Klinai ( Greek for couches; singular klinē), known in

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

as lectus triclinaris, were a type of

ancient furniture Ancient furniture was made of many different materials, including reeds, wood, stone, metals, straws, and ivory. It could also be decorated in many different ways. Sometimes furniture would be covered with upholstery, upholstery being padding, s ...

used by the

ancient Greeks Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cultu ...

in their

symposia ''Symposia'' is a genus of South American araneomorph spiders in the family Cybaeidae, and was first described by Eugène Simon in 1898. Species it contains six species in Venezuela Venezuela (; ), officially the Bolivarian Republic o ...

and by the

ancient Romans In modern historiography, ancient Rome refers to Roman people, Roman civilisation from the founding of the city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom ...

in their somewhat different convivia. In the later part of the

Hellenistic In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...

period an arrangement of three klinai positioned in a 'U' shape developed, which together formed the '' triclinium''. Each ''kline'' of a triclinium offered room for three diners, and the seating arrangement of the reclining dinner guests was given a strict significance. A two-klinai arrangement created a ''biclinium'', with the two couches either at a right angle or facing each other. Biclinium (plural biclinia) may also mean a dining couch for two persons in ancient Rome.

References

{{reflist Couches Ancient Roman furniture