Massimo Montanari
Of the many factors that contribute to defining the food culture of the classical world, one in particular stands out: the desire to be seen as belonging to “civilization”—a privileged corner of the world closed to the alien universe of the “barbarians.” Diet played an essential role in this attempt to define a model of civilized life, itself deeply rooted in the concept of the city. In order to distance itself from the “diversity” of the uncivilized noncitizen—and therefore from the “savage” lifestyle of the barbarian populations—three aspects of the food model were stressed: conviviality; the kind of food consumed; and the art of cooking and dietary regimens.
Eating Together
The first thing that distinguished civilized man from beasts and barbarians—regarded as similar in the Greco-Roman value system—was conviviality. Eating did not simply satisfy a bodily urge but transformed the act into a social and communicative event. “We do not sit at table only to eat,” wrote Plutarch, “but to eat together.” It could be argued that barbarians—and even some species of animals—were equally well acquainted with the habit of eating together. But it was the rules governing it (for example, how to mix wine and water) that made a “civilized” banquet different from a simple meal eaten in company. In Greek society the “correct” way of doing things distinguished civilized men, or citizens, from savages who did not know the rules, and from semi-savages who applied them only occasionally. Conviviality was conceived as a cornerstone of civilization. The convivium, or banquet, was the very image of life together (cum vivere).
Any group—whether a nuclear family or the entire population of a city—that partook of a banquet around a common table, either in fact or in a symbolic representation, was considered unified. Separate tables, on the other hand, signified that the group was not aggregated. This symbolism pertained to both the relationship between men and that between men and the gods. In the mythical past, men and gods sat at the same table and partook of the same food; after the fall, the tables were separated and the food was differentiated.
It is important to stress that sitting at table together was not only a useful tool for social aggregation and unity but also an instrument of separation and exclusion. Belonging or not belonging to the banquet was highly significant, whether the banquet was “oligarchic”—that is, a representation of the political identity of the city governed by the few—or “democratic,” to which practically all were invited. The relationship between participation in the banquet and integration in the community remained strong throughout the Middle Ages in the western world. Excommunication, in the literal sense of exclusion from the community, in lay society as well as in the church and in monasteries, often took the form of being sent away from the table.
In addition to expressing identity, the banquet was also the place where social exchange took place, according to the well-known anthropological paradigm of the exchange of gifts. Food thus took on a different significance at every banquet according to the direction in which the offer was made. From high to low, it denoted generous condescension and social predominance; from low to high it implied humility and subservience; between peers, it demonstrated the communality (however temporary) of the meal.
The banquet also represented hierarchy and power relationships within the group. Status was marked by the position at table of each member, by the criteria of food distribution, and by the kind of food that was served. It was considered perfectly normal to serve different foods at the same meal according to the status of the participant. It must be stressed, however, that in the ancient world this differentiation did not possess the same expressive force or level of formality as it did in the Middle Ages, when different positions were upheld by a precise ideology regarding social differences in food. In classical times, cultural identity was considered more important than social identity. A “civilized citizen” was seen in opposition, above all, to an “uncivilized barbarian,” and it was within this main contradiction that the internal dynamics of society moved.
Another important opportunity for social cohesion and for establishing a civilized identity was the symposium, the ritual collective wine-drinking that followed a banquet in the Greek world but that was always strictly separated from it. The symposium celebrated the sacred nature of wine that generates inebriation and therefore facilitates contact with the gods. The Greeks, like the Etruscans, did not usually drink wine with their meals, while the Romans came to consider it a mere beverage and thus stripped it of nearly all its sacred functions. Nonetheless, wine remained a marker of civilization. Civilized man not only invented the magical beverage but also developed forms of self-control and etiquette (knowing when to stop drinking, how to mix wine with water in the appropriate proportions for different social occasions), which proved that he was master over wine and not vice versa. Greek writers never tired of repeating that barbarians were unable to hold to these rules. The shared drinking cup (krater) was yet another symbol of cultural and social regulation and of the superiority of knowledge and technique over instinct.
…and Man Created His Plants and Animals
In addition to the rules and rituals of conviviality, food itself played a vital role in establishing human identity. It was food, especially meat, that distinguished men from gods. When Odysseus refused to eat the food of the gods offered by Circe, it was to stress that he belonged to humankind, that he was civilized rather than barbarian. Paradoxically, however, the food that most distinguished men from gods did not distinguish them from the uncivilized world of beasts. It was not meat but bread—an absolute example of artifice, a completely “cultural” product throughout all the phases of its preparation—that became the symbol of civilization and of the distinction between men and animals. Wine and oil were also a mark of a civilized society, which was able to create its own plants and animals by farming the land and raising livestock.
Barbarians were depicted and described by civilized citizens as nomad hunter-gatherers in contrast to those who grew their own produce. Farming the land implied staying in one place, as did sitting at a banquet; the sedentary nature of the feast was thought to be entirely alien to nomad communities. Ovid’s myth of Anius and his three daughters who transformed everything they touched into grain, wine, and oil presented a utopia in which nature could be transformed by the human hand. Grain and wine made the eater and drinker human—to the extent that in Homer the term “bread eaters” was synonymous with the word for “men.”
Those peoples that did not farm, eat bread, or drink wine were therefore savages or barbarians. Meat was their staple, and milk (an ethnographic projection of the infantile state) their main beverage. Classical writers did not hesitate to add the epithet “Greek” to barbarian populations who were discovered to be bread eaters, a famous example being the Greco-Scythians.
The key factor was the capacity to “construct” one’s food by domesticating and overcoming nature, a concept that, in the Greco-Roman world, had a rather negative connotation. The term “hunter-gatherer” (savage, natural) stood in ideal opposition to that of “shepherd-farmer” (domestic, artificial). In practice, this distinction often reflected reality, although shepherds were also commonly associated with hunters because of the similarity between the two activities: they both took place in the uncultivated forests, copses, and natural pastures.
Meat—whether livestock or game—had a strong cultural connotation linking it to savagery, which encouraged its identification as the food of barbarians. The Romans, on the other hand, tried hard to domesticate hunting by setting up controlled reserves of semi-tamed animals. In any case, the savage world was considered “alien” and viewed with diffidence and suspicion; this meant that it was either excluded from the domain of productive activity or forcibly assimilated into the “civilized” world.
Leaving ideology aside, the reality of production was rather different. To start with, cultivated land was not the only source of food. Uncultivated land was exploited for grazing, hunting, fishing, and the gathering of natural foodstuffs. There was a very narrow dividing line between wild and cultivated produce. The process of agricultural domestication was far from completed in the late Roman period—perhaps this explains the intense cultural need that existed to distinguish the wild from the tamed.
Furthermore, wine is not always wine, and bread is not always bread. So-called wine was often watered-down vinegar; bread—the symbol of an ideology—was in many cases more of a cereal pap than a loaf as we know it. Barley cakes and spelt porridge were the main elements of the Greek and Roman food culture. Bread came much later, the result of a long, complex, and typically urban history. Flatcakes cooked under the ashes, together with soups and polenta, were staples—especially in the countryside—for many years to come.
Pulses, mainly broad beans, chickpeas, lentils, and vetch, supplemented the diet dominated by cereals (wheat, barley, spelt, and millet). The Greeks also grew garlic, leeks, and onions in their kitchen gardens, while the Romans cultivated cabbages (which Cato, in his agricultural tract, praised highly), as well as turnips, rape, and aromatic herbs. It is interesting to note that as late as the Middle Ages, the emperor of Byzantium was the laughingstock of the meat-eating continental aristocracy owing to his fondness for these humble vegetables.
There is hardly a trace of these foods in the dietary model constructed by Greek and Roman ideology, however. Rigidly grounded in the three “fundamentals”—bread, wine, and oil—the model left little room for lesser foods such as vegetable soups, low-grade cereal mashes, pulses, and so on. There was even less room for the produce of uncultivated land, culturally marginalized by the dominant value system and therefore concealed by the sources—as if revealing a taste for these products would give away barbarian origins.
The exploitation of pastureland, marshes, and forests, which must surely have had some economic advantages, found its way into the sources almost exclusively in a negative light. Hunting, in particular, was presented as a humble occupation dictated by poverty; what is more, it forced the hunter to spend time away from the seat of civilization, the city. In short, the food ideology presented in Greek and Roman literature should be interpreted as an ideal that corresponded to reality only in part. This does not mean, however, that its importance should be denied; ideology and ideals have always played their part in history.
The concept of frugality was linked to the dominant food model. Bread, wine, and oil (along with figs and honey) were a symbol of the simple life, of a dignified poverty characterized by hard work and humble satisfaction. In Greek sources this idea was contrasted—with obvious ideological and political intentions—with the extravagant and decadent luxury of the Persians. In imperial Rome, writers expressed nostalgia for the good old days when customs were uncorrupted and foods were simple, when there was no need to cross oceans and travel to distant continents to satisfy perverse tastes, and when people were happy to live on the lovingly cultivated fruit of their own land.
Let us not be deceived, however. It was not humility that lay behind the ideal of a rustic way of life lauded by so many Greek and Latin writers. It was, rather, civic pride: every civilization attempted to vindicate its own cultural and historical primacy. The adult initiation ceremony of young Athenians described by Plutarch was purely imperialistic: led to the sanctuary of Agraulus to swear loyalty to their country, they were required to describe their land as being “where wheat, vines, and olives grow.” The implicit message was that wherever a Greek settled, he would plant wheat, vines, and olives—which is in fact what happened. Interpreted in another light, however, the message was this: wherever wheat, vines, and olives grew, there the Greeks could claim ascendancy and expand their empire.
The ideology of meat consumption was more problematic. In the classical world, meat had connotations of luxury, festivity, and social privilege; it was not considered a primary food source. Consequently, price controls on meat like the ones imposed on cereals did not exist. In some cases, it was even forbidden to sell meat to the public. The exceptional nature of meat consumption was amplified by sacrificial practices, which conferred an intense symbolic value on meat but, at the same time, placed it out of reach as an everyday food.
Sacrifice was both a tool for expiating guilt (the killing) and an important gesture of solidarity (distributing meat to the people), as well as a means of communicating with the gods (the offering). Clearly of vital importance, much has been written in the last decade, and indeed in the pages that follow, on the subject of sacrifice. One question in particular persists: whether meat consumption was always linked to sacrificial practices. In the Greek world, this seems to have been the case; in the Roman world, on the other hand, it looks as though the link gradually grew weaker. It was maintained on an ideological plane, however, justifying the repeated polemics of early Christians against the consumption of meat after sacrificing animals to “false idols.” Only game brought back from the hunt was exempt—for obvious reasons—from the logic of sacrifice. However, its marginality in the Greek and Roman value system confirms that eating meat was a relatively exceptional event.
This cultural analysis dovetails well with an economic consideration: according to a cautious estimate, in the Greek world about 80 percent of calories were provided by cereals; Greek citizens—the recipients of most of the sacrificial meat—ate no more than one or two kilograms (1 kg = 2.2 lbs.) of meat in a year. The philosophical vegetarian sects (in particular, the Orphics and the Pythagoreans) were the ultimate expression of a common non-meat-eating culture. Their rejection of sacrifice (as a refusal to spill blood or a belief in metempsychosis) was an expression of a social phenomenon rather than a dietary prescription in that it represented a rejection of the rules of conviviality and, ultimately, of society.
Respect for the animal’s life was also, more prosaically, a matter of economics. Sheep were more useful to the Greeks and Romans alive than dead. They used their wool and their milk to make cheese, which became an everyday food. Cattle were very rare and were used for working in the fields; only when they became old were they killed for their meat. Fish, crustaceans, and cheese rather than meat supplemented the cereals and vegetables in the Greek and Roman diet.
Meat played a more important part in the Roman diet owing to a longstanding tradition on the Italian peninsula of raising pigs, as we shall see in the essay on the Etruscans. Although pork was never an essential element of the diet, it was nevertheless a good source of animal protein. The pig was considered a meat larder on legs. The function of its life, as Cicero put it, was like that of salt: to preserve the meat in perfect condition. Pork took on increasing importance in imperial Rome, and, from the third century on, emperors ordered it to be distributed to the populace together with bread in order to maintain public order as well as underscore the privilege accorded to Roman citizens.
Nevertheless, bread remained the staple food in Roman times. Even soldiers—despite the Homeric image of meat-eating warriors, linked perhaps to sacrificial practices rather than to a specific dietary code—were considered bread eaters. Providing enough bread for soldiers’ rations was the foremost concern of army suppliers; without bread, it was thought, no soldier could fight effectively (rations oscillated between 0.8 and 1 kilogram per head in combat).
There was, then, a clear tie between real life and the cultural roots of a civilization that identified civilitas with a civitas surrounded by ager. An ideal soldier, on retiring from active service defending his country, established a country residence in the conquered territory. An ideal general, like Cincinnatus, left his fields to fight and returned as soon as the battle was won. In these figures, ideals blended with reality and mutually reinforced the supremacy of bread as the most important food of all.
This was in stark contrast to the predominantly Germanic culture that followed in the Middle Ages. Meat, not bread, became the food symbol of the warrior, who was, in his turn, assimilated with the figure of the hunter (the hunt being a mirror of war) rather than with that of the farmer-landowner.
The Raw and the Cooked
The preeminence of bread in classical culture was also the result of a science of dietetics (itself almost certainly influenced by the symbolic value attributed to that food), which placed bread at the top of the nutritional table. For Greek and Roman doctors, eating bread provided a perfectly balanced blend of those humors—hot, cold, dry, moist—that Hippocrates considered constituent elements of every foodstuff and, indeed, of everything that existed. “Bread,” wrote the great Roman medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus, “contains more nutritional material than any other food.”
More generally, the science of dietetics was at the heart of the culture of food and gastronomy. The art of cooking in the ancient world was strictly linked with health concerns and with dietetics. The primordial discovery that food could be cooked on the fire was the foundation of a complex food culture that influenced western thought until chemistry took over in the preserving industry.
The fact that barbarians did not cook their food, knew nothing about building fires, and ate everything raw (or, at the most, baked in the sun, like the mythological fish eaters who lived on the banks of the Red Sea), was a commonplace in classical literature. There is little point in stressing this, given the teachings of Lévi-Strauss regarding the value of cooked food as a defining element of civilization. Suffice it to say that the art of cooking was always aimed not only at making food tastier, but also at transforming its “nature” by adapting it to nutritional needs. In this sense, food and health were always inextricably linked, as Greek and Latin treatises on dietetics, from Hippocrates on, claimed.
Cooking techniques, seasonings, and ways of combining food and drink—these were all seen as being opportunities to “correct” nature. They were also a vital factor in designing a dietary regimen suited to individual needs. A “diet” was a rule to be applied to everyday life (once again, rules defined civilized behavior); the regimen changed according to activities undertaken, age, sex, environment, and season. All these factors, it was believed, affected the combinations of the four humors in the body. The aim of the diet was to redress any imbalances that might have taken place and to bring the body back to that perfect equilibrium, without which health and physical efficiency were impossible. In what was essentially an allopathic view of medicine (although occasional examples of contrary views can be found), the ultimate aim of diet was to maintain a balance by means of “temperate” or “balanced” foods. More often, it was to reconstitute an equilibrium that had been compromised by illness or by any other subjective or objective factor. The diet had to apply different combinations of heat, cold, moisture, or dryness at different levels of intensity in an infinite number of possible proportions.
Cuisine and dietetics thus became part of the same semantic universe. Criteria of taste were intertwined with those concerning health. To identify whether food was good or not, the first elements to come into play were the senses. Although the notion of the four humors was applied to the “nature” of the food, it was more a measure of sensory satisfaction. This meant that what was “good” coincided perfectly with what was “good for you.” If this was not the case, the prescriptions of the dietician and doctor were able to correct matters.
City and Country
Both the Greek and the Roman civilizations were eminently urban; the countryside was considered an annex of the polis or civitas. It supplied the city with food, and citizens took great pride in it, becoming landowners themselves at the first opportunity. Despite this ideological integration, however, the distance between life in the city and life in the countryside—even as far as food was concerned—was considerable. Country dwellers were by no means a homogeneous group—there were slaves and freed slaves, landowners and their employees, rich and poor.
The main distinction between this group and inhabitants of the city was the latter’s dependence on the market for supplies or, alternatively, on either public food distribution or private almsgiving institutions—formidable instruments of political, social, and financial control of both the plebeians and the elite. These privileges were particularly marked in Athens and Rome. Another difference, under normal conditions, was the greater variety of resources on the market. In times of difficulty, however, country dwellers enjoyed greater food security since they were closer to the productive land.
This opposition between city and country was present—developing in a nonlinear and often contradictory fashion—throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern epoch; it will also be discussed frequently throughout this book.
Crisis of a Model
The food model established by the Greeks and Romans—more ideological than dietetic, as we have seen—began to crumble from the third or fourth century onward, attacked, on the one hand, by Christianity and, on the other, by the newly dominant Germanic culture. Both these forces were “alien” and in many respects incompatible with that model. The biggest change came about with the gradual erosion of the primacy of the Mediterranean triad—grain, wine, and oil—and the increasing acceptability and availability of meat.
The diffusion of Christianity challenged the practice and philosophy of sacrifice. It was rejected at a technical level because the offer was considered wrongly directed at the “wrong” gods (though sacrificial practices aimed at the “true” god persisted, as we shall see later, in certain Christian settlements, especially among the Armenians). Above all, however, its legitimacy was undermined because the practice was considered unnecessarily cruel. It was substituted in the Eucharist with a “vegetarian” sacrifice (bread and wine), which, nonetheless, recalled a far crueler sacrifice that took place once only for the good of all men.
The result was not without contradictions: by making bread and wine sacred and by adopting oil as the sacramental substance par excellence, Christianity reinforced the values of the Roman ideological food model and transmitted it with renewed energy to the generations that followed right into the early Middle Ages. At the same time, the deconsecration of meat turned it into an everyday food.
This phenomenon was all the more significant because, in the same period, Germanic expansion brought with it a food ideology based on exploiting the forests and uncultivated land rather than on farming the land. With the demographic explosion that took place from the third century on and the consequent transformation of the countryside, meat became an even more important element in the diet. Farmland, and therefore production, was reduced, and large-scale landowners began to take over from small holders, turning the land over to pasture.
This was one reason why pork, as mentioned earlier, was distributed to the poor in the streets, and why, in late-imperial Rome, as excavations at Settefinestre have shown, meat appeared in slaves’ rations, whereas in Cato’s time slaves were given only cereals and vegetables. But there was another reason. The assimilation of meat-eating habits that were once “alien” to the classical world was also linked to an interpretation of the empire. This was no longer a “national” concept; it embraced many different territories and its food model thus became more universal. From Asia, spices and exotic fruit were imported; from the north, the Celtic taste for pork.
With the arrival of the Germanic tribes, however, the new “universal” identity of the empire was challenged. The “barbarian” food model, based on meat consumption, established itself with the same force as its propagators used to invade and conquer the Italian peninsula. The clash between the Romans and the Germanic invaders was also a clash between a value system considered by the Romans “civilized” and another considered “barbaric”—again by the Romans, of course. In the imperial biographies collected under the title Storia Augusta, nostalgia for the past was expressed in a eulogy of vegetarian frugality: an emperor’s fondness for fruit, vegetables, and bread was an unequivocal sign of loyalty to the Roman tradition; a distaste for bread and vegetables and an exaggerated taste for game and other kinds of meat was a sure sign of incipient barbarism.
Romans and barbarians (with Christians in the middle), farming and the exploitation of forests, bread and meat, domesticated and wild—in the midst of these contradictions, caught between contrasting models of production and consumption, a new phase of food culture and history began with the inception of the Middle Ages.
