Livy records the first lectisternium at Rome in 399 BCE, performed during a severe plague on instructions drawn from the Sibylline Books, the collection of oracular verses consulted by a specially appointed priestly college in moments of extreme civic emergency. Three pairs of gods, Apollo and Latona, Hercules and Diana, Mercury and Neptune, were honoured by setting up couches, the same kind of reclining dining couches used at an ordinary Roman banquet, on which images or busts of the gods were arranged as if they were guests present at the meal, with an elaborate spread of food laid out before them. Livy notes that the rite was extended, for a period, to private households as well, with Romans opening their doors to strangers in a general spirit of civic reconciliation, a detail that marks the lectisternium as aimed at restoring a broken relationship between Rome and its gods, and among Romans themselves, rather than simply requesting a favour.
The staging is what set the lectisternium apart from ordinary Roman sacrifice, which typically kept the god at a remove, addressed through the smoke of a burnt offering on an altar or a libation poured onto the ground. Presenting the gods as reclining banquet guests, fed the same food a Roman family might set before an honoured human visitor, treated the crisis as a matter needing hospitality and reconciliation as much as propitiation, a notably intimate and anthropomorphic gesture within a religious system that otherwise kept considerable ritual distance between mortals and gods.