What was the purpose of a vomitorium in Ancient Rome?

So you could not only participate in a good old Roman "pigout" but barf and go back for some more. This was also called "The Roman Beach Diet". This was designed for a small percentage of the very wealthiest.

"It was also a passage situated below or behind a tier of seats in an amphitheatre, an exit through which the crowds could "spew out" at the end of the show." Wikipedia

The Romans would have meals that were literally dozens of courses at times. So you could keep eating, you were encouraged to "purge".

No, not for vomiting. A vomitorium was only an entrance or exit of an amphitheatre. The strange idea that Romans had a room or place set aside for vomiting was dreamt up in modern times. Indeed, Lewis and Short's A Latin Dictionary [the great standard Latin dictionary] gives no such definition. It gives just 'vomitoria: the entrances to the theatres or amphitheatres' and cites book 6 line 4 of the work,Saturnalia by Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius (living in A.D. 400), a critic, as its only source. Note that he used the plural, vomitoria. Vomitorium would be the singular form.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the amphitheatre usage of vomitorium (noting 'usually in the plural') as first appearing in print in English in the C18. The editors then sniffily give this second definition: '2. A room allegedly for vomiting deliberately during feasts, to make way for other food ' [my italics] and dates this usage as first appearing in the C20.

Hoo! What a relief! I've always found it a little depressing to think about entire banquets being held in a bulimic atmosphere. I would find it totally off-putting.

Besides, it made me cynical about the rewards for greed: that you would want more than you need to eat, more clothing than you could wear in a lifetime, have servants to do your work and convey you here and there in an environmentally toxic machine while you hire a personal trainer to motivate you to work out, so that you would be sexually attractive in spite of gluttony, in order to have more sex than you have the capacity to enjoy, and so on, and so on.

Why bother clawing your way to the top, then, anyway?

Makes me tired just thinking about it