What do you think of this fact?
You’ve probably heard it: rich Romans ate until they were full, went to a special room called the vomitorium, threw up, and went back to the table. It’s a great story. It’s also not what the word meant.
Crowds, not stomachs
Vomitoria were the access ways in Roman theaters and amphitheaters that moved audiences to and from their seats. The first writer known to use the word is Macrobius, in his Saturnalia from the 5th century AD. According to Caillan Davenport and Shushma Malik, who teach ancient history at the University of Queensland, he used it for passages through which spectators could “spew forth” into their seats.
The image fits. The Latin verb vomere does mean “to vomit”, and a packed amphitheater emptying through its gates looks a bit like a building spitting out people. Live Science explains that Macrobius took an existing Latin word and added the ending “-orium”, which turns it into a place.
Where the myth came from
The wrong meaning shows up much later, in English. Davenport and Malik point to 19th-century examples, such as Augustus Hare’s Walks in Rome from 1871. World Wide Words found a 1915 book that describes a “vomitorium” in Pompeii where Romans threw up so they could keep eating. Aldous Huxley also used the word that way in his novel Antic Hay. Live Science suspects a simple language mistake, helped along by the old cliché of the gluttonous Roman.
Romans did criticize excess at the table. The philosopher Seneca wrote: “They vomit so that they can eat, and they eat so that they can vomit.” But Davenport and Malik read that as moral criticism, not proof of a daily habit, and note that vomiting was more common in Rome as a medical treatment. A dedicated room for it? That part is the myth.
Bonus fact: The word never went away. According to World Wide Words, theaters in the round still call their access ways vomitoria, today mostly for the actors.
So if you ever walk through a vomitorium, relax. You’re just heading to your seat.