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Updated: June 26, 2025
This "prandium," this essentially military meal, was taken standing, by way of symbolizing the necessity of being always ready for the enemy. Hence the posture in which it was taken at Rome, the very counter-pole to the luxurious posture of dinner. Isidorus again says, "Proprie apud veteres prandium vocatum fuisse oinnem militum cibum ante pugnam;" i.e.
When he got a few paces from the temple, he turned to look back. Calenus had already disappeared in the entry room of the priests, for it now approached the hour of that repast which, called prandium by the ancients, answers in point of date to the breakfast of the moderns. The white and graceful fane gleamed brightly in the sun. Upon the altars before it rose the incense and bloomed the garlands.
Such was the language. But we guess what is passing in the reader's mind. He thinks that all this proves the prandium to have been a meal of little account; and in very many cases absolutely unknown.
After a refreshment, which was called the morning meal and to which the two friends sat down at an hour when common mortals were already long past their midday prandium, Petronius proposed a light doze. According to him, it was too early for visits yet.
So of the Roman prandium: had it been as luxurious as it was simple, still it was always viewed as something meant only to stay the stomach, as a prologue to something beyond. The prandium was far enough from giving the feeblest idea of the English luncheon; yet it stood in the same relation to the Roman day.
Prandium, so far from being what our foolish dictionaries pretend dinner itself never in its palmiest days was more or other than a miserable attempt at being luncheon. It was a conatus, what physiologists call a nisus, a struggle in a very ambitious spark, or scintilla, to kindle into a fire. This nisus went on for some centuries; but finally issued in smoke.
And as your dictionary, good reader, translated breakfast by that vain word jentaculum, so, doubtless, it will translate dinner by that still vainer word prandium.
If prandium had worked out his ambition, had "the great stream of tendency" accomplished all his wishes, prandium never could have been more than a very indifferent luncheon. But now, II. We have to offer another fact, ruinous to our dictionaries on another ground.
It would also be maintained by a solemn and very interesting commemoration of this camp repast in Rome. On a set day the officers of the army were invited by Cæsar to a banquet; it was a circumstance expressly noticed in the invitation, by the proper officers of the palace, that the banquet was not a "coena," but a "prandium." What followed, in consequence?
Cæsar with the vestals and the Augustians left the amphitheatre, and withdrew to an immense scarlet tent erected purposely; in this was prepared for him and the guests a magnificent prandium.
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