tenants and subtenants, travelers, and foreign marginal. This client of modest and sometimes questionable gave them a poor reputation. Plautus example is a curse of his characters against the Greeks in coat and these slaves thieves who come to get drunk the proceeds of their robberies .
In Rome itself, the emperors rglementrent repeatedly operating thermopolia: Caligula made them close during the period of mourning a death of his sister, and had run a tenant who had breached by selling hot water . Claude , to reform the morals of the populace, made them close and banned the sale of meals and hot water . Nero forbids the sale of cooked food except vegetables and edible plants . It ignores the actual monitoring of these measures.
Many thermopolia were found at sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
See also
Notes
- Plautus , Curculio, II, iii, 288
- Inscriptionum Latinarum Corpus , IV, 1679
- Cassius Dio , LIX, 11, 6
- Dio Cassius , LX, 6.7
- Suetonius , Life of Nero, XVI
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