action is discussed and Jesus speaks to her; no words of hers are in the ... larly that “the women dine not with their own husbands but with any men who happen .... Antinoos, one of the suitors reveling in Odysseus' house, “troublesome beggars, .... unrealistic but touching respect to the master he has not yet recognized.
Chapter 18
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Men, Women, and Slaves
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It is hard to trace decisive historical developments between the beginning and end of the classical period, not least because some of the earliest relevant texts, notably the Homeric Odyssey (c. 650 bc) and Plato’s Symposion, were classics exerting powerful influence on later behavior. It is rather easier, on the basis of surviving sources, to draw contrasts between Greek and Roman behavior. It is an enticing possibility to compare both of these with the social behavior described in contemporary Jewish sources, though there is no room for this here. It is easy, again, to compare with the behavior of various non‐Greek and non‐Roman cultures as described in Greek and Roman sources, but the realism of these descriptions has to be questioned. The sources are principally literary, partly iconographic. Both are desultory. The first highlight is the Odyssey, brilliantly persuasive but scarcely possible to pin down to a time and a place. Then, specifically from Athens, there are comedies of the late fifth and fourth centuries bc, which can be read alongside the Symposia of Plato and Xenophon, adding details from Athenian forensic speeches: this is a rich collection of evidence, especially if combined with Athenian vase paintings, though this is risky because social realism on vase paintings flourished and died nearly a century before the literary texts. Then, leaping across a geographical and temporal divide, we have the literature of Augustan and early imperial Rome, beginning with poetry from Catullus to Horace, ending with prose from the fictional Satyricon of Petronius to Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars: all this forms a second rich cache, alongside which there is contemporary information from mosaics, wall paintings, reliefs, and archaeology. Other places and periods are more obscure to us, but we can draw on various scattered texts, occasional inscriptions, and the mass of sources from all periods excerpted by Macrobius (Saturnalia, after ad 400) and most notably Athenaeus (Deipnosophistai, after ad 200). The social behavior of Jews in the Roman Empire and on its borders is seen from one viewpoint in the Gospels, from another in the Mishna and Tosephta.
A Companion to Food in the Ancient World, First Edition. Edited by John Wilkins and Robin Nadeau. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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The excursus “Homeric society and its food,” later, demonstrates the detail to be found in one important source and indicates some ways in which it may be explored and questioned. Other texts and media, likewise, demand to be read in their own terms before links and comparisons begin to be made. Inequality is inherent in the sources, all created by men, mostly by educated writers, mostly for educated audiences and viewers. They display limited interest in the behavior of women, children, peasants, and slaves; men were in any case reticent about their own households and their womenfolk. The real balance of power cannot be clearly seen at our distance: we can hardly evaluate the significance of women’s management of household stores (Xenophon, Oikonomikos) against men’s overall pre‐eminence, and we do not really know whether male physicians’ dietary theories, which would have led to poor nutrition for women and children (e.g. Soranos, Gynaikia), were put into practice. Two other inequalities should be signaled. Slaves appear in the title of this chapter but few general claims can be made about their food because (like men and women, indeed) they did not form a discrete social unit. On those attached to households a little will be said below: the only confident statement that can be made is that they came last in the pecking order. If food was in short supply they had even less of it than others; in lavish households and at times of celebration they managed better. Celebrations reached even those who were agricultural laborers (Cato Agr. 57). Soldiers ate differently from other people: their mealtimes were dependent on their commanders and on the routine of a large and rule‐bound community. During active campaigning they were further dependent on surrounding events and on the supply chain. We have some information at various periods on the food they received, but rather little on their social behavior: Xenophon’s Anabasis is the best depiction of the daily life of such a group, with many references to food and drink.
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Classical Greece
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Social inequality is clearly visible, notably in classical Athenian society. In Athenian sources it is rarely the dinner (deipnon) that is described, much more often the drinking party (symposion) that sometimes followed it, and these were occasions for men, recalling the aside by Isaios in a forensic speech: “Married women do not go out to dinner with their husbands, nor do they care to dine with men of other families” (On Pyrrhos’ Estate 14). Thus in Plato’s Symposion the discussion – of love, heterosexual and homosexual, physical and less so – is wholly among men. Participants were at least superficially equal, some deference being shown to a host or to an honored guest, some ritual humiliation imposed on a joker (gelotopoios) or other temporary victim: note Sokrates’ reply when asked (in a later anecdote) whether he was annoyed at the mockery of him in Aristophanes’ Clouds, “No. The theatre is a symposion, and I am the butt” (Plu. Mor. 10c). Prominent in comedy fragments is the stock character parasitos, one who ate with another without being able to return the invitation: compare Plato, Laches 179c in which adolescent boys are allowed to share their fathers’ meal as parasitoi, a choice of terminology that emphasizes, by contrast, the relative equality of male adults at their meals. If dinner or a drinking party took place at a courtesan (hetaira)’s establishment it was, of course, the men who paid. Elsewhere entertainers, musicians, dancers, and prostitutes were sometimes present; in Plato’s Symposion Sokrates proposes dismissing the flute‐girl (hired by the host in advance) to “play to herself or to the women indoors,” leaving the
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men to their philosophy (176e). What happens to the flute‐girl who afterwards arrives with Alkibiades (212d) remains unspecified. In cases where women were present no surviving text shows any direct interest in whether they ate, or indeed whether they spoke. Thus too with the boy and girl who danced in Xenophon’s Symposion: not a word of dialogue is given to them, nor does any character address them, though their act is the subject of prolonged discussion (2.1). We may make a sidelong comparison with one of the meals (some centuries later) at which Jesus is described as present. At those meals, likewise, the discussions are among men; nothing is said of servants or women except when “a woman of the town, a sinner” enters and anoints Jesus with perfumed oil. Her action is discussed and Jesus speaks to her; no words of hers are in the story (Ev. Luc. 17.36–50). On family meals in classical Athens few sources used to be available, and those not very informative, until the rediscovery and publication in 1959 of Menander’s Dyskolos (The Bad‐Tempered Man). It will repay sensitive reading. A sacrifice and lunch (ariston) at a country shrine near Athens take place just offstage, forming the background to most of the action of this play. The meal gradually turns into a betrothal ceremony and is followed by a symposion and dancing. This dénouement is of course more typical of comedy than of real life; the social setting appears, none the less, realistic. Women of the family, including female slaves, are present though scarcely seen, heard or named. They melt into the background. Yet the whole event, its timetable, its menu, the hire of a cook‐ sacrificer (mageiros), and the choice of the sheep to be sacrificed and eaten, had been decided by women and slaves (the hero’s mother is depicted as unusually pious). The cook and a male slave arrive first and make preparations, then the women. The sacrifice takes place before the freemen of the household are present; they turn up afterwards and eat their meal. It seems generally true for this time and place that women and men ate somewhat apart, if not at separate times then in separate circles; “four tables for the women and six for the men” are specified at a comedy wedding (Euang. 1). Slaves had a reasonable hope of enjoying the leftovers on such an occasion and of participating in the celebration. The symposion was male, but all‐night festivity was particularly associated with women. Details that can be extracted from Dyskolos support these observations (Dalby, 1996, 2–8 and references therein). Much has been said in modern scholarship of the Athenian courtesan (hetaira), also of the mageiros, both in his religious aspect (Berthiaume, 1982) and in his recurrent appearance as a stock character in comedy (Wilkins, 2000a). He might or might not be supported by a trapezopoios, a “table‐maker” or waiter (Antiph. 152; Men., Dysk. 644– 7). The flatterer (kolax), another stock character, and his variant the parasitos interested Athenaeus (234d–245b) and several modern scholars (on all this see “Further Reading”). The symposiarchos or temporary president of the drinking party – not the host – is discussed by Plutarch (Table Talk 1.4) more seriously than seems to be justified, given that in other sources he is scarcely mentioned.
Later Greece In later Greek society, under the Hellenistic monarchies, though under Homeric and classical influence, inequalities of wealth asserted themselves more openly. Kings learned from earlier eastern monarchies to display their power and success through lavish
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Rome
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entertaining. Hetairai were reborn as royal mistresses, parasitoi return to their older incarnation as kolakes or flatterers; those who dine with the king can aspire to be no more than parasitoi and kolakes themselves. For better or worse, royal banquets are practically the only focus in our sources for this period, selected and retailed by Athenaeus (especially books 5 and 12; Murray, 1996). Whether initiated by Alexander, by the Persian monarchy before him, or by some other, the fashion for very large royal banquets – of 100 couches or more – persisted among his successors. But the most complete description now available is of a smaller event, the wedding feast of Karanos in early Hellenistic Macedonia, with 20 guests and spectacular entertainment (Ath. 128a–130d). Under the Roman Empire, the Hellenistic monarchies having meanwhile withered and died, the sources offer a few vignettes of life in Greece among simpler people, notably in Lucius or the Ass (printed among the works of Lucian) and in Dio of Prusa’s Euboean Oration. In the two peasant families depicted there (7.65–79) an unmarried daughter serves the men’s meal, as if to confirm Aristotle’s observation: “the poor, having no slaves, must use their wives and children as servants” (Pol. 1323a4).
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The social behavior of Etruscans and Italians at meals had seemed to Greeks extremely odd. We need not take quite seriously the excursus on this topic by Timaios (Ath. 517d) but we should compare it with the iconography (De Marinis, 1961) and notice particularly that “the women dine not with their own husbands but with any men who happen to be present, and drink toasts to any they choose.” This prefigures the image of Roman dining that emerges from sources of the early Empire: in stark contrast with classical Athens, women often reclined among men at meals (Horace Odes 3.6 and many later sources). The claim by the Roman antiquarian Varro that this marked a decline from austere earlier customs seems ill founded (Roller, 2006, 96–8). There were nuances, however. Some guest lists, fictional and real, are exclusively of men (e.g. Horace S. 2.8, the Cena Nasidieni) or include mistresses but not wives. At the historical dinner of the high priests in 70 bc (Macr. 3.13.10‐12; Tansey, 2000) there were separate circles, two of men and one of women. At Trimalchio’s fictional dinner (the Cena Trimalchionis: Petr. 26–78) the only woman guest reclines but the host’s wife is with difficulty persuaded to do likewise. Trimalchio’s dinner is instructive if sometimes hard to interpret, its aim being to satirize the behavior of the newly wealthy of the first century (the host is himself a vastly rich former slave) and one of its methods being reductio ad absurdum (Dalby (2005)). Whatever was the case with women, children up to a certain age would perch on a male relative’s couch: Suetonius, writing a century after the event, thought Augustus old‐fashioned to apply this rule to his grandsons Gaius and Lucius, who from Suetonius’ viewpoint were heirs apparent to the Empire until their early deaths (Aug. 64). At Trimalchio’s dinner, soon after the moment just described, Trimalchio invites his slave attendants to recline with his guests; throughout the episode slaves are prominent and vocal, to the disgust of the fastidious and hypocritical narrator, who is himself attended by his lover (temporarily playing a slave role). At the same period, in real life or at least in Suetonius’ biography, Galba, briefly emperor, used to give handfuls of food from the meal to his attendant slaves, another old‐fashioned practice (Gal. 21). Slaves can hardly be imagined as standing behind the couches – in the traditional dining rooms
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of Roman and Greek architecture there was often no such space – but rather as crouching beside a couch, serving in the center of the room or waiting around the entrance. If the cook was sent for in one of Trimalchio’s theatrically planned incidents, so, no doubt, he might be sent for in real life, to be praised or blamed. Entertainment in Rome might be more varied and elaborate than is described for classical Athens. It could be more violent, if indeed gladiatorial combats took place at dinner in continuation of an Etruscan practice, as Nikolaos of Damascus (Ath. 153f) asserted that they did. Performances of mimes and plays are described, as are recitations of poetry. The dancing girls of Syria, at the eastern end of the Empire, and of Gades (Cadiz) at the western end, were equally famous and no doubt distantly related. Augustus sometimes employed storytellers; Suetonius’ list of the entertainments this emperor chose for his private meals (Aug. 74) confirms that there was overlap between the kinds of performance that were given as interludes during public games or as street entertainment and those that a host might arrange for a dinner.
Placing and Politeness
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The placing of diners is not discussed in Greek contexts: in this way, if in no other, Greek diners were really equal. The typical dining room with its limited number of couches (often five, seven, or nine) would stretch when needed because couches could be shared, as Alkibiades, late arrival in Plato’s Symposion, shared that of Sokrates. At shrines, where several parties might dine at the same time, there were multiple dining rooms still of similar size. Posture and placing mattered to Romans. There are several references to the issue in sources already cited, and a discussion in Plutarch’s Table Talk (1.2–3). In the traditional dining room (triclinium) nine places could be named on three large couches forming three sides of a square. More than nine diners could squeeze in, especially if some were sitting rather than reclining. In the later Empire the semicircular stibadium was the fashion, even less definite in its numerical capacity and less fixed in its placing. Placing perhaps gradually ceased to be a problem. Horace’s Cena Nasidieni (S. 2.8), like Trimalchio’s dinner, is a model of what should not happen. In the triclinium the guest of honor had a traditional place, at the lower end of the middle couch, and the host normally reclined to his right, at the upper end of the lowest couch; if Nasidienus gives up this place to a gourmet friend who will explain the menu and the recipes, Nasidienus has made a bad decision and in any case no one needs to drone on about the food. In general, politeness at meals is partly a matter of how one behaves, partly of what one says and does not say. One text relevant to these issues is the episode in Aristophanes’ Wasps (1122–1537) in which a son teaches his father how to recline at dinner. The four principal texts, though, are Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistai (so long and inconsequential that the relevant material is not easy to find), Plutarch’s Table Talk, the Cena Trimalchionis, and various epigrams of Martial in which dreadful examples are trenchantly presented. Here, again, sensitive reading will bring new insights. In Homeric society a guest was asked his origin and intention only after he had eaten. Hence Nestor can ask his guest Telemachos, as the meal ends, whether he is a pirate (Od. 3.90). In Petronius this might have been a reductio ad absurdum; in formulaic oral poetry, in the depiction of a society for which this is the only evidence, we do not know that it is. We cannot hear the laughter.
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Homeric Society and its Food
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The society depicted in the Odyssey is a construct worth studying, whatever its relation to reality. If one sets out to treat the poem as a closed system, the resulting description is seductively coherent and complete. To begin with, a singer (aoidos) was frequently present at dinners in big houses (but the frequency might be a requirement of plot economy, Sch. Od. 8.43) and might be recalled to perform regularly (Od. 1.153–4, 8.43–4). He would not sit with the feasters, around the walls, but would have a stool placed for him “in the middle” (Od. 8.66, 8.473): servants would supply the singer with food and drink to be taken when wanted (Od. 8.62–70, 8.474–83). The pig‐farmer Eumaios asks:
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Who, when himself just arriving, calls in another stranger from elsewhere, unless one of those who are public workers, a seer or a healer of sicknesses or a maker of shields, or again an inspired singer, who gives pleasure by singing? These are invited by mortals all over the boundless earth (Od. 17.382–6).
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Thus the singer is numbered among “public workers,” as Hesiod’s proverbial lines in the Works and Days confirm: “Potter hates potter and joiner joiner; beggar is jealous of beggar, singer of singer” (Hes. Op. 25–6). As independent as beggars, singers were at the opposite end of the spectrum of esteem. At dinner, though not counted among the feasters, they were not members of the household either: while others’ places showed them dependent on one of the feasters, the singer’s did not. Odysseus on Scherie was not the singer Demodokos’s patron, yet he presented him with food (Od. 8.475). A beggar’s (ptochos) view of society is seen in Odysseus’ approach to Eumaios’s isolated cottage (shared by him, his slave and laborers). The welcome depends initially on whether Eumaios decides to overrule his dogs. He does, and gives his guest food and wine. When the laborers return Odysseus shares their meal; in the morning he helps Eumaios make a fire and set out breakfast – the only breakfast in the poem – food “ready cooked, which they had not eaten up the day before” (Od. 16.50). In town it would be more chancy. “Take this unhappy stranger to town,” says Telemachos to Eumaios soon afterwards, “for him to beg his meal there: whoever wishes will give him crust and cup” (Od. 17.10–13). In the event Telemachos is more generous than these words imply:
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Telemachos called the pig‐farmer over, taking a whole loaf from a fine basket, and as much meat as he could hold in his cupped hands, and said: “Go and give the stranger this and tell him to go around all the suitors, begging. Shyness is not a good quality in a needy man” (Od. 17.344–5).
Beggars face competition. “Have we not plenty of other vagrants besides,” demands Antinoos, one of the suitors reveling in Odysseus’ house, “troublesome beggars, cleaners‐up of feasts?” (Od. 17.376) It will be useless to beg for food and offer nothing in return. In Eumaios’ cottage Odysseus earns the loan of a warm cloak with a tale of his adventures, and pays for hospitality in the evening with work in the morning. At a big house in town, with numerous feasters, he can hope for better chances. “I should soon
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do whatever they wanted,” says Odysseus, “laying a fire, splitting logs, carving and roasting meat, pouring wine, and the sorts of things the worse do to serve the good” (Od. 15.317–24). He is offered farm work, though with a caveat: “If you have learned bad ways … you will want to skulk about the town to get the fodder for your starving belly” (Od. 18.363–4). This last option, vagrancy and odd‐jobbing, has been chosen by Odysseus’s rival, the beggar Iros (who resembles the parasitoi of classical Athens in that “the young men had a nickname for him”: Od. 18.1–7). There are no women beggars in the Odyssey, but a myth told by Sokrates in Plato’s Symposium (about 380 bc) suggests one way a female vagrant earned her food:
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The gods were celebrating, Craft’s son Resource among them. While they were at dinner, Poverty came begging, as she would when a feast was on, and hung about the door. Resource became drunk on nectar (wine did not yet exist), went into Zeus’s garden and sank down to sleep; and Poverty, deciding in her resourcelessness to have a child by Resource, lay down beside him, and there she conceived Eros “sexual love” (Smp. 203b).
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The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (early fifth century) suggests another way. The goddess Demeter herself, as a beggar woman, offers to “nurse well a newborn child, holding it in my arms” (hHom. Dem. 138–9). If not driven off by sticks, stones or dogs, a beggar progressed as far as the doorway and sat and observed. Within was one main room, megaron; the hearth was near the center of it with a smoke‐hole above. In a house bigger than Eumaios’s this need not be the only room: in Odysseus’s house there were a store‐room and an upstairs, but the megaron was where social activities of all kinds took place. It was where most men of the household slept, and outsiders if there was room (Od. 14.523–4; if not, on the verandah). It is where Odysseus, still disguised, talks with Penelope after the feasting is over. One focus of the megaron was the “equal feast” (Od. 8.98; Il. 1.602, 23.56) already evident by sound and smell to a passer‐by, the dining and drinking of the feasters (daitymones) who sat on benches and stools around the walls. In front of each was a small table. Surrounded by the feasters, separated from them by their tables, “in the middle” was the household: women and children, dependents and slaves. In the middle of these was the hearth. Odysseus, looking forward to his late‐evening interview with Penelope, expects to get “nearer the fire” (Od. 17.572). The layout was difficult for commentators of later times to understand: trying to grasp why queen Arete sits “at the hearth,” a scholiast explains that “it was winter” (Sch. Od. 6.305). In reality the hearth is mentioned because it was the central point of the room, and the center for the household – as opposed to the feasters – in particular, but that made no sense to later scholars. For them men feasted in a dining room from which the household was excluded. More recently M.I. Finley was certain that Arete has got things wrong: her position is “contrary to all the rules of Greek society of the time” (Finley, 1956, 98). Nausikaa understands better, neatly expressing the dependence of servants on mistress and the interdependence of man and woman: [My mother] sits at the hearth in the glow of the fire, spinning her sea‐purple wool, lovely to see, leaning against a pillar, and house‐girls sit behind her; and there my father’s chair leans against her, where he sits and drinks his wine like an immortal (Od. 6.305–9).
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During dinner the conversation among the feasters is all that we hear; what the household says to itself is not part of the story. We hear what the feasters eat and what they give to others, not what the household eats. Activities surrounding the meal are described in one of two relevant “typical scenes” that are surely drawn from preceding oral tradition:
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Heralds (kerykes) and busy attendants were some of them mixing wine and water in bowls, some again with porous sponges washing and setting out tables, some portioning out plentiful meat … [The feasters] were sitting in rows on couches and chairs, and heralds poured water over their hands, and house‐girls piled out bread in baskets, and boys filled bowls with drink; and they set their hands to the food laid out ready (Od. 1.109–49, repeated elsewhere with variants).
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In the image of meals at Odysseus’s house there is room for all the servants mentioned elsewhere: the housekeeper Eurykleia, the house‐girls whom Odysseus will soon put to death, also heralds (carelessly borrowed from the formula at Il. 18.558), attendants on the suitors, boys, and a carver. Serving meat and pouring wine are, as Odysseus puts it, “the sorts of things the worse do to serve the good” (Od. 15.324), but there is little specialization. “Maids cleared away the dinner‐things” (Od. 7.232), and in Odysseus’s house Penelope appeared in the megaron when her maids were clearing up (Od. 19.59– 64). Even Eumaios is served by one slave (Od. 14.407–56). As to children, we can start with a vignette of feasting in the megaron: its source is the Iliad, c. 675 bc) and its theme is the child whose father is dead:
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The day of orphaning makes a child all friendless … In need he approaches his father’s companions, pulling at one by the cloak, at another by the tunic: and of those who pity him one holds out a cup, for a moment, and wets his lips but does not wet his mouth. And an amphithales chases him from the feast, hitting with hands and attacking with insults: “Go, then! You have no father dining with us.” In tears he approaches his widowed mother … though on his father’s knee he used to eat nothing but marrow and rich mutton fat (Il. 22.490–501).
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The amphithales is apparently a child with both parents living (the Greeks had a word for it). In the Odyssey we read of Arete’s preparations for Nausikaa’s picnic: “Her mother was putting all sorts of satisfying food in a hamper, was putting cooked things in, was pouring in wine into a goatskin” (Od. 6.76–8). But this is not specifically food for a child: similar preparations are made by Kalypso when Odysseus is ready to embark. “The goddess put in a skin of black wine for him, that was one, and another of water, a big one, and provisions in a leather bag; she was putting in many satisfying cooked things for him” (Od. 5.265–7). On women’s food we have only the scene in which Kalypso and Odysseus eat together for the last time before his departure. They came to the hollow cave, the goddess and the man together. Well, he was sitting there in the chair from which Hermes had got up, and the nymphe put out every food for him to eat and drink that mortal men eat. She was sitting facing godlike Odysseus, and house‐girls put out ambrosia and nectar for her; and they set their hands to the food laid out ready (Od. 5.194–200).
The immortals of Greece could not eat human food, so the fact that Kalypso eats differently from Odysseus might not necessarily imply a distinction between the sexes; we
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may however think that it does, and that a woman would serve her man before her maids (if she had maids) served her. Aside from the household’s regular meals, it was proper for newly arrived guests to be given food and drink on arrival. The feeding of a guest requires a different “typical scene” (West et al., 1988, v. 1, 94; Dalby, 1995). The rules of hospitality as poets saw them led automatically from the arrival of a guest to the offer of food and the setting up of a table in front of the guest’s chair: just one table, even on the one occasion when the host (Telemachos) eats at the same time as his guest Mentor (the goddess Athene in disguise). The text depicting this meal can be compared with the “typical scene” of feasting, quoted above, with which it happens to be interwoven.
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A maid bringing hand‐water poured it from a fair gold jug over a silver bowl for the wash, and drew up a carved table. An aidoie housekeeper had put out bread, and bringing it, having added many relishes, regaled them from what was there; a waiter put out bronze trays of all sorts of meats, and put out gold goblets for them; a squire often passed by, pouring wine for them (Od. 1.136–43, repeated with variants at 7.153–77 and 14.72–113).
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A pair of meals whose juxtaposition has seemed inexplicable occurs at the point where Telemachos and Peisistratos arrive at Menelaos’s while a wedding feast is in progress. After bathing, the newcomers eat under Menelaos’s eye (Od. 4.47–68): what becomes of the wedding feast? Two solutions were proposed by early readers, both requiring the text to be adjusted: some deleted the wedding feast (Od. 4.3–14); some retained it and added extra lines, based on Iliad 18.604–6, to round it off. It was the second solution that prevailed in the manuscripts and therefore in modern editions (the interpolated lines are Od. 4.15–19). If we remove these intruders, we have the text that Athenaeus read. He explained it by proposing that the wedding feast is over by now, and Menelaos and Helen are eating the leftovers (Ath. 180c–f). We should prefer to say that the wedding scene had served its purpose and was supplanted, in the poet’s mind, by the obligatory feeding of newly arrived guests (Dalby, 1995). Among the inequalities in the “equal feasts” of the Odyssey one remains to be discussed. The power of distributing food and wine defined one’s relations with others. One aspect of this was the giving of special honors to guests and others. The evening meal at Eumaios’s farm, with the disguised Odysseus as guest, was the occasion for the sacrifice of “the best of the pigs … we, too, shall enjoy it” (Od. 14.414–15). It was in the nature of the “equal feast” that the carver, here Eumaios himself, cut the whole sacrifice into portions, one of which was for the gods (Od. 4.3–14. “In Greece this is still done with great ceremony, and beforehand. The host stands, and picks over the whole dish of bits, putting fair equivalents towards each of the guests, before helping on to the plates – a clear survival from the plateless stage” (J.L. Myres in Monro, 1901, 39). But the other portions were not equal after all, because Eumaios “honored Odysseus with whole spare‐ribs of the white‐tusked boar,” a portion that Odysseus himself acknowledged as good (Od. 14.437–8). This particular honor was a notable one, though not unique in the Odyssey: Menelaos selected the same cut (though of an ox!) for Telemachos and Peisistratos (Od. 4.65–6, cf. 8.474–83, Il. 7.321, 9.207). Eumaios’s generous act may be one of those details in which the poet makes him pay unrealistic but touching respect to the master he has not yet recognized. It was a gift of food from host to guest but also from client to patron, but Eumaios is supposed not to know this.
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If the supply of meat was to be divided into portions, one who was not among the feasters could not be the beneficiary of general charity (there was nothing left over) but had to depend on individual generosity or patronage. Odysseus received a handful of meat from Telemachos’s share and then, at his instruction, went the round of the feasters to beg for more. It was not for him to pick and choose what went into his bag, any more than for a mendicant Buddhist monk with his bowl: he would hope to get some s election, relatively good or bad, from what the feasters were eating Eumaios at his evening meal, after making a libation, hands the wooden wine‐bowl to Odysseus first. The drinking could never quite be equal if there were fewer cups than diners, as there evidently were in Eumaios’s cottage, but, more than that, passing a wine‐ cup was somehow a more normal vehicle for unequal honor than selecting portions of food. Odysseus, about to depart from Scherie, gets up from among the feasters to hand a wine‐bowl to his hostess Arete. When Mentor (the disguised Athene) and Telemachos arrive at Pylos while Nestor and his people are sacrificing, Nestor’s son finds a reason in Mentor’s apparent seniority to pledge him and hand him the cup first, a mark of respect to herself of which the disguised goddess, not known for her sense of humor, naturally approves. Odysseus in his narrative says of a gift of wine that Maron of Ismaros had made to him “none of the slaves or servants in his house had known it, but himself and his dear wife and one housekeeper only” (Od. 9.205–7). The nature of the housekeeper’s responsibility for wine was parallel, it may seem, to the carver’s role in dividing meat, and one passage of the Iliad does actually refer to a daitron, a “share” of wine: Idomeneus, among the swift‐foaled Danaoi I value you, whether in war or in any other matter, or in feast, and when the best of the Argives mix the aldermanly smoky wine in its bowl. Well, while the other long‐haired Achaeans may drink a share, your cup always stands fuller, as does mine, to drink when the spirit urges (Il. 4.257–63).
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The concept of a share of wine is mentioned only to invalidate it. Meat and wine are not parallel. They were distributed in ways that were thought of as different, although no single text contrasts them. Meat was divided into equal shares, one (inedible, perhaps) for the god, one for each feaster: it may be just credible that this equality, divinely mediated, was not compromised by the choice of a special portion for a guest of honor. On archaic vase paintings of banquets the diners’ portions are obsessively depicted as equal (Schmitt Pantel, 1990, 18). However, wine was under the householder’s authority: how correct it was of Telemachos, not yet a householder and never depicted unambiguously as one of the feasters in his father’s house, to take a supply of the second best wine with him to Pylos and Sparta, leaving the best for his missing father (Od. 2.350)! Wine was mixed with water by the householder, was selected at his whim and was distributed as he chose. This distinction between meat and wine corresponds to that between sacrificial meal and symposium, rightly shown to be central to Greek city life in studies by Pauline Schmitt Pantel (1990): it may, though we cannot quite know this, have been consciously present to the mind of the poet of the Odyssey. The picture that the Odyssey gives us is of nascent cities (poleis) that have scarcely yet taken up the baton: small households (the tradition knows little of large and wealthy ones) individually defend themselves against the world. The recurrence of stories of kidnapping and enslavement is notable. Outsiders who had no household – whether temporarily as travelers or indefinitely as vagrants – were reluctantly admitted within
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household defenses. On returning home Odysseus’s most dangerous moment is just outside his own house. “Do not hesitate here,” Eumaios tells him, “or someone noticing you outside may throw stones at you or chase you.” “I am not unfamiliar with beatings and stonings,” the disguised beggar replies (Od. 17.278–9, 283). The centrality of food in the reception of an outsider is evident. The new arrival gets the leftovers from the last meal, and in this way is admitted to the household through partaking of what is “inside.”
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The primary texts culminate in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistai, a work that gathers within itself much of the earlier classical source material. The new Loeb edition is completed (Olson, 2006–12). Secondary literature at first took two forms: commentaries on the texts alongside monographs on aspects of ancient dining. There is no commentary on the Deipnosophistai in any modern language; for those who read Latin, the single volume by Isaac Casaubon (1600) was reworked and much expanded in the multi‐volume commentary by Schweighäuser (1801–07). Both can be found on line. They act partly as guides to what other ancient sources said on the topics raised by Athenaeus; for this specific purpose nothing has replaced them. Commentaries on other relevant ancient authors are worth exploring and need not be listed here. With regard to recently rediscovered texts note the edition of the Vindolanda tablets from northern Britain by Bowman and Thomas (1994) and that of Menander’s Dyskolos by Handley (1965). On topics related to Roman households the sourcebook by Gardner and Wiedemann (1991) is convenient. Modern writings on classical Greek dining and symposia begin with the work of Andrea Bacci (1595). Concerning symposia plenty of later work exists; Murray (1990b), followed by Murray & Tecuşan (1995), offers a handy guide to it, a state of the art and more. For dining see the work of Slater (1991) and Dalby (1996, 1–22), which deals with Menander in some detail. For Greek cooks see Berthiaume (1982), Lowe (1985), and Wilkins (2000a); for parasitoi Arnott (1996, 336–43, 542–7), Fehr (1990), Bruit Zaidman (1995), and Wilkins (2000a, 71–87); for hetairai, Peschel (1987) and Davidson (1997). On Roman dining, various studies of specific sources are useful: those of Baker (1988) and Caston (1997) on the Cena Nasidieni, Dalby (2001) on Suetonius, Boyce (1991) on the Cena Trimalchionis. Additionally and in general see the work of D’Arms (1991) and Dunbabin (2004) on slaves and attendants, Roller (2003) on women, Dalby (2000b, 257–66) on dinner as the place for courtship, Roller (2006) and Dunbabin (1991, 1998) on placing and posture; also Allison (2001) for new approaches to archaeological evidence and Griffin (1985) on poetry. Iconography is the primary focus for De Marinis’ work on Etruscan banquets (1961) and in Dunbabin’s important work on Roman material (especially her 2003 volume). Greek soldiers, as viewed through Xenophon’s Anabasis, are the focus of Dalby (1992); on Roman soldiers see Davies (1971) and Dickson (1989). As regards Homeric society, the latest general survey is by van Wees (1992), but his focus is on warfare. For meals and their context see the work of Dalby (1995); on servants in particular, Ramming (1973) and Greenhalgh (1982).
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