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Atheneus and his Deipnosophists

by Eugenia Prina Ricotti

ANCIENT GREECE COOKING
The human alimentation could seem an argument of no great importance in the history of a people. But in reality this isn’t true. The way of eating meals and what is served always was an aspect of the society to which each ancient people belonged. Thus a people of nomad shepherds would always base its alimentation on meat and milk, while farmers would never kill the ox that plows their fields, therefore for their dinner they usually used starch and vegetable. Of course they also ate meat, but much less than the shepherd tribes, and anyway their roasts were mainly lambs, muttons and pigs. We find lots of data on the ancient Greeks’ diet in their authors' writings.
Sooner or later in all their texts there was the description of some dinner, and, sometime, even of a lavish banquet reported with its menu and even its recipes. Other ancient scholars wrote books which had as the sole subject cooking and all the cooking ingredients. We know of at least 20 of these treatises, unfortunately all of them are now lost. Thank God we still have parts of the splendid Haediphagetic - the book on fishes, where to find the best, and how to prepare them - all written in poetry (to be exact in heroic exameters) by one of the most famous gastronomes of the antiquity, Archestratus of Gela...
Anyway all those news about ancient times’ dining are not completely lost. On the contrary pieces on this argument are the only surviving parts of the works of many ancient Greek authors. The compilation of this anthological work is the opus of a “Graeculus” as the Romans called all the Greeks immigrates, a man who had left his native Naucratis, an Egyptian town, and arrived to Rome where he became the librarian of P. Livius Larensis, a very rich patrician, a descendant of Varro who owned a very large library. This charge furnished to Atheneus – this was the scholar name – a splendid instrument which allowed him to redact with loving care his colossal opus titled “The Deipnosophists” (you can translate it as “The Gastronomes”) a treaty divided in 15 tomes and obviously all dedicated to Larensis, his master.
In “The Deipnosophists” we not only find the news about the ancient Hellas’ alimentation from Homer and onward, but we are also told about the banquets of all, or at least nearly all, the Mediterranean people. Nor the curiosity of the Greek authors stopped at those coasts, but they were interested to the table use and customs of the most far away people. For instance Megasthenes, a Greek writer of the Hellenistic times, even described what was served to the Indians in those days, and in his second book of his “India’s History”, wrote how in this far away country a low individual table with a certain numbers of very spicy meat sauces and a golden bowl full of boiled rice. Then also in the III cent B.C. Indian alimentation was based on curry,
and Megasthenes was not the only one to tell of faraway people. The news collected by Atheneus in all the texts examined concerned all the people then existing. From Spain it got down to India. He found authors who described the banquets of the Celts, the Germans, the Thracians, the ancient Syrians, the Persians, the Parts, and the Egyptians and gave even news abut the mysterious and dissolute Etruscans. In their works Alexandria’s Rhetoricians and grammarians laughed about of the Phoenicians, smoked fish eaters, cited the Ethiopic cumin, praised the Babylonian apples and, while they censured the immorality of this town’s men who were much effeminate, they exalted the luxury of their tables. To sum all this up the Greek authors analyzed and commented all the banquets, the cooking, the orchards, the fields, the farms and the preserves of all the known world, and by a very intelligent reading of the texts of all the epochs Atheneus collected all those news in his Anthology creating a work full of interest and which offers a pleasing and easy reading to all of us.