Oddone Longo
Human Beings and the Gods
There is no doubt that, for the Greeks, the fundamental distinction between the human world and that of the gods was that the former was mortal and the latter immortal. However, it should be recognized immediately that there existed an equally rigid distinction regarding the food and drink each group consumed. We need only recall those “foods” that, denied to human beings, were reserved for the gods: substances that gave life and that were destined to renew, day by day, divine immortality. Among these were nectar, which held violent death at bay, and ambrosia, whose immortalizing function was expressed as the negation of moros, the fate of death that inexorably awaited all mortal creatures.
No less necessary than the first two substances, inasmuch as it expressed human worship of the gods, was a third “food,” useless to human beings. This was the smoke that rose from the altars on which were burned those parts of animals—cows, goats, and pigs—that were destined for the gods, the other parts of which were periodically eaten by human beings.
The “otherness” of divine nourishment, when compared with that of people, was expressed by dividing the body of the sacrificial victim into edible and inedible. The edible parts were eaten at the banquet that was considered an integral part of the sacrifice, while the inedible parts, once they were burned and transformed into smoke, provided the gods with the extra nourishment they needed.
The distinction between parts for humans and those for the gods (bones, fat, and some entrails) was sanctioned in Greek tradition by the myth of Prometheus, who tricked Zeus by sharing out the “sacrificial victim” to the advantage of human beings (Hes. Theog. 535 ff.). The fact that the sacrificial smoke was considered an integral and indispensable part of the divine diet was stressed in a comic vein by Aristophanes in The Birds, where he describes how the Olympian gods would risk starvation if the birds succeeded in their plan to intercept the sacrificial smoke.
“One is the race of men, and one of gods,” as Pindar said. The division between their two natures is made concrete, as we have said, in the opposition between mortality and immortality, strictly linked in its turn to their respective food codes—one for men and one for gods. A god who was so tempted by the smell of grilled meats at a banquet that he partook of them as men did would lose his divine nature by doing so. He would be demoted to the ranks of men, a risk that Hermes ran in Homer’s Hymn to Hermes (l. 287), where the young god, “desirous of meat,” is forced to abstain.
By the same token, if a human being were, by some extraordinary circumstance, allowed to eat the food of a deity—even that of a minor god or nymph, such as Calypso—he or she would acquire immortality and thus a similar, if not equal, nature to that of the gods. This is why Odysseus, whose only desire was to return to Ithaca, rejected the deity’s offer of immortality and, despite sharing her bed and table, ate only “human” food that had been specially laid out for him (Od. V.194 ff.).
This separation and alimentary dualism is reinforced by a further opposition within the human condition: food for the living and food for the dead. Whoever ate the food of the dead would automatically enter the kingdom of the dead and be forbidden to return to the land of the living. Likewise, any human being who failed to eat the food of the dead would not be admitted to the underworld. This happened to the companions of Odysseus when they ate the lotus in the land of the lotus eaters. The rule was also valid in the world of the gods, as can be seen in Homer’s Hymn to Demeter, when Hades offers the food of the dead to Persephone in order to be able to marry her. Once swallowed by the unknowing Persephone, the pomegranate seeds allowed her to spend half of her life with the god of the underworld.
These distinctions between human beings and gods and between the living and the dead are no more than generic, however. “Humans,” in the simplest sense of the term, have never existed outside a specific cultural context. Every culture, at whatever stage it might be (and even more so at a rudimentary stage), tends to identify “humans” with the members of its own group and to attribute to those who do not belong to that group “nonhuman” characteristics. We shall now consider the extent to which this is true, as far as food is concerned, in Greek culture. For the Greeks, “humans” were, first and foremost, “bread eaters”—that is, consumers of cereals (barley, grain) that had been cooked in some way. This basic cereal-based diet distinguished Greeks not only from nonagricultural peoples but also from those who cultivated and ate different cereals. In the eyes of the Greeks (who ate barley), spelt, for example, was considered the staple of Italic peoples.
This “ideological” position was the product of the basic Greek diet throughout the Hellenic peninsula and the Aegean islands: 80 percent of a Greek’s daily calories came from cereals, primarily barley and grain. The proteins and fats in their diet were provided by secondary agricultural produce (pulses and olive oil) and by the rare, and thus sacralized, consumption of animal flesh. The comic poet Philemon (fr. 105K.) described how the “most just” possession for a Greek (in a significant shift from an alimentary code to an ethical one) was a small plot of land that would offer him everything that “human nature” required: “grain, oil, wine, dried figs, and honey.” What else could one desire? The choice offered by Philemon was the “Mediterranean triad” of grain, olives, and wine, with its restricted use of foods with a high sugar content (honey being the only sweetener adopted). What was missing from the poet’s list were pulses (an essential source of calories as well as enzymes and vitamins), dairy products (especially those from goats, which enriched the diet with protein and animal fats), and fish, both fresh and preserved, much appreciated by the Greeks whenever circumstances allowed.
Diet and Lifestyle
In light of these considerations, it should come as no surprise that dietary “otherness”—that is, “the food of others”—does not concern only the gods and the dead. It is primarily, though not exclusively, a feature of descriptions of an ethnographical and anthropological nature (whether “real” or “imaginary”). Within the Greek world as a whole, diets inevitably varied a great deal in relation to economic and social differences. Literary sources include such examples as the robustly meat-based diet of the Homeric heroes (both Greek and non-Greek) in the Iliad and the endless banquet of the suitors in the Odyssey. But it is largely in comparison with other cultures that the Greek diet (“diet” as “life” or bios) acquired its specificity.
Greek anthropology had two moments of glory. The first was the work of the historians, geographers, and doctors of Asia Minor, whose work—with the exception of Herodotus, the Hippocratic corpus, and fragments from other authors—has been mostly lost. The second coincided with Greek-Macedonian expansion under Alexander and continued with the establishment of his powerful successors.
Both these moments were times of intense cultural interaction between Hellenic and non-Hellenic peoples. During the former, this interaction occurred between highly civilized Greek cities in Asia Minor, such as Miletus, Smyrna, and Halicarnassus, and the recently established Achaemenid empire, with its similarly Indo-European matrix and undoubtedly high level of culture. This interaction, later to become dependency, led to more or less direct contact with the ethnic groups and cultures belonging to the empire, apart from the Medians and Persians.
During the second period, Greek-Macedonian expansion over a vast empire stretching to the borders of India, and the establishment after Alexander’s death of his various successors, obliged those holding political power to obtain as detailed a knowledge as possible of their subjects’ lands, both geographically and ethnographically. Journeys of discovery, with the aim of drafting reports for the Hellenic rulers, were carried out. Some of their material has survived in the form of extracts and paraphrases such as those found in the works of Diodorus Siculus and Photius dealing with the expeditions made by Agatharchides for the Ptolemaic kings. Although these are incomplete, they provide us with a picture of the cultures (and, above all, the diets) of “barbarian,” or even “savage,” peoples both inside and outside the boundaries of the various kingdoms.
Let us begin with the Ionic age and Herodotus, who, apart from being “the father of history,” was also the father of anthropology, or, if one prefers, ethnography. In contrast to the work of his predecessors and contemporaries—the historians, travelers, and “ethnographers” of Ionia—that of Herodotus had the fortune of surviving intact to this day, a fortune it probably deserved.
An episode in Herodotus provides us with a significant example of the profound interaction between the culture of the Greek cities of Ionia and the Achaemenid civilization, an interaction that the ideological interpretation of the “Persian wars” as “wars of independence” has blurred. When describing Cambyses’ failed campaign in Egypt (III.22 ff.), Herodotus does not hesitate to offer the Persian diet as a model of civilization and, above all, of Mediterranean alimentary civilization, contrasting it with the exotic diet of the Ethiopian kingdom. In an imaginary dialogue between the messengers of the king of Persia and the king of Ethiopia, Herodotus makes a cultural comparison between the two kingdoms (for the Greeks, the Ethiopians were halfway between history and myth). An essential part of the dialogue is the contrast between two different dietary regimens. The Ethiopian king expresses a mixture of surprise and disgust when he discovers that the Persian diet is based on wheat bread, given that Ethiopians lived on milk and boiled meat. When he then learns that dung is used to fertilize wheat, he concludes that bread eaters are neither more nor less than dung eaters.
The other section in Herodotus that deserves consideration for the quality of the information it provides regarding food is the ethnographical description of Scythia and the lands around its farthest borders. This is almost certainly the region of western Asia that is farthest from the civilizations of the Mediterranean, even though the lands that correspond to modern-day Ukraine were known as “the granary of Greece” (and of Athens!).
The Scythians known as nomads were horse breeders and clearly knew nothing about agriculture. They lived almost entirely on horse milk and its by-products (IV.2.19), a diet that for the Greeks was, to say the least, unusual. Alongside these were another group of Scythians known as farmers or plowers. Although this group grew cereals, they did not eat the produce themselves but sold it, probably to the Greeks. Herodotus does not describe the diet of these farmers, but it is likely that they too lived on milk products.
Finally, Herodotus describes a third group of Scythians curiously known as Greco-Scythians, or Callipidae, occupying the river basin of the Borysthenes (now the Dnieper). Although they shared most of the customs of the other Scythians, they grew cereals and ate them. They were also therefore bread eaters, and it was probably this characteristic that earned them the epithet “Greek,” which, despite its incompatibility with “Scythian,” simply referred to their diet. Apart from bread, these people also ate other agricultural produce, such as millet, lentils, onions, and garlic, just as the Greeks did (IV.17).
Beyond the farthest borders of Scythia we find populations whose dietary codes shifted dramatically from human to inhuman—populations, in other words, among which cannibalism was a more or less widespread practice. In these borderline cultural areas, Scythians and non-Scythians overlapped. The original Androphagi, who lived beyond the desert at the edge of Scythia, were, naturally enough, also nomads (IV.18). They dressed like Scythians but spoke a different language. Like the Homeric Cyclops, they knew neither justice (dike) nor law (nomos), and their habits were more savage than those of other men. Despite these characteristics, however, Herodotus is uncertain of their ethnic identity, claiming that they are “the only Scythians to eat human flesh” (IV.106).
In other places, we find examples of occasional, ritualized cannibalism. Among the Issedones, when a man’s father died, his sons brought sheep to his house as a sacrificial offering. The sheep and the body of the dead man were jointed and sliced and the two meats, mixed together, were cooked and offered to the guests (IV.26). In other respects, the Issedones had a strong sense of justice (they were dikaioi). The Massagetae had a similar custom. Animal breeders and fishermen, these people generally lived on milk and fish and clearly knew nothing about agriculture. When one of their number became very old, he was sacrificed along with his sheep. The meats were then mixed, boiled, and eaten as part of a funerary banquet (I.216).
In the “Scythian ethnography” of Herodotus, therefore, we move from a positive extreme, represented by the Greco-Scythians of the Borysthenes, both cultivators and consumers of cereals, to the negative extreme of the Androphagi, habitual cannibals. Between these two extremes were the farmer Scythians, who did not eat the grain they produced, and the nomadic Scythians, who raised horses and lived on milk and its by-products.
The first moment of glory in Greek anthropology was therefore that of Herodotus and his culture. The second was the Hellenistic age. We shall now consider some examples of the way in which the “food of the others” was described by an ethnographer such as Agatharchides (whose work, as we have seen, has reached us in the summaries of Diodorus Siculus and Photius).
In the center of Africa, at the farthest borders of the desert, lived the Acridophagi, or locust eaters, who caught their prey by lighting fires as the insects approached. The fires not only killed the locusts but also smoked them. In order to make them more digestible, the Acridophagi dipped them in brine. These marinated locusts were then eaten immediately or set aside, not to be eaten until the next “harvest” (Diod. Sic. III.29).
Ethiopia, beyond Egypt, was the home of the Rhizophagi, root eaters who pulled up roots from the marshes, crushed them with stones, and then mixed them with water to make a kind of meatloaf that was baked in the sun. This was the only food they knew, but they had such quantities that they were never reduced to fighting among themselves or against other peoples (Diod. Sic. III.23). The image is one of a primitivist Eden.
Hylophagi, or leaf eaters, climbed up trees with great agility to pluck the tenderest shoots. They were able to digest any kind of bark or branch as long as it was fresh and juicy. They lived in bands that could not be qualified as families since, as in other “savage” populations, women and children were held in common. Not only their diet but also their physical characteristics, such as the ease with which they swung from tree to tree using both hands and feet, marked them out as beings that were closer to animals than humans. They went naked and defended their territory using branches as weapons. Their lives were short, and they almost always died of starvation. The frequency with which they were struck by glaucoma and became blind made it impossible for them to find their food (Diod. Sic. III.24).
These three examples are enough to indicate the nature of this type of ethnography. Nevertheless, one might also consider the more complete description given by Agatharchides (and, before him, by Nearchus) of the population of Ichthyophagi, or fish eaters, who lived along the African and Adriatic coasts from the Red Sea to the mouths of the Indus.
Throughout this “primitive” (or “primitivist”) ethnography, the model is approximately the same. The populations described are situated at a lower level, particularly in a cultural sense, to the point of exhibiting indisputably bestial characteristics. What all these descriptions have in common is the exclusive nature of the diet. That which defines these people, usually to the point of providing them with their name, is what they eat. These foods are usually considered inedible or, at the very least, exotic, just as the way in which they are prepared (baked in the sun, etc.) is considered extravagantly primitive. It is only in the case of the Ichthyophagi that the diet was based on a type of food that was not only well known but also appreciated among the Greeks. Indeed, when available, fish was one of the main sources of animal protein for the Greek world.
However, what really distinguishes both the Ichthyophagi and the other peoples is the fact that they were all monophagi—that is, they depended on a single food source. The most extreme case of this was the group of Ichthyophagi known as Apotoi. Having no source of fresh water, these people ate their fish raw in order to obtain the water they needed to survive. In this way, the fish they ate was a substitute for something they did not even know existed.
We shall conclude our rapid “ethnographic” survey by looking at the description Arrian gives us of eating habits in distant India. According to a traditional scheme (already codified in Plato), humanity passed through a “primitive” period (for Arrian, preceding the arrival of Dionysius, the hero-god who civilized India) during which men (Indians) lived on tree bark or devoured the raw flesh of animals they had been able to capture. In such a wild land, Dionysius introduced not only city life and laws but also the consumption of wine and grain, instructing the local people in how to cultivate their fields. However, populations that knew nothing of agriculture remained at the borders of civilization. These included mountain dwellers, who lived on the flesh of wild animals, and Indian shepherds and hunters. But even the first of the seven castes listed by Arrian, that of the Brahmins, continued to follow a primitive pre-Dionysian diet (either as a cultural rejection or as an ascetic exercise); they lived exclusively on fruit and tree bark, described as “tasty and nutritous as dates.” The members of the caste never wore clothes and led a life of misery, spending the winter in the sun and the summer in the shade of large trees (Arr. Ind. VII.4–5, XI.11, XII.8).
The conceptual framework, that of Alexandrian and subsequent ethnography, could have come from Aristotle’s Politics: “There are many different kinds of food, and that means many different ways of life, both of animals and humans; for as there is no life without food, differences of food produce, among animals, different kinds of life” (1256a).
This is undoubtedly the most effective expression in the classical world of the strict interdependence between culture and diet. Aristotle then distinguishes three cultural models: that of “nomads” (migrating breeders of domestic animals), that of “hunters” (including fishermen and raiders), and “the third and largest class [which] lives off the earth and its cultivated crops.” This three-part division was not as rigid as it seems, and various combinations existed.
Even before Aristotle, an “evolutionary anthropology,” not contemplated by Aristotle, had located the most barbaric forms of appropriation and consumption, such as cannibalism, in the earliest and most primitive phases of human history. To restrict ourselves to a single example, the pseudo-Platonic Epinomis regards the first stage in the cultural evolution of humanity as the rejection of cannibalism and the selection of edible animal species, followed by the cultivation of barley and grain, the building of houses, the construction of tools, and so on (947 ff.).
We cannot conclude this survey of the ways in which the Greeks considered the “food of the others” without examining one of the seminal texts of classical Greek literature—Pericles’ funeral speech (Thuc. II.38.2). “Because of the size of our city, there come to us all the goods of every land, and it is our fortune to find our own native products no more familiar to us than are those of the rest of the world.” Although the habitual austerity of Thucydides’ style (as well as that of Pericles) does not allow the historian to say what these goods are, it is nonetheless clear that they occupy first place in Pericles’ encomium of Athens.
In his elegy to the optimus princeps, Pliny the Younger simply echoes the words of Pericles (Pan. 29.2). Pacifying the Roman Empire and reinstating traffic and trade, Trajan allowed for such constant interaction between its various peoples that “any produce from one region becomes the produce of all peoples” (ut quod gentium esset usquam, id apud omnes natum videretur). The cultural and dietary “cosmopolitanism” no longer converged on the capital as it had done on Athens. In Rome, on the other hand, at least within the ideological context of the Trajan elegy, we find a diffusion and distribution of resources, an equal fruition of natural produce throughout the entire universal empire. Apart from literary and ideological representations, it would appear that, for Romans, the “food of the others” posed no problems. Rich Roman tables, in both the capital and the provinces, must have offered an extraordinary variety of both homegrown and exotic foodstuffs.
Those people who did not remain outside the Roman sphere of influence gradually assimilated the ways of the empire, especially its diet. In a civilization based on agriculture and raising livestock, the dietary regimen was nothing other than the last stage of an entire productive process. At its source were the forms of appropriation and exploitation of the means of production (primarily the earth itself) and of techniques of production in the context of the vast and uniform expansion of Roman conquest and colonization.
The overall uniformity and homogeneity of agriculture in the Roman Empire has been stressed. It was based, once again, on the “Mediterranean triad,” despite the considerable climatic differences between the Mediterraean basin and central Europe. This uniformity of production and consumption developed alongside the settlement of retired centurions in the provinces, followed by the spread of “capitalist” villae. Both these reflected specific political and economic policies. They formed part of the process of urbanization and Romanization throughout the empire, which included the diffusion of a particular way of life, one of the most important aspects of which was diet.
This is indirectly confirmed by the lack of interest shown in the “food of others” by such Roman “ethnographers” as Pliny the Elder, who rarely refers to “alien” diets among primitive peoples, even in his habitual references to Greek sources, and by historians like Tacitus in his descriptions of barbaric populations such as the Germans and the Britons.
In Periclean Athens, the “imperial city” was said to have appropriated the food of others, regarding it as its own. In the Roman Empire, on the other hand, it was the “capital of the world” that imposed its own diet on its subject peoples, gradually pushing other foods, customs, and practices aside. Although, like Athens, the city of Rome was the “showcase of the world” in food, as in everything else, the empire as a whole based its expansion and centuries-long domination on a process of conquest that was also one of cultural expansion. Within these processes, homogeneity of diet was an element of absolute importance.
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