The practice seems to have been adopted from the east, where it was a form of dining for elites. The Greeks used single couches onto which companions were often squeezed for after-dinner drinking parties. An association of dining with luxury led to 19th-century depictions, like the one above, of Roman diners leading the soft life (here, without reclining). The practice of reclining and dining continued into ancient Rome, but with a few additions-for one, respectable women were invited to join the party, and for another, drinking was not a separate, post-dinner event, but became part of the dining experience. The ancient Greeks had a recumbent approach to their (male-only) dinner parties, as I discussed in a previous post: elite men reclined, propped on pillows, to drink, converse, and-sometimes-overindulge.
