ABSTRACT
In the elite household, dining equipment would include silver plate, pottery and glassware, and sometimes even vessels of semi-precious stone. Throughout the Roman period, vessels are frequently represented in wall-paintings and mosaics, sometimes in representations of people using them, sometimes alone. Decoration on formal dining crockery or silver usually unites the individual vessels as the components of a single overall 'set' each with the same decoration, thus, perhaps, similarly linking together the diners as individual members of the same social community, and helping to constitute the occasion as more formal and choreographed than family dining might be. Silver plate itself was an essentially conservative form, heavily dependent on the Hellenistic tradition both in the forms of the vessels used and in the decorative motifs used. Elite pottery such as Samian originated as copies of silver vessels, both in form and decoration.
