What is a trechedipnum?

Shoes? Clothes? A bib? Something else?

Ten years ago, archaeologists unearthed a 2,000-year-old mosaic from the ancient city of Antiocheia, in the southern province of Hatay, Turkey. The two panels you can see there are: on the left, a skeleton reclining happily, under the legend ΕΥΦΡΟΣΥΝΟΣ (euphrosunos)—joy, gladness, rejoicing—a ‘don’t worry, be happy, we’re all dead in the end’ kind of image, I suppose; and on the right a toga-wearing fellow hurrying from right to left, under the header ΤΡΕΧΕΔΕΙΠΝΟΣ (trechedeipnos). What does that mean?

From around the same time, here is a passage from Juvenal’s 3rd Satire:

Quae nunc divitibus gens acceptissima nostris  
et quos praecipue fugiam, properabo fateri,
nec pudor opstabit. non possum ferre, Quirites,
Graecam urbem; quamvis quota portio faecis Achaei?
iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes,
et linguam et mores et cum tibicine chordas
obliquas nec non gentilia tympana secum
vexit et ad circum iussas prostare puellas.
ite, quibus grata est picta lupa barbara mitra!
rusticus ille tuus sumit trechedipna, Quirine,
et ceromatico fert niceteria collo. [Juvenal Satire 3, 58-68]

The race most attractive now to our well-to-do countryfolk,
that race I above all desire to escape, I’ll soon tell you who they are,
I’m not ashamed to say it: Roman friends! I can’t stand
a city full of Greeks!—though how many of these dregs even are Greek?
For the Syrian Orontes has long been polluting our Tiber,
with foreign language and customs, pipes and harp-strings
in minor-key, even their native tom-toms are dragged along,
and those girls forced to ‘offer themselves’ in the Circus.
Check them out, if your taste’s a barbarian whore in a painted headdress.
Ah, Quirinus, that rustic of yours is now putting on his trechedipna,
his nicterium hanging from a neck smeared with ceromaticus.  

Umbricius—the speaker of Juvenal’s 3^rd satire, perhaps a real person, perhaps a fictional character, if the latter, perhaps the sock-puppet for Juvenal’s own views—simply hates how many Greeks there are in early-2^nd-century Rome. Hordes of them, and not just Greeks, it’s a flood of ‘Easterners’—Syrians, Egyptians, Macedonians, Jews, all sorts. The worst of it is, wealthy Romans love these interlopers: these ‘Greeks’ achieve high positions, make much money, have sex with high-born Roman matrons, go about the city cheating and doing crime. Immigrants! The Roman Tiber has been ‘polluted’ by the flow of the Orontes (the 350 mile long river that flows through the Lebanon, Syria and Turkey into the Mediterranean). ‘Make Ausonia Great Again’ could be Umbricius’s motto: except that, in this Satire, he’s given up: right at the beginning he tells us that he’s leaving Rome, it’s become too Greeky for him. He’s packed up his stuff and is moving to the coast, to Cumae. But before he goes he rails at what his native city has become.

In the last two lines of this passage, Umbricus addresses Quirinus, a notional authentic Roman (Quirinus was a Roman god of the state, and his name was a way of invoking Romulus, founder of Rome—Augustus and Mark Antony and other notable Romans were sometimes addressed as Quirinus). Juvenal asks: what has happened to your salt of the earth ‘rustic’ Roman now? He’s decking himself in Greek gear, a sign of his capture by Greek influence. Three specific items are listed, using their Greek names.

What are they? The niceterium is a victory prize, or some item associated with victory (from νίκη níkē, “victory”): a medal, perhaps, since it is hanging from the rustic’s collum, his neck. It might be a torc of some kind; but Juvenal’s point is that it is not Roman—medallion is probably the sense of it. We do know what ceromaticum is: from κήρωμα (kḗrōma), it’s a kind of ointment or body-lotion, worn by wrestlers, made of oil and wax mixed together (κηρός is wax) . The point is: it’s foreign. The Romans had a low opinion of Greek wrestling.

What about the trechedipnum? This is less clear in terms of Juvenal’s poem. We know what the Greek word means: a τρεχέδεῖπνον is someone who runs hurriedly to a banquet—that’s what the feller in the image at the head of this post is doing. The word is from τρέχω (trékhō) to run, to move quickly + δεῖπνον (deîpnon) food, provender. This was an archetypal figure in Greek and Hellenized culture. One of Alciphron’s letters is from a fictional character called ‘Trechedeipnus’ bemoaning how hungry he is, how desperately he desires a feast.

But the reference in Juvenal is not to a person hurrying to dinner. It is to something that a rustic Roman is ‘putting on’ (sumo): something he is wearing. What would you put on in order to hurry to a banquet? We don’t know for sure what Juvenal had in mind, though scholars tend to think one of two things. One suggestion is that the trechedipna are a pair of special running-to-a-banquet shoes: ‘Greek slippers’ ‘Greekified shoes’. In her Loeb Juvenal edition, Susanna Morton Braund renders the word as ‘chausseures grecques’ so that the foreignness of the term stands out against the English of her translation. Another suggestion is that it is a garment of some kind, a light shirt (rather than the heavy Roman toga). Liddell and Scott go with this latter: ‘a light garment worn at table by parasites’.

Neither really makes sense to me. Nowadays, sure, we might take off regular shoes and put on our Adidas or Nike running-shoes, the better to be able to sprint rapidly to supper. But that’s not a Ancient Greek notion. Athletes in competition ran barefoot; ancient shoes or sandals would be more of an encumbrance to running than naked feet. The character in the Antiocheian mosaic, at the head of this post, has one shoe on and one shoe off, implying that in his hurry to get to food he has accidentally lost one, kicked it off. Diddle diddle dumpling my son John, and so on.

The shirt idea doesn’t make sense to me either. Why would changing your shirt mean you get to the feast any quicker? Again, moderns might dress up to go to dinner, but that wasn’t a Roman custom: and what you’re wearing isn’t going to help you access the food more quickly.

But the trechedipnum in Satire 3 must be some kind of attire or adornment. I’m just not sure I grasp what kind. Could it be a bib, or some kind of napkin or serviette? The point of the trechedipnum in Alciphron’s letter is that he is a glutton, that he thinks about food all the time, that he upbraids the clock because it’s taking too long to get to dinner-time. As a piece of attire a trechedipnum could therefore be something of use to a glutton. Could it be trousers—looked on with suspicion by toga-wearing Romans as eastern and barbarian, but certainly easier to run in (although the figure in the mosaic is wearing a toga, not jogging pants). I don’t know.