What should we make of dietary restriction in antiquity? It is evident there existed two almost separate worlds, of actual practice and of the realm of literature. They occasionally intersect, but generally run parallel to each other. While I have noted how religious or cultural norms dictated the types of food which were shunned, and how on occasion abstinence was required by custom or law, my chief interest has been how literary texts used dietary restriction as fact or metaphor. Some tried (or purported to try) to give a factual account and explain the reasons for this or that food habit or prejudice. However, often this was but the starting point. Authors used notions of excess or abstinence to explore ethnicity, religion and culture. Their opinions often reflected uncertainties and anxieties in a cultural landscape experiencing profound and violent change. We can discern profound misgivings about the level and speed of change, or attempts to assert and define ethnic identity. For example, the sumptuary laws of the late Roman republic were used by some authors, such as the elder Pliny and Aelian, to promote a conservative agenda, whereby conspicuous consumption is both a cause and a symptom of moral and political disintegration. These writers, profoundly uncomfortable with the changes wrought by relatively rapid political expansion, an influx of wealth, and population movements, urge an ideological shift and a return to an heroic uncorrupted past. Dietary simplicity is one facet of their nostalgia. During the Second Sophistic (that resurgence of Greek philosophy and intellectual life that dated from the reign of Nero and continued into the third century ad), Greek-speaking writers sought to reassert Greek identity under Roman rule by reconstructing it in the mould of the Homeric past. Just as Roman writers mythologized their own antecedents in search of a fixed identity, so too did Greeks. Athenaeus’ dinner party existed in a bubble.1 Its location may be Rome in the late second century ad, but its collective mind was far away celebrating and dissecting the literature and ideas of the diners’ Greek heritage: a veritable orgy of cultural self-celebration and an act of voluntary cultural isolation.
Dietary self-abnegation is a vital element of this re-invention. The heroes of the past, be they paragons of Roman republican virtue or the Homeric warrior aristocracy, were partly defined by their simple diet. Excess food, or sophisticated foreign cuisines were metaphors (and hallmarks) of weakness and moral decay.2 Moral and physical strength was founded upon dietary discipline. In a similar vein, philosophers and intellectuals from Plato onwards sought to foster the idea of a separation of mind and body whereby the physical was either irrelevant or detrimental to the spiritual. Food dulled the senses, and prevented mind’s ascendancy. Porphyry exhorted the intelligentsia to embrace vegetarianism and reject the contaminating influences of the sensory world.
If it may be confidently asserted that dietary restriction could be an effective tool for self-identification, then it could also be used to define and classify others. Dietary laws ensured the preservation of Jewish identity in the Diaspora, and maintained ritual purity. However, Jewish diet could also be a way of defining them in the eyes of outsiders. Of the many special laws and customs adhered to by Jews, it is usually their diet – and ad nauseam their refusal to eat pork – that sets them apart in the eyes of Greek and Roman writers
While used to promote a conservative view of the world, diet and its manipulation was also a counter-cultural phenomenon, challenging orthodoxy. The Jews’ pork taboo showed them unwilling to integrate with Graeco-Roman culture. Similarly, vegetarianism is tainted with a refusenik reputation, a rejection of conventional pieties and rituals, its unorthodox status reinforced by association with esoteric ideologies: the mysticism of Pythagoreans or the plea for compassion by Plutarch. This caused the majority to lump them in with Jewish ideology and Egyptian practices. The bean taboo, also associated with the Pythagorean school, raises analogous concerns about the relationship between mainstream ideology and nonconformist behaviour.
This dichotomy between dietary restriction as a force both for conservatism and for unorthodoxy is but one problem we face when attempting to provide a coherent account. Classical authors (representing the moneyed élite, not the majority) may lead us to assume that food was a source of concern for those in authority and needed strict controls to regulate its use. This was true to a degree. The Roman sumptuary laws, and possibly archaic Spartan legislation, reflect an impetus towards moral control and an attempt to keep under control the spending habits (and the political ambitions) of the aristocracy. A restriction upon the amount that could be spent upon food, or the types of food that could be purchased, was regarded necessary to ensure there were sanctions to hand to enforce compliance. Writers might have urged self-discipline, but the existence of these laws (and in the case of the Roman sumptuary laws, legislation that was redrafted and reintroduced over many years) seems to indicate a reluctance on the part of many to heed their advice.
Self-regulation was apparently thought sufficient to control the use of alcohol. In spite of its great potential for misbehaviour and social disorder, evidence does not suggest rules existed to govern its sale and ingestion (even to or by the lower orders). The limits of drinking were often set by peer-pressure. Intoxication was regarded as something that should be policed by one’s fellow drinkers, rather than by laws or governments.
For the majority of people, a restricted diet must have been omnipresent. For them, diet and identity was not an issue. The affluent, however, whose means transcended the view of food as fuel, saw it as a way of expressing iden-tity, when lines marking the boundaries of religion, ethnicity and culture had become blurred, even dissolved. In a world where the terms Greek, Roman and barbarian had ceased to provide an effective means of identification, and when Roman citizenship was extended to millions of people, diet became another way of taking back local and individual identity. Its malleability meant that it could be used to both challenge the status quo and reinforce it.
(1) In spite of the presence of Larensis, the focus of the prandial conversation is the past. Braund argues otherwise; Braund (2000).
(2) The oriental tyrants of Book XII of the Deipnosophistae are characterized by both excess and extravagance. The culinary oddities of Elagabalus act as a metaphor for his Syrian strangeness, his effeminacy and the alien nature of his religious practices; SHA Heliogab.