Why did the Romans recline while feasting?

[Vindex]

No, not the start of a joke but here'san article which might explain it!

[starman2012]

Didn't many recline during regular eating, as opposed to feasting or stuffing themselves?

[M. Demetrius]

That was the "tradition" of more than one culture. If you have the food already cut up bite-sized, and a properly padded cushion, it works pretty well.

[PhilusEstilius]

What about all of we modern Couch Potatos when we sit there watching TV.

[M. Demetrius]

Well, our custom is to sit more or less upright in chairs or couches, the Japanese sit much lower to the ground, and the table legs are very short, and the Romans were somewhere in between, with knee-high tables, more or less. I believe it was just tradition, and much of the Roman world kept it. Romans were pretty big on keeping traditions.

[M. Caecilius]

I've just read (as an aside in a book on Houses in Roman Africa) that tradition required the man to recline and the women to sit, though by the time of the late republic both genders would recline. So long as they belonged to the upper class that had access to a triclinium, rather than the majority of the population who could not aspire to much more than a stool and were lucky to get a single course meal.

I do believe that the ancient Greeks and the Etruscans, judging from some sarcophagi, reclined as well; the tradition would thus go back somewhat beyond the Romans, geographically and chronologically.

[john m roberts]

It hurts less that way when you keel over drunk.