The 17 Horrific “Private Practices” of the Roman Elite That History Tried to Erase (It’s Worse Than You Think)
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THE DINNER PARTY? 
History shows us Romans reclining and eating grapes. It doesn’t show us the “Comissatio”—the secret drinking hour where the doors were half-closed and the rules of morality vanished. Matrons, senators, and “delights” participated in rituals that would destroy their reputations if made public. The archaeological evidence tells a story of systematic abuse disguised as high culture.
The Year is 23 BC: A Dinner to Remember
The summer air hangs heavy over the Bay of Naples. In a sprawling villa that represents the pinnacle of architectural beauty, a man named Marcus Vidius Polio is hosting a dinner party. He is a man who was born into nothing and clawed his way to owning everything—including the lives of 47 human beings who staff this single property.
Inside the dining room, a young slave named Demetrius stands frozen, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. In his trembling hands, he clutches a heavy silver pitcher. On the intricate mosaic floor beneath him, three drops of expensive Falernian wine glisten in the lamplight.
To you or me, this is a minor accident. A spill. A mistake. To Demetrius, it is a death sentence.
The room falls silent. The guests, comprising seven of Rome’s most powerful senators and their wives, stop eating. They know what comes next. They know about the ornamental fish pond in the central courtyard. It isn’t stocked with koi or goldfish. It is teeming with lampreys—moray eels imported from Sicily, bred for size, aggression, and a perpetual hunger.
Polio raises a single finger. Two guards seize the boy. Demetrius doesn’t scream; he knows that struggling only prolongs the inevitable. He is dragged toward the black water where the eels are waiting to strip the flesh from his bones in minutes. This was the reality of the Roman elite—a class of people who built monuments to justice and philosophy while practicing unspeakable cruelty in the privacy of their own homes.
The Veneer of Civilization
We often look back at Rome as the cradle of Western civilization. We see the white marble statues, the stoic philosophy of Seneca, the speeches of Cicero, and the organized legions that brought “order” to the world. We romanticize their banquets as scenes of witty conversation and flowing wine.
But history is written by the victors, and in this case, the victors were the Roman aristocrats who carefully curated their public image. They maintained a strict separation between their public personas—honorable, virtuous, pious—and their private lives. What has survived in the history books is the version they wanted us to see.
However, fragments have survived. Private letters, legal documents, and graffiti preserved by volcanic ash tell a different story. They reveal a ruling class that believed their wealth and status exempted them from the very moral standards they imposed on the rest of the world. These were not the crimes of “mad emperors” like Nero or Caligula, which are easy to dismiss as anomalies. These were the systematic, everyday practices of the “good” Romans—the respected senators and the virtuous matrons.
The “Comissatio”: When the Doors Closed
The Roman banquet is a staple of historical drama. We see the Cena—the formal dinner. Guests arrived at set times, ate in specific courses, and discussed politics or poetry. This part of the evening was public. It could be written about in letters to mothers or referenced in the Senate.
But the Cena was just the warm-up.
After the food was cleared, the Comissatio began. This was the “drinking party,” and it operated under a completely different set of rules. It was a zone of silence, a conspiracy of complicity. What happened during the Comissatio was understood to be strictly private. To speak of it publicly was social suicide.
The poet Martial, writing with a wink and a nod to those in the know, described senators arriving with their wives but leaving with “other arrangements.” He hinted at respected matrons whose behavior, fueled by the third or fourth course of unmixed wine, would shock their daytime visitors.
This wasn’t just drunken revelry; it was an organized system of exploitation. The “entertainment” often involved the sexual use of slaves who were trained to recognize subtle signals. A flick of a wrist or a glance from a guest was a command. These human beings were treated no differently than the silver goblets they served from—objects to be used and put away.
The horrifying genius of the Comissatio was that it implicated everyone. If you attended, you witnessed. If you witnessed, you were complicit. This created a bond of mutual blackmail among the elite. Political alliances were often sealed not with handshakes, but with the shared knowledge of what happened after the doors were half-closed.
The Market of “Delights”
If the banquet was the stage, the slave market was the backstage supply chain. But the elite did not shop where the commoners shopped. They didn’t go to the bustling public forums where agricultural laborers were sold based on their muscle mass.
For the wealthy, there was a parallel, shadow market run by specialized dealers like a man named Tyrannius. Tyrannius didn’t sell workers; he sold Deliciae—”delights.”
These were human beings selected solely for their beauty, youth, and sexual appeal. Agents scoured the Mediterranean for children and teenagers who met specific aesthetic criteria. Once purchased by dealers, these children were sent to special training facilities. The records euphemistically refer to their education as “the arts of pleasing,” a sterile phrase that hides a lifetime of abuse.
The price difference tells you everything you need to know. A skilled farmhand who could manage a vineyard might cost 2,000 sesterces. A Deliciae, beautiful and “trained,” could fetch 200,000 sesterces.
Wealthy buyers like the senator Quintus Lutatius Catulus would visit private showrooms to inspect the merchandise. Here, the dehumanization was total. Buyers were encouraged to touch, to inspect, to verify the “quality” of the human product. There was no pretense of humanity here. It was a transaction of flesh.
But what happened when the “delight” faded?
Beauty is fleeting, especially in the harsh conditions of the ancient world. When a Deliciae aged, when their youth—their primary value—evaporated, they were discarded with chilling efficiency. Some were resold for pennies to hard labor camps. Others were cast out of the household entirely, left to starve in the streets of the city they had once “delighted.”
The Cycle of Abandonment
Perhaps the most stomach-churning practice of all was the Roman elite’s relationship with their own children.
In Rome, the Paterfamilias (the male head of the household) held the power of life and death over his family. This wasn’t a figure of speech; it was the law. When a child was born, the midwife would place the infant at the father’s feet. If he picked the child up, it was accepted into the family. If he turned away, the child was “exposed.”
Exposure was a polite term for abandonment. The baby was taken outside and left in a designated public place, exposed to the elements, stray dogs, and the night.
Why would the wealthy do this? It was a cold, financial calculation. Sons were expensive but useful—they carried the name and inherited property. Daughters required dowries. Too many daughters could bankrupt a family or dilute its wealth. So, perfectly healthy female infants were routinely thrown away like refuse.
But here is where the story takes a turn into a horror deeper than death.
Many of these exposed babies didn’t die. They were collected by slave traders who prowled the exposure sites like vultures. These traders weren’t saving the children out of kindness; they were harvesting raw material.
These foundlings were raised specifically for the Deliciae market. They had no family, no history, no name, and no rights. They were the perfect blank slates to be molded into sex slaves.
This created a monstrous, circular tragedy that Roman society knew about but refused to acknowledge. A senator might expose his infant daughter in 20 BC. Twenty years later, he might visit a dealer like Tyrannius and pay a fortune for a beautiful young woman to serve at his private banquets.
He would never know that the wine was being poured by his own flesh and blood.
The system was so widespread that legal disputes arose. A surviving court case from the 1st century details a woman who went to a market and recognized a young slave on the block as the daughter she had exposed decades earlier. She tried to claim her. The court’s ruling? She had no case. By abandoning the child, she had forfeited her rights. Her daughter was property now.
The Cost of Silence
The story of Demetrius and the eels has a strange ending. On that night in 23 BC, a guest actually intervened. History suggests it might have been Augustus himself, or a man of similar stature, though the specific account leaves him unnamed. He stepped between the boy and the guards and told Polio that what he was doing was wrong.
Polio, furious but outranked, released the boy. But he didn’t do it because he suddenly grew a conscience. He did it because the “entertainment” had been ruined. The mood was spoiled.
That is the ultimate indictment of the Roman elite. Cruelty was acceptable as long as it was stylish. Abuse was permitted as long as it was discreet. The murder of a slave was fine, provided it didn’t disrupt the dinner conversation.
For centuries, we have marveled at the aqueducts and the Colosseum. We have studied their laws and their military tactics. But true history requires us to look into the shadows, to look into the lamprey pond, and to acknowledge the millions of silent victims whose suffering paid for the marble grandeur of Rome.
The guest at Polio’s dinner ensured that the host faced subtle social consequences for his gaucherie—for being too obvious with his cruelty. But the system itself? The markets, the exposure, the exploitation? That continued for hundreds of years, protected by the silence of wealth and the complicity of power.
Today, 2,000 years later, the mosaic floors are cracked and the villas are ruins. But the stories of Demetrius, of the nameless Deliciae, and of the exposed children remain as a warning. Civilization is not measured by the beauty of its monuments, but by how it treats its most vulnerable. And by that measure, the Roman elite were savages in silk robes.
