The Pic-Nic Society was a London club devoted to theatrical entertainment, lavish dinners, and gambling. The Pic-Nics notoriety invited scandal and satire. Burney’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra is a knock-off of James Gillray’s The Pic-Nic Orchestra. Caricatures...
Blixen’s Out of Africa is a memoir without picnics. But Pollack and his screenwriter Kurt Luedke have added two picnic episodes that reveal Blixen’s characteristic vanity and romantic nature. Neither is a particularly happy picnic. The first picnic is in...
By the last count, seven directors have filmed Austen’s Emma. None of them are definitive or even alike. A list is provided as a separate entry. McGrath’s Emma is lively, and his picnic episode at Donwell Abbey and Box Hill is reasonably close to...
The picnic in Gondry’s Mood Indigo [L’Écume des jours] is his invention, a goofy addition to Boris Vian’s surrealistic novel L’Écume des jours. * It’s the love story of Colin, who is manic and unpredictable, and Chloe, who is stable until she meets...
Menander’s comedy The Bad-Tempered Man [aka Dyskolos] was lost for centuries until discovered in the 1950s. A pivotal episode is a pilgrimage to the shrine of Pan at Phyle on a hillside in what is now Athens, where a sacrificial meal will cooked to appease the...
The custom of sharing food or eranos was common among the ancient Greeks. In The Memorabilia, Xenophon discusses a dinner party at which Socrates suggests that the food and drink be collected in common stock, so there is no social discord about who brought what to...
Horace delights in a rustic country dinner resembling eranos, the Greek custom of dining where each guest contributes something. A guest might contribute money, food, drink, or entertainment. Horace’s adaptation of this custom required that his guest provide...
Hunting feasts have a long history. Among the Romans, one such by Philostratus Elder uses the rhetorical device of Ekphrasis, a verbal description of a visual representation, to illustrate a painting he observed in Naples. Ironically, none survive, if they existed at...
Seneca says that eating ripe figs at a picnic brings “me a New Year feast every day, and I make the New Year happy and prosperous by good thoughts and greatness of soul.” Figs—only figs—that he claims is a substitute for bread. It is among the oddest main dishes for a...
The Sevso Plate * (27.8 inches in diameter) may also reference a hunting feast describe by the roman writer Philostratus. But the iconography is Christian. The Chi-Rho situated at the apex of the legend on the plate’s circumference is a symbol for Jesus Christ...
