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Banqueting in the different Greek towns.

by Eugenia Prina Ricotti

Dining in the different Greek towns
Starting from the V cent B.C. the Greek banquet became more and more sumptuous and its gastronomy very rich. Of course in all of the Greek towns the foods were basically the same but different was the way they were cooked and even more different was how the dishes were served. The wars that had always been fought between the cities and their parochialism kept people divided and even neighbouring towns didn’t consume their meals in the same way. Then, it was evident that the citizens of a town found strange the use and customs of all the other Greeks and profusely criticized them.
Thus Athenians were taken for a ride because their dinners were based on those kind of hors d’oeuvre still in use in today Greece and Turkey, the “metzes”, formed by a series of small plates with only tastings of different delicatessen. The comedy writer Linceus makes fun of all these little titbits and presents one of his actor complaining:
“The cook sets before us a large tray on which there is five small bowls. In one of them there is garlic, in another one two sea urchins, nearby a sweet pancake, another plate offers 10 snails and, at last, in a bowl, a little piece of sturgeon. When I am eating this, my friend eats that, and when I am eating that he is eating this What I want, my dear man, is to taste everything, but this is not possible because I don’t have five mouths and five right hands. This table that seems to offer a great variety of foods will never calm my hunger.”
Also the Thebans were taken for a ride, because it seems that they were very stingy and all Greeks agreed that their dinners were paltry. Cleitarchus in the I book of Alexander’s history write that when the town was destroyed by the young general, all the money of the community that was found there didn’t reach 440 talents.
Maybe this was the reason for which their meals were always so scanty, and they based their alimentation on thrions (meat olives much like the ones that today are done rolling some filling in vines’s leaves, except that in ancient times they did them with fig leaves, a custom still in use in some part of Greece). At Thebes there was a great consumation of vegetables cooked or raw, anchovy too were eaten, and also little fishes, sausages, beef ribs and polenta, to conclude all low priced food. Attaginus son of Phrynon whom Herodotus in his history define as very rich, offered this Theban kind of dinner to Mardonius and to 50 of his comrades and the historian remarks
“It was evident that after this banquet the Persians could never win, and the Greeks didn’t need to exert themselves on the Plataea battlefield, because Attaginus had already provided to destroy them with his dinner”
After Athenians and Thebans we find the Spartans with their squalid “mensa”, the hard wooden klinai over which to lean on their elbows was a torture, the uneatable black soup and the hard bay leaves to munched after dinner just as in the ancient times, were always in the news and always ferociously criticized. Of course the Spartan seemed to be the worst possible cooking of all antiquity and we can’t marvel if when a Sybarite, who for his business had to go to Sparta and was made to stay there for some days and of course had to dine at the common “mensa”, came back rather shocked to his country and adfirmed that there was nothing to marvel if the Spartans were the most daring warriors of all the world. Anyone, according to him,
would hasten to be killed to subtract himself to this kind of life.
What is certain was that when in the later periods the common “mensa” enforcement was was abolished and Sparta adapted itself to the rest of Greece’s customs, also then Laconia revealed itself as an uncomfortable country. The old common “mensa” was transformed in a very luxurious club divided in two little triclinia where Spartans could invite their friends. It could have been a very nice and cozy place, but for a craze of ostentation they spread over the tricliniar couches coverings and pillows so embroidered that guests could not dare to lean over them. Thus, at Sparta,
to lay comfortably was always a problem, and also when Spartans dinners surrounded itself with all the possible luxury they still were a torture for the partecipants.


Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, A pranzo nell'antica Grecia in Archeo 10, December 1984, pp. 40-43.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier: L'alimentazione nel mondo greco in Archeo, nº 44, October 1988, pp.48-91
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L'alimentazione ed il banchetto in epoca greca in L'arcano convito, Cultural publications of the “Cassa di Risparmio di Verona, Vicenza e Milano”, pp. 44-47 September 1989.


Books
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L’arte del convito nell’antica Grecia. L’evoluzione del gusto da Achille ad Alessandro Magno , L’ERMA DI BRETSCHNEIDER, ROME, 2005.