In the very same year English writer Augustus Hare published his Walks in Rome, in which he assumed that the chamber adjacent to the dining room in the Flavian Palace on the Palatine was none other than a vomitorium, which he described as “a disgusting memorial of Roman life”. In an 1871 account of Christmas in England, French journalist and politician Felix Pyat described the holiday meal as “a gross, pagan, monstrous orgie – a Roman feast, in which the vomitorium is not wanting.” By 1871, then, the vomitorium was already misunderstood as a chunder chamber. They reflect the confusion about whether the vomitorium was a passageway or a room for emptying one’s stomach. However, there are references in newspapers and journals that pre-date Huxley, going back to the 19th century. This passage is commonly cited as the first time vomitorium was misused to mean a room used for vomiting. The door of his sacred boudoir was thrown rudely open, and there strode in, like a Goth into the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter, a haggard and dishevelled person… In 1929, Aldous Huxley wrote in his comic novel, Antic Hay:īut Mr Mercaptan was to have no tranquillity this afternoon. Our aim is to explore how the myth arose and why it has proved to be so persistent. This misconception of the vomitorium as a vomiting room is widely acknowledged in popular culture.

Vomitorium/vomitoria are still used today by archaeologists as architectural terms. Macrobius uses the plural vomitoria to refer to the passages through which spectators could “spew forth” into their seats at public entertainment venues. It first appears in the Saturnalia of Macrobius, written in the 5th century AD.

The vomitorium is clearly part of this group, but no ancient source actually employs the word to describe a place for post-prandial puking.

There is a delightful array of Latin words associated with the act of throwing up, from the verbs vomo (“I vomit”) and vomito (“I keep on vomiting”) to the nouns vomitor (“one who vomits”) and vomitus and vomitio, both of which can either refer to the actual business of chundering or the yucky stuff itself. It was once thought that a diner could, at this point in the meal, make a quick visit to the vomitorium – a room adjacent to the dining room replete with a basin and feathers to tickle the throat – in order to make room for the next course. After gorging on a feast of sausages, blood pudding, young sow’s udder, sea bream, lobster, mullet, Attic honey, and Syrian dates, all washed down with a few glasses Falernian wine, it is little wonder that a Roman diner might begin to feel quite full.

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