What Does Luxuria Mean?

Abstract This chapter offers a view on etymological and semantic issues concerning luxuria. This word is linked to the ideas of desire, excess, and deviation from a standard, and is strictly related to other passions, such as greed and ambition, and secondarily lust. The Roman narrative constructs luxuria as a vice coming from the East, as a consequence of military conquests, and describes it as a cause of fatal decline. This view can be traced back to Greek historiographical discussion of tryphe (in Thucydides, Herodotus, and Polybius) and to philosophical taxonomies of vices (in Plato and the Stoics). Geographically, luxuria’s preferred location switches from Sybaris in Greek authors to Capua and Baiae in Roman ones. Specific features of Roman luxuria are the spread of the concept through several literary genres, most of them in prose; the relevance of its social aspects; the focus on banquets, with particular attention related to fish dishes and tableware; and the diachronic shift of the concept from a mainly economical to an erotic meaning.