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The XIII cent B:C. dinners.

by Eugenia Prina Ricotti


THE ALIMENTATION AT THE TIME OF THE WAR OF TROY
It is in the Homeric poems and precisely in the Iliad that we find the descriptions of the ancient Greek dinners and we read about their alimentation.
This poem, one of the most beautiful I know, has always been ascribed to Homer, and also to Homer was credited the Odissey. However the two poems can not be contemporary: the Iliad must have been written at least one century before the Odyssey, a fact which results clear from the differences between the convivial customs of their protagonists. To begin with, in the Iliad all men ate their meals sitting; the tricliniar couches that we find in the Odyssey were still unknown. Moreover the convivial life was very simple and the heroes of the war of Troy prepared their meals in their tents and, after having eaten, they cleaned and set everything in place.
Thus it was a very primitive life that was led in this war, but also the one managed in their towns by the monarchs of the times was not different. At least that is what we realize looking at the ruins of their XIII cent B.C., palaces in which, when the court met to partake the meal, they did roast the chunks of meat on the hearth and by themselves poured their wine. Those kings of Achilles’ times lived in solid mansions, built with big boulders, and set on top of the hills; royal palaces of which the fulcrum and the most important part was the “megaron”, the place from where the king managed his country, administered the justice, and where he divided his meals with his courtiers. The central part of this “megaron” didn’t have a roof and around it ran a porch sustained by four columns, then in the middle of the uncovered area there was large round and low hearth on which bed of embers were prepared.
This is the sort of room that we find in all the palaces of this period, in Mycenae, Tyrins and Pylos and just here, in Nestor’s palace, the hearth, with all its decoration of painted stucco, is very well preserved and even better restored. Certainly Nestor’s “megaron” is a splendid example of this kind of hall and it helps us to reconstruct the kind of life that was led there. In the room we still see the remainders of Nestor’s throne: a big stone seat that was set against one of its walls and, while his courtiers, who sat under the porch, partook his meal, the king, sitting on his throne, dominated the scene.
Everybody took the chunks of meat with their fingers and bit them. There was no plate or cover. The table’s furniture consisted only of the cups to drink the wine and at Pylos many of those vessels have been found in a room adjoining the “megaron”. All these table furniture had been put there on wooden shelves. With the passing of time the wood rotted, the shelves crashed down, and all the cups fell one over the other, and so they were found by the American team of the Cincinnati University who was excavating the palace.
Apart from the cups the people who ate their meal in the “Megaron”, needed only a knife with which to cut the meat. Of course to do this they could also use their daggers, those splendid arms similar to the ones that had been found in the Atrides tomb, precious objects that with their niello-decorated blade and with their golden inserts were the glory of those warriors. As those daggers were normally used to kill an enemy they were always kept well sharpened and so it was easy to carve the heroic roasts of those times.
We know that Odysseus was a master in this art and it is interesting to see how ancient Greeks cut and served their meat. In the Attic and Corinthian ceramic cups and vases, the portion of meat hanging from the tables set in front of the various personages of history and myth are represented as long and dark strip of roast. Very long strip because usually the persons there represented were heroes and semigods who had just done some heroic feat, and thus, to them, as was the custom in ancient Greece, the fillet was offered, big strips of fillet, red meat broiled or just singed on the camp’s fire. It is interesting to notice that the big quarters of beef were the only thing that Iliad’s heroes ate or, at least according to Homer, this was their diet: red barbecued meat because, at those times, meat was always broiled and it seems that nobody knew any other way to prepare it.
Antiphanes of the New Comedy takes Homer for a ride just because in the meals he never includes a cup of broth or a chunk of boiled meat. Thus he derides the poet writing
“He roasted even the tripe, so primitive he was”
However it seems to be true that, during the war of Troy, the favorite meal was always a big roast of beef that kept all the warriors strong and blood thirsty and gave them the pleasure to kill one other with more enthusiasm. Of course some one ate also kids and lambs - and Priam reproved his sons who used to steal them - moreover we see Achilles offering to Priam mutton when the old king comes to his tent to implore for Hector body, but in the Iliad these exceptions to the normal diet were not frequent.
The heroes ate also great loaves of bread served in wide baskets, but, according to Atheneus, they did it only in the morning. It seems that bread was never offered for dinner, when, as we have just seen, the only thing served was meat. With it the heroes drank red, or rather black wine, poured in cups so large that we can call them heroic; cups that had all sort of shapes depending to the people and the civilizations who made them, but always large they were. Cups all different starting from the Trojan ceramic cups shaped as truncated cone to the precious and elegant ones that have been found in the tombs of the Mycenaean kings. One of these particularly beautiful corresponds with the description found in the Odyssey of the golden cup of Nestor that had two doves on its handles. Any of these vessels could contain a large quantity of wine, but it is also possible that the wine was already diluted, this at least if we can accept an order of Achilles to “mix the purest wine”, a phrase that seems to imply the existence of a dilution, but of this there is no other mention.
Cheese is some time mentioned, not very much, but it was natural that in a pastoral civilization it took part of the alimentation. Goat cheese grated and mixed with red and heavy wine is offered by Macaon, a doctor, to Nestor, when the wounded old king was taken back to the camp. It must have been considered a corroborating mixture, something like an ante litteram blood transfusion. To make it tastier and press the old and wise old man to drink it, Macaon puts also an onion in it. Try and tell.
Another very important product of ancient Greece was oil that from the most ancient time had been one of the richness of Greece and was always widely used. This very important good was kept in large ceramic “dolia” lined up in the palaces storerooms. Many were found in ruins of the XIII cent. B.C. palaces among which there was also Nestor’s residence and here the excavators found, written in linear B, how much oil had been produced in Nestor’s palace, a proof that the persons in charge were very good managers.
The great absent from the tables of the XIII cent. B.C. was fish, and this notwithstanding that very often the Mycenaean ceramic is decorated with scenes of swimming fishes and that their vessels are practically wrapped by the sinuous tentacles of amusingly stylized octopuses. Also Homer speaking of the Hellespont in the Iliad, describes it as a sea teeming with fishes, but also if catching them must have been a highly practised activity for the coast population, the poet does never show anyone eating it, and fish is not the only food absent from the heroes’ diet. In all the Iliad, apart from the onion that Macaon added to the wine and the grated cheese he mixed to restore poor wounded Nestor, there is no mention of fruits or vegetables. However we can’t exclude that all those foods where not cited because they were considered unworthy of the magnificent and mythical king-heroes. For the popular fantasy those special persons could eat only the most sublime foods, and precisely, bread, meat and red wine, just as in the Olympus’ the gods meals were exclusively based on nectar and ambrosia.
But is this the truth? Well, looking at the “megaron of the king palaces we are obliged to think that Homer was right. The big round hearts in the “megaron” were certainly done to prepare gigantic barbecue and the large areas occupied by the embers doesn’t seem an apt place to fry a sole or boil a grey mullet. Thus it is highly probable that in the XIII cent, B.C. the Greek aristocracy ate meat that was good and expensive, while the normal people, the artisans, the peasants, and all the others workers, based their diet on chicken, lambs, fishes and vegetables, all foods that became much appreciated in the still far away V cent. B.C.


Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, A pranzo nell'antica Grecia in Archeo 10, December 1984, pp. 40-43.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L'alimentazione nell'antichitá in l'Eterno Banchetto: l'arte culinaria dell'Antica Roma 22-29 June 1987.
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier: L'alimentazione nel mondo greco in Archeo, nº 44, October 1988, pp.48-91
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Monograph Le ricette più antiche del mondo in Archeo: le attualità del passato. Anno VIII, n° 1, febbraio 1999

Books
– L’arte del convito nell’antica Grecia. L’evoluzione del gusto da Achille ad Alessandro Magno , L’ERMA DI BRETSCHNEIDER, ROME, 2005.