A Companion to Food in the Ancient World

John Wilkins, Robin Nadeau, John Wilkins, Robin Nadeau

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118878194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Companion to Food in the Ancient World presents a comprehensive overview of the cultural aspects relating to the production, preparation, and consumption of food and drink in antiquity.

• Provides an up-to-date overview of the study of food in the ancient world

• Addresses all aspects of food production, distribution, preparation, and consumption during antiquity

• Features original scholarship from some of the most influential North American and European specialists in Classical history, ancient history, and archaeology

• Covers a wide geographical range from Britain to ancient Asia, including Egypt and Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, regions surrounding the Black Sea, and China

• Considers the relationships of food in relation to ancient diet, nutrition, philosophy, gender, class, religion, and more

PART 1
Literature and Approaches

CHAPTER 1
Food in Greek Literature

Richard Hunter and Demetra Koukouzika

Food

In the fourth book of Homer’s Odyssey, Menelaus tells the young Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, who has come to visit him in search of information about his father, about how he (Menelaus) was delayed on his return from Troy by adverse wind conditions on the island of Pharos off the Egyptian coast. Supplies were running low, and with them what strength Menelaus and his comrades had left, but Eidothea, daughter of Proteus, the old man of the sea, took pity on them:

She met me as I roamed by myself, apart from my companions. They spent their time wandering around the island, fishing with bent hooks, for hunger gnawed at their stomachs.

Homer, Odyssey 4.367–9

This is one of the passages in which, as has long been recognized, the tale of Menelaus’ homeward voyage, his nostos, foreshadows that of Odysseus, but does so in a lower, less heroic key. The distinction which Menelaus draws between himself and his crew is repeated when Odysseus and his men are stranded on the island where the cattle of the sun-god graze; hunger forces Odysseus’ men to fish (12.332 repeats 4.369), and finally, when Odysseus is absent and asleep, his men succumb to their hunger and kill some of the cattle, with disastrous results. Hunger and the incessant demands of the belly (gastêr), a theme that resonates much more loudly in the Odyssey than in the Iliad (cf., e.g., Od. 7.215–18), becomes in fact a leitmotif of the scenes on Ithaca in which Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, tests the suitors and plots their destruction. While the feasting suitors consume Odysseus’ flocks, leaving it to the careful and trustworthy Eumaeus to preserve the dwindling stocks as best he can (cf. esp. 14.5–28), the theme of the hunger that pursues the non-élite and outcast members of society is foregrounded in Book 18, in which the disguised Odysseus is forced to fight against the beggar Iros for a haggis (gastêr) “full of fat and blood” (18.45, on which see the notes of Russo, Fernandez-Galiano, & Heubeck, 1992, 49–50, and Steiner, 2010, 162). The seer Theoclymenus realizes that the day of death is at hand for the suitors when Athena distracts their wits, they are afflicted with weird fits of laughter, and “the meat they ate was foul with blood” (Od. 20.345–8).

However, what particularly attracted the attention of learned readers in antiquity about the respective tales of Menelaus and Odysseus was not, in fact, the way they are used to differentiate the heroes from those beneath them, but rather the focus on the eating of fish as a food of “last resort.” It was noted at least as early as the fourth century BC that fish did not form a regular part of the Homeric diet (cf. Pl. R. 3.404b12-c3, Eub. fr. 118 KA = 120 Hunter); in the Iliad, in fact, fishing only occurs in similes (cf. 5.487, 16.406–8, 747 (diving for sea-squirts, a wretchedly unheroic occupation), 24.80–2), and Hellenistic scholars, the so-called “separators,” who believed that the two poems were the work of different poets, used the absence of any fish-eating from the Iliad as one piece of evidence (scholium on Il. 16.747). The greatest Homeric scholar of the Hellenistic period, Aristarchus, argued against the “separators” that Homer minimized references to fish and seafood because it was trivial (mikroprepes), just as “he does not show them eating vegetables” (scholium on Il. 16.747, cf. Ath. 25d). The matter has been much discussed in modern scholarship (cf. Davidson, 1997, 11–20), but it does seem most likely, as Aristarchus essentially realized, that Homer’s focus on meat-eating, particularly as an accompaniment to sacrifice, is part of the creation of a heroic, distanced world, and is not to be taken as a realistic reflection of élite life in the Bronze Age. The greater prominence of fishing and fish-eating, even if under constraint, in the Odyssey, is both a reflection of that poem’s greater concern with “the ordinary man” and the lessening of poetic distance between the events related and the Homeric audience (cf. 19.113, cited below).

As this example demonstrates, food and its uses in narrative carry symbolic value, as they do in many cultures and literary traditions. The cannibalism of the Cyclops and the corrupt and incessant feasts of the suitors both offend against the privileged good order of a well run society, as is seen, for example, in the paradigmatic episode at the beginning of Odyssey 3 in which Nestor and his sons greet Telemachus and the disguised Athena on the Pylian shore and, after completing their sacrifice, offer their visitors “roast meat” and wine. The most famous expression of this good order in antiquity was Odysseus’ so-called “Golden Verses” from the start of Book 9:

I say that there is nothing more delightful than when good cheer holds the whole demos, and through the hall feasters sit in rows listening to a bard, and beside them are tables full of bread and meat, and a wine-steward draws wine from a mixing-bowl and pours it into the cups.

The eating of food is, or should be, a sign of sharing in a community; Achilles refuses to eat as one manifestation of removing himself from the Achaean fellowship in his grief for Patroclus (Il. 24.129), but when he has accepted Priam’s offer of ransom for the body of Hector, thus returning to the shared world of heroic social values, he himself urges Priam to share a meal with him, an act that seals their agreement (24.601–28). This social value of eating is also stressed through the fact that, in the formulaic Homeric mode of composition, more verses are standardly devoted to the preparation and distribution of food than to the actual process of eating, which is often dismissed in a single verse, “but when they had set aside their desire (eros) for drinking and eating.”

The manifestation of these ideas at the macro-level is the flourishing of the land and the food supply in a justly governed state. The disguised Odysseus tells Penelope that she is like a just king, under whom

the dark earth bears wheat and barley, trees are laden with fruit, flocks give birth without fail, the sea provides fish, and the people flourish because of his good rule.

Homer, Odyssey 19.111–4

So too for Hesiod, the presence of justice in a community is manifested in peace and the absence of famine:

For them the earth bears abundant life, on the mountains the oak bears acorns and bees live in its center; thick-fleeced sheep are weighed down by their wool, women bear children who resemble their parents, and the people flourish with good things continually. They do not travel on ships, for the life-giving earth bears crops.

Hesiod, Works and Days 232–7

The Works and Days is centrally concerned with the relation between justice and the ordering of agricultural life; the struggle for food is what determines life, and famine is a reality, as indeed it was throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Work and the practice of justice will mean that “Famine will hate you, but you will be loved by fair-garlanded Demeter, the revered lady, who will fill your barn with the stuff of life” (299–301). Some four centuries after Hesiod, Callimachus told the story of Erysichthon, who inspired Demeter’s anger by cutting down the trees in a grove sacred to her in order to build a hall for “constant feasting,” itself a wasteful disregard of the proper use of food and resources. Demeter punishes this impious desire by precisely inspiring Erysichthon with insatiable hunger, so that he not only eats his parents out of house and home, but also eats “the mules … and the racehorse and the war-horse and the white-tailed creature [? weasel] which made the little animals [i.e. mice] tremble” (Callimachus Hymn to Demeter 107–10). The prayer with which the hymn ends shows the persistence of the Hesiodic ideal throughout antiquity, as indeed we would expect in any pre-industrial society:

Hail, goddess, and preserve this city in concord and prosperity, make everything abundant in the fields: feed the cattle, bring fruits, bring crops, bring the harvest, support peace also, so he who sows may also reap.

Callimachus, Hymn to Demeter 134–7

Eating was not always a laughing matter.

Food, however, could be. A principal inheritor of the Hesiodic vision that associated plentiful food with a Golden Age (Op. 116-20) and a world of peace and concord was Attic, as also Sicilian (Epicharmus), comedy. In comedy, however, such visions of plenty had more to do with wish-fulfillment and the carnival world created by these dramas – note especially the culinary conclusion to Aristophanes’ Ekklesiazousai – than with moralizing protreptic, as in Hesiod. Food could still, of course, carry argumentative force. In Aristophanes’ Acharnians the central character makes a private peace treaty with the Spartans, which means that all of the good things of Greece of which the blockaded Athenians are deprived can flow into his private market. Particularly welcome is the eel from Lake Kopais that a Boeotian merchant brings:

O dearest girl, desired for so long, you have come, longed for by comic choruses and dear to Morychos. Servants, bring out my grill and the fan! Children, behold the noblest eel which has come as we desired after five long years. Greet her, children! I will give you charcoal in honor of this lady who has come to visit. Carry her out! Not even in death may I ever be separated from you, wrapped in beets!

Aristophanes, Acharnians 885–94

Dicaiopolis’ emotion is marked by an amusingly paratragic tone (we may be reminded of Electra greeting her brother at Soph. El. 1224ff); the return and recognition of such “dear ones” marks, as in tragedy, that the tables are turning and things are definitely looking up.

Comedy’s delight in ...