As we have seen, a restricted diet often helped ancient peoples make sense of the world around them. Culinary demarcation lines were a means of sorting out who belonged where. What was on your plate and in your cup helped to define your ethnicity, your class, your gender. In an age where most people existed on unexciting and rather lumpen fare – and where the daily menu was dictated by what could be grown and whatever the weather allowed – those with greater gastronomic choice had the luxury of using food as a statement.
At least some of those who shunned meat did so to set themselves apart from the carnivorous. Sometimes this was to voice religious dissent or, as in the case of Porphyry, to separate intellectuals and the philosophically enlightened from the unthinking masses. Jews used their dietary laws to avoid contamination and to separate themselves from the Gentiles. Thus, dietary restriction could act as a stratagem for thinking about awkward areas of identity. Eating different foods (or eating those foods in a different way) could act as points of certainty in a shifting ideological landscape. We have seen how the consumption of or abstention from fish (its actual practice and those texts that attempt to ideologically deconstruct fish-eating) could become a short-hand for concerns about social mobility and the potentially corrupting influences of wealth. We have also seen how fish occupied a number of positions along a spectrum of practices ranging from those who did not eat fish but venerated them (Syrians and Egyptians, or Roman aristocrats) to those who ate too many of them (greedy and corrupt Athenian politicians).
In the last chapter, I examined how some societies attempted to regulate the consumption of food and drink. It is, of course, a matter of speculation how far this was done for moral reasons and how far it was to do with the control of social mobility and political factions. However, it is important to remember that ancient authors very much emphasized the moral aspect. Excessive eating was seen as not only physically harmful, but morally wrong. Porphyry and Plutarch point to the way in which meat is deleterious to clear and effective thinking, whilst Cicero points a castigating finger at the intoxication of Mark Antony. Gluttony is often used as a symbol of internal corruption and moral failure (and by implication, abstinence is equated with virtue).
There are parallels with our own experience. Alarm at the rising level of obesity is often expressed in terms of its effect on mortality rates or national expenditure on health. However, it is also perceived as a moral issue. The adipose are stigmatized as lazy, lacking self-discipline. Fat is bad, but thin is morally pure: all hard work and denial. The thin person is conversant with the language of control: they suppress the impulse of hunger, they continue exercising when those around have collapsed in an heap.Thinnessmeanspower; the fat are weak. ‘Control’ is always found in the vocabulary of anorexics. Those who strive towards emaciation may do so for a number of reasons, but often take pride in assuming control of their bodies (when events in their lives are spiralling out of control). They talk of the discipline of self-denial; they see victory in every mouthful refused, defeat in each swallowed morsel.
Corpulence is the physical manifestation of an inner lack of restraint. In antiquity, the prime example of the man who lacks self-control was the tyrant, or absolute monarch. Adored and worshipped by an uncritical populace, freed from the fetters of law or conventional morality, he was at liberty to indulge every whim. He could circumvent or subvert traditional notions of what is appropriate and what is not. He could do things that may be considered unmanly: wear cosmetics or perfume, indulge in homosexual liaisons, with himself in the passive role. He might also eat to excess, as a display of ostentation and wealth, expressing the power to procure foods unavailable to the majority of his subjects.
This equation of overeating and tyrannical behaviour is common in Graeco-Roman texts. It is associated with the perceived decadence of the eastern world. As the Greeks and the Romans saw corruption and moral decay as emanating from the east (in terms of religion, custom and wealth), so the sensual, bloated and cruel monarch embodied all these vices. Tacitus rails in his Annals against foreign customs that corrupt and degrade young Romans.1 In his eyes, Nero, a passionate devotee of Hellenic culture, is the embodiment of all that is wrong with society, debauched, contaminated by foreign customs, increasingly effe-minate, with a weak and corrupted aristocracy. Just as some today complain of the decadence and immorality of youth, making nostalgic comparison with their own thrift, order, and respect for authority, so ancient authors distrusted what they saw as any subversion of hierarchy. This extends beyond concern at social mobility to calling into question the very nature of identity as notions of self capitulate before the blurring of traditional boundaries.
Gluttony, effeminacy and Eastern ethnicity (the last a category hard to define and used by authors in a number of different ways) co-exist in classical texts. If one extreme of ancient identity is the lean, spare warrior, content to live a frugal existence, untainted and untempted by wealth or public acclaim, but still of service to the state, at the other lies the spectre of the bloated, slug-like male/female amalgam. This ambiguously gendered individual is cruel, capricious, sensual and lives for the trappings of wealth, be they physical orna-ment or luxurious banquets.
This image is often deployed to characterize the more problematic emperors, particularly by Suetonius (writing in the second century ad, whose biographies concern the emperors up to Domitian) and in the pages of the Scriptores Historia Augustae (purporting to be have been composed by a selection of authors writing during the reign of Diocletian at the end of the third century ad, although more likely composed by a single hand at a much later date). This second book contains putative biographies of emperors from Hadrian onwards (biographies of Nerva and Trajan are lost to us). Much is of dubious veracity and historians rely on the facts at their peril. Nevertheless, they provide valuable information as to the way ancient moral character was viewed. The fact that the character analysis of the SHA continues Suetonian motifs points to the long-term validity of the stereotype of the voracious and erratic monster that could be the absolute ruler.2
The twelfth book of Athenaeus is filled with examples of the archetypal eastern tyrant. They mainly, though not exclusively, originated in Persia.3 There were also several Greek territories renowned for their devotion to luxury and epicurean living. The southern Italian city of Sybaris is a notable example (giving rise to sybarites), and Sicily, too, had the same reputation. Etruscans and Egyptians came in for much the same description. Their perceived vices were embodied by classical authors in the person of the absolute ruler. Here, indolence, effeminacy and gluttony were magnified, as was a preoccupation with novelty.4 Setting aside perfumery and clothing and attending only to eating, Athenaeus’ inventory of tyrants cited On Heracleia by Nymphis of Heracleia who described Dionysius, the tyrant of that city, as choked by the folds of flesh that were the consequence of his morbid obesity.5 Athenaeus also quoted Agarthachides on Magas of Cyrene in the third century bc, who suffered similar corpulence and died because of it.6 In Egypt, both Ptolemy VII and his son Alexander were of massive girth. Ptolemy earned himself the nickname Physcon (Fat Belly).7 By contrast, Agarthachides noted that the virtuous Spartans (whose austerity we have already discussed) used to hold regular inspections of naked warriors to check that none had a protruding belly.8
The presumption of many philosophers and intellectuals was that preoccupation with food (certainly with meat) distracted from mental acti-vities and contemplation of the divine. Pangs of hunger were a reminder of bodily demands, but could be resisted by the exercise of will. Hence greed implied no self-control. The ruler unable to resist physical desires was unable to make balanced moral judgements. As was noted in my opening chapter, both Claudius and Nero were judged poor rulers. They were self-indulgent, in thrall to slaves and women (in particular Nero’s mother and Claudius’ last wife Agrippina), sadistic and unworthy to exercise power. What is unclear is whether their gluttony and lack of control was the cause or symptom of their failings. Another emperor characterized by incompetence, cruelty and a vast appetite was Vitellius, who reigned for a few months in ad 69. Our principal source is Suetonius who described his eating habits as follows: ‘He divided up his feasts into three or four parts: breakfast, lunch, dinner and a carousal. He was able to indulge in all this by using emetics.’9 His claim to fame was his invention of a dish called ‘the Shield of Minerva’, named for the enormous platter upon which it was served. It contained a miasma of ingredients, sourced from all over the empire, including pike livers, peacock and pheasant brains and flamingo tongues. It was cooked to celebrate his arrival in Rome as emperor. It was said that two thousand fish and seven thousand birds were served at this feast. 10
An interesting fact about these three emperors is that their great appe-tites appeared unnatural. The word was that they relied on emetics to rid themselves of food.11 Nero may have done this for reasons of vanity and to check his weight, but Claudius and Vitellius forcibly ejected food to make room for more. The impetus was greed and it pushed the body beyond the limits what was physically and, by implication, morally permissible. An emperor is an exceptional individual and some separation from the ordinary man was understood, but stuffing one’s face until one vomits was not perhaps the most desirable image (at least in the eyes of imperial biographers).
An example of such tensions is the boy-emperor Elagabalus.12 This strange figure represented all the ideals and attitudes that were the very opposite to how Romans liked to view themselves. This teenager, master of much of the known world, threatened to smash it apart. He was Syrian, the supposed son of the emperor Caracalla, dominated by his mother Julia Soaemis and by his grandmother Julia Maesa (sister of Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus). Elagabalus flaunted his bisexuality, he cross-dressed and indulged in extreme forms of opulence. In addition, he advocated a form of (pagan) monotheism, rejecting the Roman pantheon. Unmanly depravities, unacceptable behaviour and his blurring and erosion of the limits of identity made him a fascinating but ultimately perilous figure to the author(s) of the SHA. Dio told how this refusal to accept a settled identity extended even to his gender:
He brought his licentiousness to such a point that he asked his doctors to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body, having offered them great sums to do this.13
The Scriptores Historia Augustae devoted disproportionate space to his banquets and culinary innovations. These included never serving seafood when dining near the coast, but only when far inland.14 He also used to serve dishes fashioned out of wood or stone to the bemusement of his guests.15 For him, meals were more than opportunities for nutrition, they were an arena for artistic statement, a display of largesse, chances to stage elaborate practical jokes. The SHA’s fascination was evidently down to curiosity, and might also demonstrate the centrality of food habits to the depiction of character. The book tapped into a cliché equating tyranny to corrupt eastern morals and overeating. Just as Augustus was good and therefore abstemious, and the philosophical equanimity of Marcus Aurelius was marked by lack of interest in fine food, so the despot was a wanton homosexual (who takes the passive role in intercourse), wilful, cowardly, drenched in perfume, addicted to luxury and an outrageous glutton. The connection between abstinence and virtue is taken up by the early Christians. Such a view was a reaction to the literary topos, if not the reality, of the profligate, fat pagan despot. This notion has a new currency today, superseding our earlier stereotype of the jolly giant.
(1) Tac. Ann. 14.15
(2) For a stereotype is what it is, although of course it may provide a good indication as to the types of common prejudice that was current at the type (or a motif that may have reflected the ideologies or concerns of the text’s potential readership).
(3) Athenaeus asserts that Persians were the first race to become notorious for their devotion to pleasure; Ath. Deip. XII. 513e–f.
(4) Again, the Persians have a reputation as culinary innovators; Ath. Deip. XII. 515b–c. This linking of experimentation with food and tyranny is taken up again in the life of Elagabalus (also known as Heliogabalus) in the SHA.
(5) Athen. Deip. XII. 549a–b.
(6) Athen. Deip. XII. 550c.
(7) Athen. Deip. XII. 550b.
(8) Athen. Deip. XII. 550d.
(9) Suet. Vitell. 13; for more on his gluttony, see Greenhalgh (1975), 114.
(10) Suet. Vitell. 13.2.
(11) For Vitellius and emetics, see Suet. Vitell. 13.1; Dio Epitome Bk LXIV 2.2; (1975), 114; Crichton (1996), 203–207.
(12) For Elagabalus, see Kettenhofen (1979); Frey (1989).
(13) Cassius Dio LXXX. 16. 7.
(14) SHA Heliogab. XXIII.8–XXIV.1.
(15) SHA Heliogab. XXV.7–9.