One of the stops on our Philadelphia trip was the Penn Museum, a surprisingly large archaeological exhibit for a university (as opposed to national or major city) museum. Sadly, it was under construction, so some exhibits were closed and the building was oppressively hot—although the heat added something to the Egyptian experience.
I got a big kick out of one small entry: a Roman brooch in the shape of a cheese grater. It looked like an undistinguished trapezoid to me, but the text called it a cheese grater, and I suppose the curator knows his business. The text went on to explain that this was a mark of status in a competitive environment. This brooch carried the message “I operate the cheese grater in my house.†Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Apparently, however, the cheese grater was a big deal when a central focus of social dinners was the serving of hot wine flavored with (Yurgk!) grated cheese. A peculiar thing to fixate on as the focus of an evening, but who am I to judge?
The card did not clarify whether grating cheese into the wine was indicative of a greater influence wielded through the political access these dinner parties could produce, or merely a very, very petty mark of status among Roman women, a class entitled to virtually no status whatsoever in society at large. I wish the text had cleared up this ambiguity; the two interpretations are virtually opposite in meaning.
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