Taste and the Ancient Senses

Kelli C. Rudolph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317515401
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Olives, bread, meat and wine: it is deceptively easy to evoke ancient Greece and Rome through a few items of food and drink. But how were their tastes different from ours? How did they understand the sense of taste itself, in relation to their own bodies and to other modes of sensory experience? This volume, the first of its kind to explore the ancient sense of taste, draws on the literature, philosophy, history and archaeology of Greco-Roman antiquity to provide answers to these central questions.

By surveying and probing the literary and material remains from the Archaic period to late antiquity, contributors investigate the cultural and intellectual development towards attitudes and theories about taste. These specially commissioned chapters also open a window onto ancient thinking about perception and the body. Importantly, these authors go beyond exploring the functional significance of taste to uncover its value and meaning in the actions, thoughts and words of the Greeks and Romans. Taste and the Ancient Senses presents a full range of interpretative approaches to the gustatory sense, and provides an indispensable resource for students and scholars of classical antiquity and sensory studies.

1

Tastes of Greek poetry

From Homer to Aristophanes

Sarah Hitch

Food enjoys a particularly well-established and central place in classical Greek literature, which provides a unique and sophisticated reflection of the perils experienced by all subsistence economies. From the earliest sources, Homer and Hesiod (approximately 750 BCE), food is one of the most powerful and frequently used symbols of social and cultural identity.¹ By the Classical period, food as a social and cultural marker was also a literary topos and the subject of literary endeavours in its own right. A hexameter poem in the Hesiod tradition was written on the subject of fish in the fourth century BCE and it was joined by the development of cookbooks and professional cooks.² Although this development reflects the spread of literacy in the Classical period, equally important is the increased interest in food preparation, ingredients and the status conferred by food imports following the Persian wars in the early fifth century BCE. Additionally, the choice of foods available to wealthy Greeks, as portrayed in the literature of the period, highlights the pleasures offered by individual foods, and in this respect the concept of “taste” comes to the fore.

In this chapter, I trace the parallel, but not synonymous, development of the poetics of eating and tasting. In subsequent chapters, Telò and Gowers will focus on more subtle reflections of taste in Greek and Roman literature; whereas I look at two critical contexts for the development of a poetic discourse of food, eating and taste. Epic and lyric poetry and, most of all, Attic comedy contribute to the establishment of taste itself as a social concept. This topic has been relatively overlooked by modern scholars, in contrast to the recent flurry of interest in ancient foodways and the role of the archaic symposium in the development of Greek poetry and its self-reflexive, antagonistic poetics of authorship.³ The presentation of food in Greek literature – and to some extent its taste – has been the subject of recent scholarship, but in terms of literary development the trajectory of food and taste is quite different. Eating, as a primary illustration of wealth and religious piety in early poetry, becomes an anecdotal expression of greed in Classical Athens under the influence of a sort of market globalization of food and increasing reliance on imports. Taste, by contrast, begins its poetic life as the expression of choice; the Greek verb geuomai “taste” is etymologically linked to the English word “choose”, and the post-epic metaphors of taste embrace and modify notions of danger and experimentation implied by the Greek concept of taste.⁴

In epic, taste generally refers to an experiment of a fleeting or unique type rather than highlighting a connection with consumption, since epic heroes are not given a choice of food. The alimentary abundance provided by Homeric kings or barbaric meals in Odysseus’ travels mark both the wealth and power of the providers and the subservient position of their guests. Accepting the generous meal provided by a host is a sign of the acceptance of his power, and the Homeric king often demonstrates his wealth and power through feasting. The feast, created at his demand, offers the guests no choice other than acceptance or denial of his graciousness.⁵ Indeed, the pleasure of Homeric food derives from the community and is ultimately about control through provision for groups, predicated on the basic fear of starvation. Unlike eating, taste cannot be controlled: it is experienced, rather than created. Taste in Homer represents a choice of experiences, and is highly individualized. Groups feast, while individuals taste. Since there is no individualized experience of consumption in Homer, there is no emphasis on the taste of what is consumed. An exception which proves the rule, so to speak, is the Cyclops’ greedy consumption of wine provided by Odysseus. Odysseus gives Polyphemus wine in order to get him drunk so as to incapacitate him and escape. The Cyclops drinks alone and does not mix the wine with water, both signs of his monstrous nature and abstention from normative social rules or religious piety. The wine is described as “pleasing” to him, and he compares it to ambrosia and nectar to signify how pleasurable the taste is for him.⁶ However, taste terminology is not used, nor does the Cyclops himself describe the wine as sweet – his taste experience is focalized by the narrator.

The implicit sensual pleasures of taste, primarily “sweetness”, describe a range of activities in archaic poetry, but become increasingly associated with poetry itself and the gifts of the Muses.⁷ Taste is a fitting metaphor for such encounters because the relationship between the Muses and the singer is a personal one, and the performance of the inspired bard is typically personalized and individualized in Homer and Hesiod. As we will see, the nurturing role of the Muses as dispensers of sweetness merges in archaic lyric with the social importance of fighting bravely in combat resulting in an antagonistic poetics of taste under the influence of the world’s first “food culture”. In the fifth century BCE, when the choice of food becomes the predominant expression of social identity, rather than its production method or frequency of consumption, we will see that the prestige of food moves into the expression of artistic production.

Food and tasting in early Greek epic

In Homer and Hesiod, descriptions of eating emphasize surplus and deprivation, reflections of the underlying threat of starvation faced by subsistence communities. The taste of food is not at issue, nor are diners described as choosing among varieties of food. Outside of the sensory pleasure of eating, a culinary discourse of pleasure is created around abundance and entertainment at the feast. As we approach the topic of taste, we must observe a distinction, at times slight, between food, eating and taste. Food triggers a range of associations and contexts for human beings, some culturally determined and others instinctive. In Greek texts, food is often representative of positive, even Utopian, settings, as we shall see. Eating, on the other hand, carries the more sinister undertones of avoidance of starvation and is often about control: lavish banquets provided by Homeric kings are displays of status and achievement, with the individual’s worth to his community expressed in terms of invitation to and apportionment of meat at the feast.⁸ An illustration of this distinction between eating and food are the two most common Greek words for food: sitos, the staple essential to survival, usually bread, and opson, what you put on top – the relish, such as the onion served by King Nestor’s wife, Hecamede, in Homer’s Iliad.⁹ In other words, eating is a necessity, and the food consumed can be generically described as sitos. Luxury foods such as roast meat and wine and accompaniments to food for the purpose of enhancing taste elevate the meal from eating to feasting and are not usually described as sitos. The idea of “taste” in such contexts is less about savouring the flavours, as we might expect in colloquial English, and more about the way food habits express an individual’s lack of self-restraint through excessive relish consumption beyond the fulfilment of hunger and avoidance of starvation.

Eating, as a necessity, is portrayed in a positive light when abundant food is provided by the royal host to create an environment of leisure and social harmony. As such, the effortless and abundant supply of food, rather than its taste, is essential. Numerous lengthy descriptions of the king’s banquet, one of the type scenes in Homeric poetry, are repeated at intervals throughout the poems and are nearly identical in form. Generally the host, usually the king, provides a meat dinner for his guests, sometimes with a special portion of meat for the guest of honour. These feasts in Homer are frequently concluded by a formulaic verse. Homer’s heroes can feast until their hunger is satisfied, described here as literally “throwing aside their desire (eros)”, signalling that the pleasure afforded by the feast is in the assuagement of hunger.¹⁰ We can compare a description using a related verb (eratizein) of a starving lion “desiring” meat.¹¹ The need for sustenance is basic for all living beings, and hunger is portrayed throughout early epic as one of the most shameful of mortal ailments; for this reason Odysseus comments to the Phaeacian king Alcinous: “But let me have dinner, though I’m in distress, for nothing else is more like a dog than the hateful belly.”¹² The best of the heroes and their rich king can feast endlessly to show their prosperity, and to distinguish themselves from animals and barbarians in their civilized consumption of meat, but the sensual pleasures of food are not at the forefront of these depictions. The erotic associations of food and sex so predominant in fifth-century BCE Attic comedy have not yet developed. In this respect, desire for foods or tastes is also part of the generally neutralized descriptions of human passions in Homeric poetry.¹³ Although later authors, and philosophers in particular, were impressed with the dispassion of the Homeric heroes, recently scholars have interpreted such detachment as a sign of distinguishing Greek poetry from the more visceral Near Eastern epics.¹⁴ This moderated picture of sensory pleasures confines the frequent association of Homeric banquets with pleasure to the social sphere experience, rather than to the enjoyment of food itself. Pleasure (hēdos) comes from the company gathered and the freedom to sit at leisure rather than the sensation of eating or taste.¹⁵ Conversely, in Homer’s Odyssey, the greed and arrogance of Penelope’s suitors is expressed through the frequency of their feasting, the absence of the host provider and, most importantly, their behaviour at their feasts.¹⁶ Thus, eating in Homer is rather narrowly depicted as either a group activity reflecting social hierarchy or a perilous necessity scarcely distinguishable from the needs of animals.

Unlike eating, food in the Homeric epics is frequently objectified through an idealized gaze, best expressed in the descriptions of utopian places favoured by gods. Divine places are full of food, spontaneously produced.¹⁷ Hesiod’s golden race take pleasure in banquets and parties: no specifics are given other than the fact that the food grows effortlessly (Works and Days 115–19). Equally, prolific food production, usually trees which abound in fruit year-round, is a key descriptor of places favoured, visited or inhabited by deities. The difficulty and danger faced by subsistence farmers are not far from these idealized images and even form the basis of Hesiod’s hexameter poem Works and Days, which utilizes many of the same thematic associations of hunger and the blessi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: On the tip of the tongue: making sense of ancient taste
• 1 Tastes of Greek poetry: From Homer to Aristophanes
• 2 Tastes of reality: Epistemology and the senses in ancient philosophy
• 3 Tastes in ancient botany, medicine and science: Bitter herbs and sweet honey
• 4 Tastes of Homer: Matro’s gastroaesthetic tour through epic
• 5 Tasting the Roman world
• 6 Tastes from beyond: Persephone’s pomegranate and otherworldly consumption in antiquity
• 7 Tastes of Roman Italy: Early Roman expansion and taste articulation
• 8 Tastes and digestion: Archaeology and medicine in Roman Italy
• 9 Tastes of meat in antiquity: Integrating the textual and zooarchaeological evidence
• 10 Tastes in the Roman provinces: An archaeobotanical approach to socio-cultural change
• 11 Tastes of wine: Sensorial wine analysis in ancient Greece
• 12 Tastes of the extraordinary: Flavour lists in Imperial Rome
• 13 Tastes of danger and pleasure in early and late antique Christianity
• Bibliography
• Index