‘‘The beginning and root of all good, is the pleasure of the stomach!’’ The wisdom of this saying, which was attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, is the first lesson that a human infant learns. Food, the only source of energy for the sustenance of life, also provides one of the basic pleasures life offers. Food is at the heart of family and social life. Food sharing has always meant inclusion and acceptance in the group; while accusations of disgusting eating habits, often together with those of unacceptable sexual habits, are a well-tried means of social exclusion, employed quite profitably by the morally superior or gossipmongers for shaming and ridiculing their victims.
In the ancient Mediterranean world, feasting was as central to religious life as it was part of family and social life. The awesome rite of religious sacrifice culminated in a banquet; the ritual sharing and eating of sacrificial meat was an integral part of polytheistic cult. The gods honored in this fashion, including the god of the ancient Jews, shared with their worshippers a preference for the meat of domesticated animals. But unlike the god of the Jews, the gods of the Greeks and Romans did not prescribe special diets, and rarely required abstinence of their followers. In the absence of God-given moral injunctions, human legislation oversaw important aspects of public conduct, while philosophers and other guardians of morality worried about how one should live an ethical life, and ancient ‘‘healthcare professionals,’’ doctors and athletic trainers, gave advice about health (Grimm 1996: 43-59). Food was a central concern for both moral and physical well-being.
Despite the wealth of references to food in its literature, the question of who ate what in the Roman world still remains quite contested. In the extant literary works, all written by men of the upper classes or by those who would have liked to belong to the upper classes, eating and drinking are used for a great variety of purposes, ranging from moral metaphors to character description or, more often, for character assassination, having little in the way of trustworthy objectivity.
The ancient empire of the Romans, which sustained itself for centuries, covered the lands around the Mediterranean sea and, at its zenith, extended further into areas of Northern and Western Europe and Asia that were increasingly removed in terms of climate, population, and culture from the Mediterranean core, which itself was quite a varied patchwork of climates, lands, languages, and traditions (Patterson 1987).
The question ‘‘who ate what’’ in this far-flung empire is not a trivial one; reliable answers for it would take us a long way in understanding an ancient culture that was crucially important in the formation of European civilization. Research devoted to answering this question has increased, and there are now a number of excellent scholarly books (e. g. Garnsey 1988, 1998, 1999; Curtis 2001; Sirks 1991; Morley 1996). Unfortunately there are no ancient statistical studies and no surveys of food consumption from antiquity to aid the investigator in this quest. The question, ‘‘who ate what,’’ has to be approached by collating and critically evaluating more or less indirect evidence, each with its own specific problems.
Perusing uncritically some of the rich and vivid remnants of ancient literature, a consensus has long held that the Romans went with hardly a pause from being frugal, upright vegetarians - ‘‘pulse-eaters’’ - into decadence and unimaginable gluttony, eating and regurgitating the most diverse products of the known world all mixed together and moistened with rotten fish-sauce (Pray Bober 1999: 146-56)! Since only the ‘‘elite’’ could afford to devour the riches of land and sea, the same opinion has generally held that the ‘‘non-elite’’ or nine-tenths of the population of the empire lived on bread and water, on a ‘‘starkly vegetarian’’ diet (Sirks 1991: 362; Garnsey 1999: 16-17). These opinions, as I shall argue, need to be seriously modified.
References to food and eating are ubiquitous in Roman literature. They appear in the works of poets, orators, historians, biographers, and medical writers. Advice concerning food and eating forms a significant part of the teaching of various philosophical schools. All use food and eating for their own varied purposes of persuasion, each with its own ‘‘axe to grind.’’ Consequently, as we shall see, none of these sources provide reliable information relevant for the actual diet of the wider population or even segments of it. On the other hand all of these writings are very strong on attitude, that is to say, on strongly held and highly emotion-laden opinion, and a failure to recognize this leads to their misuse and misinterpretation.
Many ancient writers regarded food in itself as a trivial necessity, not a worthy subject for their art; on the other hand many realized that food and eating habits could be used profitably for purposes of moral judgment, for embarrassing and ridiculing one’s opponents and social targets. Knowing that food has a wealth of sensuous associations, that it can conjure up a rich variety of sights, smells, and textures, both enticing and disgusting, Roman writers became masters of its use as vivid metaphors for real or imagined excesses of the many-faceted society they saw around them. Emily Gowers, in her book The Loaded Table (1993), inspects the feast of verbal food that Roman writers and poets ‘‘cooked up’’ and gives a perceptive analysis of the way this ‘‘verbal food’’ expressed the writers’ concerns with Rome and its empire, with the growth and increasing complexity of its society and their own place in it. The verbal feast served up by the poets was not, and was not even meant to be, a record of what people ate.
In the steeply hierarchical society of the Roman Empire the ruling classes held to an age-old set of beliefs and principles developed to underpin their own privileges. A
Roman aristocrat was expected to rule over his family, which included not only wife and children but also slaves and clients, dependants of various ranks. All of these he was to protect, and all of them owed him allegiance and service. An aristocrat was born to rule and to take part in the rule of the empire. This idea was strongly maintained even when the rule of the empire was concentrated in one man’s hands. A man was considered fit to rule others only if he first proved that he could rule himself. Ruling himself, encrateia, was defined for him by the Stoic philosophers as the need to control his passions, as Shakespeare echoes it centuries later: ‘‘give me that man that is not passion’s slave.’’ The philosophers argued primarily against inordinate anger, fear, greed and grief, but the list of passions could be extended, or reduced on the other hand to a minimum of two, passion for food and sex. These two ‘‘passions’’ would then serve as a graphic marker for a multitude of other sins. Stoic teaching fitted well with the Roman ideal of gravitas, meaning seriousness, restraint, frugality in conduct. It followed from both that any concern with the comforts or pleasures of the body would be morally suspect and below the dignity of a high-born man. The true man, according to the Stoic view, concerned himself with matters of the mind:
It is a sign of a stupid man to spend a great deal of time on the concerns of his body - exercise, eating, drinking, evacuating his bowels and copulating. These things should be done in passing; you should devote your whole attention to the mind. (Epict. Ench. 41)
This ideology went hand in hand with rules and expectations concerning proper masculine comportment (Gleason 1995). The well-born man had to present himself as one who unquestionably deserved his social position. This required, in addition to the already mentioned gravitas and self-control, also philanthropia, generosity towards his city and his dependants. ‘‘The Roman people hated private luxury but delighted in munificence extended to the public!’’ observed Cicero (Mur. 76), and many ancient writers seem to prove him right. Accusations of ostentatious luxury echo through Roman literature, coupled often with the hurt feelings of the writer who was left out of it. The poet takes cruel vengeance for the dinner party where he felt short-changed by memorializing the host in a poem for eternal shame. Millennia later we are still witness to his stinginess.
How should one read these complaints? Roman grandees used the evening meal, the cena, for various social purposes. When dining with intimate friends and social equals, the number of participants was small, usually not exceeding nine people. It was believed that beyond this number the occasion would become loud and unruly; instead of convivium, or ‘‘life-sharing,’’ it would become convitium, ‘‘vice-sharing.’’ A rich Roman was also expected to maintain a large network of social connections, to take care of his clients, entertain visitors to the city who came with recommendation from friends, and so on. The philanthropia expected of him required, amongst other things, the feeding and entertaining of a large crowd of people. The grand dinner party served this purpose. Following the work of John D’Arms (1984), many writers have elaborated the social inequality and hierarchical arrangement of the Roman dinner. But is this so surprising? Anyone who has ever attended large, modern banquets, wedding parties, fund-raising occasions, etc., knows that not everyone sits at high-table, that the farther one is seated from the place of honor, the colder the food he is served.
When Ammianus Marcellinus, the last great Latin historian, a Greek from the east, expresses his disappointment with the Roman aristocracy (14.6.7-24) we hear again the same complaints: luxury, ostentation, lack of true refinement, and gluttonous dinners. But on a more critical reading one may suspect that what hurt Ammianus most was not receiving the attention he felt was due to him and not being invited back next time. To understand the picture that he, and other newcomers like Galen, in the Concerning Foresight (de praecognitione), and Lucian, in the Nigrinus, paint of Rome one has to keep in mind that they came as provincials to the greatest city of the world, intent on fame and success. Rome must have appeared a bewilderingly large and threatening place in comparison with their home city which they knew well, and in which they were part of a familiar social network. The well worn cliches these writers use to describe the Romans reminds one of refugee intellectuals arriving in New York and complain that the city ‘‘has no culture!’’
If food, in and of itself, was considered trivial by ancient writers, appetite was most certainly not. Hunger is a fact of life; all men hunger if deprived of food. Appetite, on the other hand, is a sinister and suspect attribute. It is individual, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, and therefore highly dangerous. Appetite, for food or sex, and most often for both, provided rich material for the gossipmongers. People have always worried about their fellow humans having more access than themselves to these basic commodities. In Roman thought, appetite, the source of passions, fits neither with gravitas nor with self-control, which explains its easy use as a weapon for character assassination in the hand of righteous or self-righteous critics.
There is a discernible conflict in even the best of the ancient historians, between the urge to tell it as it was and their equally strong need to teach a moral lesson or tell an intriguing tale of gossip, innuendo, and speculation. The requirement of the moral lesson is that the hero who fails must have a flaw in his character which makes him fail and justifies his sorry end. Gluttony is dragged in as an easy, almost mechanical device to substitute for careful analysis of what often was a very complex set of causes.
Of the many examples of the use of appetite to besmirch character in the hands of ancient historians, I will present here the fall of Vitellius, because in his case the historians’ characterization is generally unquestioned, and he is often held up as an example and personification of Roman gustatory vice (see also Pray Bober 1999: 356, who suggests that modern notions that the Romans habitually indulged in gorging and vomiting were picked up from the biography of the ‘‘despicable Emperor Vitellius’’ written by Suetonius).
The following is a brief summary of his story: after the fall of Nero, Galba becomes emperor and Vitellius is sent to the legions in Germany. These legions, restless in the wake of the revolt of Vindex in Gaul, make Vitellius emperor, while in the center of the empire the praetorians kill Galba and make Otho emperor. A large extant part of Tacitus’ Histories treats the ensuing civil war, from which the Vitellian forces emerge the winners for a time, while a well-organized conspiracy is being forged under Vespasian in the east, involving the Roman forces in Judea, Syria, and Egypt.
The war was fought with enormous investment on both sides. Vitellius does not appear to have been an unpopular emperor while he lived. Tacitus says that the common people of Rome and even slaves armed themselves to fight on his side.
But he failed. Tacitus criticizes him for not being able to restrain his forces, for not being eager to fight, for not believing the rumors about the Flavian conspiracy. The fact is that Vitellius failed, therefore there must have been moral turpitude involved. Since Vitellius seems to have been devoted to his wife and family and gave little scope in these quarters, the turpitude chosen is gluttony: indolent luxury and extravagant dinners; ‘‘at midday he was tipsy and was gorged with food,’’ says Tacitus (Hist. 1.62). In summing up, the historian admits, somewhat inconsistently, that ‘‘his nature was marked by simplicity and liberality’’ then, in typical Tacitean fashion, he adds ‘‘qualities which if unchecked, prove the ruin of their possessor.’’ In hindsight the historian decided that ‘‘undoubtedly it was to the advantage of the state that Vitellius be defeated’’ (Hist. 3.86). The interest of the victors demanded that his memory be blackened. The fact that he was a rather fat man, who may have liked good food, is a rather poor explanation of a complex series of events.
Other writers embellish the topic. The historian Cassius Dio dealt with Vitellius in book 64 of his work, first describing Vitellius’ moral failures, then, to be fair, cataloguing his ‘‘good deeds.’’ I shall reverse the order here. The list of good deeds first: Vitellius retained the coinage minted under his predecessors, Nero, Galba, and Otho, evincing no displeasure at their likenesses, and any gifts that they had bestowed upon any persons he held to be valid, and deprived no one of any such possession. He did not collect any sums still owing of former levies, and he confiscated no one’s property. He put to death but a very few of those who had sided with Otho, and did not withhold the property of these from their relatives. Upon the kinsmen of those previously executed he bestowed all their funds that were still to be found in the public treasury. He did not even find fault with the wills of those who had fought against him and had fallen in battle. And so on. He won the attachment of the populace, but Dio, with characteristic disdain of the common people, attributes this to his constant attendance at the theater. He ate with the most influential men on free and easy terms, and this gained their favor to an even greater degree. He honored his friends and old companions.
Compare this picture to the catalogue of his flaws, compiled by the same author: He was insatiate in gorging himself and was constantly vomiting up what he ate, being nourished by the mere passage of the food. All the most costly viands were brought from as far as the ocean, not to say farther, drawn from both land and sea, and were prepared in so costly a fashion that even now certain cakes and other dishes are named Vitellian, after him. It is admitted by all alike, claims the writer, that during his reign he expended 900 million sesterces on dinners (giving the same sum, Tacitus only says ‘‘it is believed’’). Then there is the story of the enormous dish that he filled with the tongues and brains of peacocks. This dish appears also in Suetonius, now wearing the name ‘‘the Shield of Minerva.’’ The latter writer goes to extremes in using gluttony for character assassination: on this platter, he writes, Vitellius mingled the livers of pike, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos and the milt of lampreys, brought by his captains and triremes from the whole empire, from Parthia to the Spanish strait (Vit. 13).
It becomes obvious to anyone who tries to put together all these contrasting characterizations that the good sides and the bad do not fit into a coherent, plausible picture. Even the famous Vitellian delicacies turn out on inspection not to be so outlandish. In Apicius’ cookbook, a late antique compilation of recipes from assorted earlier works on cookery, there are, indeed, three recipes with the name of Vitellius attached, but none of them stands out for its particular extravagance (Apicius 5.3.5, 9, 8.7.7; the first two are recipes for beans, the last one is for roast pork). Interestingly, in the whole collection one cannot find any reference to peacock brains, flamingo tongues, and the like. There are instructions for roasting these birds, and for preparing sauces for them, and there is one recipe for meatballs made from peacocks, but no mention of brains. Romans bred peafowl both for its beauty and for the table (Varro Rust. 3.6-7). They enjoyed peacocks for the beauty of the males; females were eaten if not used for breeding. As these were fattened, and were expensive, they were associated with luxury. Varro mentions that a fattened bird in his days would fetch 50 denarii. Now to use only the smallest piece, the brain or the tongue of such an expensive bird, is a clever writer’s ploy to give a sense of the absolute peak of insane luxury.
Two more examples from Roman literature have to be mentioned here, for the reason that they are often used as evidence for the Roman diet (see e. g. MacMullen 1974; C. P. Jones 1991; Garnsey 1998, 1999; Pray Bober 1999). One is Trimalchio’s famous, or rather infamous, feast, on the extravagant and disgusting side; the other is the poem known as the Moretum, on the moral, vegetarian, and bare subsistence side of the argument. Both, we should remind ourselves at the outset, are works of fiction.
The author and inventor of the fabulously rich and even more fabulously crude freedman, Trimalchio, is generally believed to be Petronius, an aristocratic aesthete and courtier of Nero. Trimalchio appears in the longest complete episode in an otherwise fragmentary adventure novel, the Satyricon, that is set in a predominantly Greek atmosphere, somewhere around the Bay of Naples (see Myers, this volume). Trimalchio’s feast is a clever and cruel satirical attack on the nouveau-riche ex-slave, who managed to enrich himself by trade and money lending, enterprises that were considered below the dignity of aristocrats, and who in the process of acquiring wealth, also acquired pretensions to refinement and culture, which were, of course, the natural preserve of the upper classes alone (Pray Bober 1999: 163). The author relentlessly ridicules Trimalchio’s lack of taste and sophistication in matters of food and wine by emphasizing the contrast between the enormous wealth spent on the dinner and the disgusting, ridiculous, and insipid results. He plays up the crudeness and vulgarity of the conversation, the main concern of which is to brag of the host’s wealth. Some modern writers discard the rest of the Satyricon and use the Trimalchio episode, out of its context, as if it were a realistic document of social history (C. P. Jones 1991: 185). Trimalchio’s feast, if read in its context of a novel of adventures in low-life, becomes questionable evidence for social history. The rather heavy-handed satire is interesting not because it teaches us anything about actual Roman eating habits but because it is a forerunner of a long-lived literary-intellectual conceit, the aristocratic disdain for the middle classes, the first great ‘‘put-down’’ of the bourgeoisie. And in that genre it is exquisite.
Just as the dinner of Trimalchio is thought by some to exemplify the life of the wealthy, on the side of poverty the often cited literary evidence is the Moretum, a first century ce poem of unknown authorship, once attributed to Vergil. The poem describes in epic form and minute detail how, early in the morning, a frugal and hard-working farmer prepares his bread and a kind of herb and garlic laden cheese spread, the ‘‘moretum.’’
‘‘Simulus,’’ our farmer, has only one slave woman to help him, an African, described again with careful but unflattering detail. His farm, the poet tells us, costs him nothing but his hard work. He owns a fertile vegetable garden which he tends with skill and diligence. The produce of it, however, is not for his consumption, but for the public. Every so often he carries it to the town market from where he comes back ‘‘enriched’’ with money. When not engaged in his garden he ploughs his field with a pair of bullocks. The reader is assured that Simulus has no meat in his larder, that he slakes his hunger with bread and uses onions, chives, and watercress as relish.
While it is sometimes admitted that this is not exactly a slice-of-life portrait of the Italian peasant, and that the poet had his own literary purposes of moralizing or poking fun at a nostalgic bucolic genre, popular amongst the rich (Kenney 1984), the poem, it is claimed, does manage to convey something of the flavor of rural life (Garnsey 1999: 114). The question is, what flavor? It certainly does describe how rotary hand mills were operated, many examples of which were found in Roman military forts in Britain and elsewhere (Curtis 2001: 338); it lists the vegetables one might find in an Italian kitchen garden; it attests to the existence of local markets and market days ( nundinae), and shows how the produce reached the market of nearby towns to be exchanged for money. Some farmers, like our fictional ‘‘Simulus,’’ were undoubtedly very poor. This poem, however, is often made to carry a much larger burden, for it lurks in the background of many general assertions that the popular diet in the empire was mostly vegetarian (Wilkins et al. 1995: 2; Curtis 2001: 395), that meat was considered a luxury, and that only the wealthy could afford it. This view is often elaborated further with claims that only pigs were bred for consumption by the rich and that cattle were only slaughtered when old and could no longer be of any service (Sirks 1991: 362; Pray Bober 1999: 181), that sheep and goats were kept for wool, milk, and cheese, and that fish was a luxury food (Garnsey 1999: 16), notwithstanding the ubiquity of the sea and the rivers running into it! Other sources of animal food, chicken and other fowl, or field fare are never considered by those committed to the vegetarian argument (Frost 1999).
Telling others how to live seems to have been just as popular in the ancient world as it is today. In the Roman Empire physicians vied with other experts, philosophers, orators, apparently even athletic trainers in giving dietary advice. Can we expect to gain more reliable information concerning food habits from those who guarded health and well-being?
Health care was firmly based on diet. Food and drink were used to combat diseases and it was firmly believed that they were of general assistance in preserving health as well. Physicians claimed to be experts on the ‘‘nature’’ of foodstuffs, which had to be carefully fitted to the ‘‘temperament’’ or ‘‘constitution’’ of each individual. Health, according to the prevailing views in ancient medicine, consisted of an equilibrium between the four bodily humors, blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile, with their corresponding qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry. Food, exercise, and climate were crucial in maintaining this equilibrium. Foods were categorized according to their nature as heating or cooling, moistening or drying. At the same time they were either strong, medium, or weak. Strong foods were believed to be most nourishing but hard to digest, weak foods least nourishing but easy to digest. With the aid of this list made up on the basis of Celsus’ Concerning Medicine and Hippocrates’ Regimen in Health, we may reconstruct the ideal ‘‘balanced’’ diet. Among the ‘‘strong’’ foods were generally counted beef and the meat of other large domesticated quadrupeds; all large game such as the wild goat, deer, wild boar, wild ass; all large birds, such as the goose, the peacock, and the crane; all ‘‘sea monsters,’’ such as the whale and the like; all pulses and bread-stuffs made of grain, honey, and cheese. Among foods belonging to the class of medium strength were counted: the hare, birds of all kinds from the smallest up to the flamingo, fish, and root and bulb vegetables. Finally, to the weakest class were thought to belong snails and shellfish, all vegetable stalks, gourds, cucumbers and capers, olives, and all orchard fruits. Strong foods were ‘‘heating’’ foods; in addition to being most nutritious they were also thought to be aphrodisiacs. The more ‘‘heating’’ the food, the more it was supposed to increase sexual potency, or at least sexual appetite.
In thinking that relied heavily on analogy, ‘‘strong’’ and ‘‘weak’’ were loaded with meaning which, while having nothing to do with nutrition, became attached to food and drink. Thus ‘‘strong’’ food, roast beef, is also masculine food, food fit for a free man, as opposed to complicated rich sauces which are ‘‘effeminate’’ food.
Amongst the voluminous writings of Galen, a famous physician who practiced medicine in Rome in the age of the Antonines, there is an abundance of references to food and a number of treatises devoted explicitly to the nature of foods. Galen, who had an extremely high opinion of his own expertise, cautions against doctors who give general advice as to whether a given food is beneficial or not; some foods may be beneficial or harmful for all, but in most cases the effect of any food depends on the particular condition of the patient. In his three books on food Galen lists an extensive range of foodstuffs edible for humans, including grains, vegetables, meat, and fish, together with all their possible effects on temperament, health, and digestion. Galen’s list of animal foods is amazing in its rich variety: in addition to the domestic quadrupeds generally used for food, i. e. pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats, he discusses meat from horses, wild and domestic donkeys, camels, dogs, bears, ‘‘even though they are worse than lions and leopards.’’ ‘‘Not a few people eat panthers... some doctors even recommend them...in the autumn hunters serve fox because they are fattened by the grapes’’ (Mark Grant 2000: 155-6). Next comes his list of edible birds, which is again staggering: from chickens to ostriches, peacocks to sparrows, even bustards - the good doctor knows the nature of the flesh of all feathered creatures and their effects on digestion. Similarly with the denizens of rivers and seas.
Reading Galen on food one sees a human population that, instead of being ‘‘starkly vegetarian,’’ would eat just about anything that moved! But how reliable are his lists? Again, Galen’s work has to be considered in its proper social setting. The ancient physician, descendent of Hippocrates, saw his task as a dual one: to cure the sick and also to keep the healthy from getting sick. Diet meant not just food, but a whole system of regulated life, in which food, exercise, sexual activity, sleep, and so on, had to be fitted to the climate and the seasons, all in order to keep the body healthy. Galen considered himself the heir and most accurate interpreter of Hippocrates. He was, however, more than just a doctor of the kind whose main concern was curing his patients. Galen had higher personal ambitions; he wanted to be known also as a philosopher. His own writings, which constitute almost all that we know about him, are evidence that he was a vigorous and vociferous representative of the competitive rhetorical culture of the high empire, in which knowledge and expertise could lead to fame, wealth, and power. Winning fame in such fierce competition required proof of expertise; and expertise, acquired in long and arduous training, was displayed publicly by the ability to make finer and finer discriminations. The knowledge that could be attained by only a very few was highly valued (T. Barton 1994). Galen claimed that he could distinguish 32 different kinds of pulse beats in his patients, a skill indeed that few could ever match! Should we believe his extensive experience with all the exotic foodstuffs, or should we take his knowledge of the flesh of bustards and panthers as part of his claim to omniscient expertise?
How to keep a healthy man healthy and well concerned not only the doctors but also the philosophers, who extended the notion of health to include also that of the mind and soul as well. Vegetarianism as a choice arose first, as we will see, in philosophical discussions. The ideas that combined to give rise to philosophic views concerning diet go back to classical Greece; the ‘‘philosophic diet,’’ however, achieved its true flowering during the affluent centuries of the Pax Romana, when the slogans of the Stoic ethic were incorporated into a Platonic theology. Before taking the ‘‘philosophic diet’’ as any indication of ancient food practices or even widespread attitudes, one has to consider the fact that these ethical writings were copied and transmitted to us mostly because a later age found them useful and uplifting. In their own time they may not have been always so highly regarded. The preacher of selfcontrol, with his claim of superiority to the desires of ordinary people, with his reforming zeal aimed at curbing culinary and sexual indulgence, may have been admired by some, but was made the object of satire and the butt of jokes by others.
By the time of the empire most of the philosophic schools understood their task to be the teaching of how to live the ‘‘good life.’’ Looking back to a ‘‘golden age’’ of simplicity from the wealth and complexity of a huge empire, each school or teacher proposed to inculcate in the follower a way of life that would lead to true happiness, that would make him or her immune to the frustrations of life and enable the follower to rise above the common crowd - to attain an aristocracy, not of birth, money, or political power, but of virtue (Habinek 1992).
It was the Stoic school that provided the clearest elaboration of ethical principles, which were more or less taken on by the other schools. According to the uncompromising view of the Stoics, the ‘‘good life’’ is one which is lived ‘‘in accordance with nature.’’ Virtue is sufficient for happiness; virtue is the only good, all emotion is bad. The cardinal virtues to which one should aspire were prudence, temperance, justice, and courage. All are born with a capacity for virtue, but from the influences of their surroundings most have become morally ill. Only philosophy can teach the way to virtue. Through the virtue of temperance a person will so toughen his body and discipline his mind that he will achieve mastery of himself. Understanding and selfcontrol will lead to true happiness, which according to the Stoics entailed apatheia - lack of passion, lack of anger, greed, fear, and desire. Askesis, that is the training of the mind and body for endurance would, they thought, lead to the achievement of the Stoic virtues. As one of the first steps in this training, one’s attitude to food had to be re-educated, for the Stoics believed that the beginning and foundation of temperance lay in self-control in eating and drinking (Lutz 1947: 27-30).
The anxieties aroused by human omnivorous tendencies in a philosopher who believed that man should live ‘‘according to nature’’ are well illustrated by the views of a Roman Stoic of Nero’s time, Musonius Rufus. Musonius deplores the corruption of an age which contrives all kinds of devices to increase the pleasure of eating, where some people have come to such a depth of decadence to have even written books about cooking, as the learned write about music or medicine! He warns his listeners about the multitude of vices that are connected with eating, and how they must try to free themselves from these:
One should by constant practice accustom oneself to choosing food not for enjoyment, but for nourishment, not to tickle the palate but to strengthen the body. Certainly no reasonable being... will think it desirable to be like the majority who live to eat, and like them, to spend his life in the chase after pleasure derived from food.
Frugality being a virtue, one should prefer inexpensive food to expensive, what is abundant to what is scarce, but Musonius was especially concerned that one should only eat what is ‘‘natural’’ for humans and avoid what is ‘‘unnatural’’:
Food from plants of the earth is natural to us. . . and some products of domesticated animals, like cheese, but not meat.
He urged that ‘‘the most useful foods are those which can be used at once without cooking.’’ Musonius argued that meat was a less civilized kind of food and more appropriate for wild animals, and, more importantly, that it was heavy food and an obstacle to thinking and reasoning, since ‘‘the exhalations rising from it, being turbid, darken the soul.’’ People who use meat for food ‘‘seem slower in intellect’’ (Muson. XVIII).
With his vegetarian views Musonius was somewhat unique among the Stoics, who saw that all living creatures fed on other living creatures in nature, and consequently, were not against meat eating. They, like the writers of the Jewish Bible, regarded animals as having been created for the good of mankind, and believed that meat was ‘‘natural food’’ for us. Eating meat was not a vice for most of them; the vice was giving in to pleasure.
Preaching endlessly against pleasure was not limited to the Stoic school alone. No ancient moralizer would trust his fellow human beings to be able to maintain the golden mean, a reasonable equilibrium in their lives. Pleasure, they feared, had such power that once tasted, the individual would tumble headlong into the deepest morass of debauchery. Musonius’ reason for advising against meat eating stems not from a rejection of the body or its sexual nature, but rather from his fear that stuffing the body with heavy food might block the spirit and interfere with thinking and reasoning.
Were people truly interested in following the advice of Stoic teachers? Did they practice dietary self-restrictions? Ancient literature seems to attest to the fact that some among the high-living wealthy liked to discuss frugality, and that some found gestures of asceticism flattering to their self-image. There can be no doubt that the Stoic ethic of self-control was viewed generally as a lofty aim; it agreed closely with Roman moral conservative principles. Seneca, Nero’s teacher and advisor, a self-styled Stoic, and one of the richest men of his time, tells us about the influence the lectures of another Stoic philosopher, Attalus, had over him:
... when he began extolling to us the virtues of poverty and showing us how everything which went beyond our actual needs was just so much unnecessary weight, a burden to the man who had to carry it, I often had a longing to walk out of that lecture hall a poor man. When he started exposing our pleasures and commending to us, along with moderation in our diet, physical purity and a mind uncontaminated, not only by illicit pleasures but by unnecessary ones as well, I would become enthusiastic about keeping the appetite for food and drink firmly in place. (Ep. 108)
Seneca’s longing for poverty was never, as far as we know, translated into action, but he writes that he actually became a vegetarian following the philosopher’s teaching that ‘‘variety of diet was incompatible with our physical make-up and inimical to health.’’ He gave up the practice after a year, in obedience to his father who objected to it, or so he claims. He assures his readers that he did learn a life-long lesson - he gave up mushrooms and oysters forever because these are luxurious foods that only increase the appetite. (They also may have been the most likely to be poisonous, a serious consideration in upper-class circles of the Neronian era!)
Despite the rousing lectures and the hypocritical posturing of the likes of Seneca, neither dietary self-restraint nor even simple vegetarianism was received with favor, even by most philosophers. Porphyry of Tyre, writing in the third century ce, paradoxically provides the best evidence for this in his treatise, On Abstention from Animal Food. Porphyry was an eloquent advocate of vegetarianism. He wrote this treatise for an aspiring student of philosophy, who, after trying vegetarianism, as Seneca had, returned to meat eating. Porphyry pleads with his young friend to reconsider his decision and lays out the arguments against the eating of meat in order to persuade him.
Porphyry writes that he is well aware of the fact that the common folk eat meat because they believe that it is healthy, and that the physicians share this view, for they even use meat to treat disease. He also knows that most of the philosophers belonging to the Peripatetic, Stoic, or Epicurean persuasions eat meat. He acknowledges that meat eating is appropriate for those engaged in heavy work, also for soldiers, athletes, or people recovering from illness; he recommends abstention from meat only for contemplative philosophers, who lead a sedentary life and need no strength (Abst. 1.1-27, 2.4).
There were three lines of arguments against meat eating in Greco-Roman antiquity: the religious one based on belief in the transmigration of souls, held by Empedocles and Pythagoras; the moral one, based on the conviction that animals as rational beings deserve justice, and that it is unjust to kill them for food, held by Plato; and finally the argument that a meat diet is unhealthy or expensive or both. Adding to these, Porphyry argues for the philosopher’s need for tranquility of the soul which, he asserts, is hindered by overloading the stomach with rich food.
In arguments urging a meatless diet on a wider audience, these lofty ideas about tranquility of the mind and justice and fairness to animals lost ground to the increasingly more lurid views gaining favor among various self-appointed guardians of morality who saw food as intimately linked with sex, and who feared that pleasure arising from strong, heating foods would inevitably lead to sexual lust. From Porphyry’s concern with justice and tranquility and Stoic anxieties about what food would fit ‘‘life according to nature,’’ we turn now to a Platonist’s view of the ‘‘good life’’ and its sustenance.
Plato left amongst his legacy to posterity the notion of the duality of spirit and matter. According to this, man was composed of a divine soul, which, descending from the spiritual realm, was captured by the material body. The aim of the soul is to return to its divine spiritual height.
By the time of the Roman Empire Plato was regarded as a cult figure and the founder of a philosophic sect that was characterized by a belief in the transcendence of god, the existence of immaterial spirit, and the immortality of the soul, all leading to an ascetic, world-negating tendency, which takes ‘‘likeness to god’’ as its slogan, rather than the Stoic ‘‘conformity with Nature’’ (Dillon 1982: 60-75).
The extreme attitudes to food that these ideas could engender are best illustrated by the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a first century ce Greek-speaking Jewish Platonist, whose fervently pursued aim in life was to combine Platonic philosophy and Jewish religion into a happy union. His aim was lost on the Jews, but was enthusiastically endorsed by early christians, some of whom by the early fourth century thought him a christian.
Philo’s ethical writings are steeped in a radically dualistic, Platonic conception of the universe, according to which the ‘‘flesh’’ is a hindrance to the spirit (Gig. 29-33), the soul dwells in the body as in a tomb, and the body is ‘‘the dwelling place of endless calamities’’ (QuisHer. 68, 85, 273; Som. 1.139; Deus 111-15; Ebr. 101; Abr. 9; Conf. Ling. 177).
Control of the ‘‘passions’’ and disdain for the pleasures of the flesh were moralizing commonplaces shared, as we have seen, by cynics, Stoics, Platonists, and other sundry moralizers in the Greco-Roman world. In Philo’s religious piety, however, the ‘‘passions’’ were not only to be kept under control but were to be eliminated and the body rejected. The chief amongst the ‘‘passions’’ against which he struggled most were not the anger, or fear, or grief of the Stoics, but ‘‘the pleasures of the belly and what is underneath it.’ The amount of emphasis that the dangers of gluttony receive in Philo’s work reveals an obsessive fear of overeating and sex which is remarkable and rare in ancient Greek, Roman, or Jewish sources (Spec. Leg. 1.148, 2.50, 193-6, 3.911; Op. 158-9; Det. 101-3, 135-7, 156-9; Vit. Cont. 74, and countless other places).
The diet for those who pursue the philosophic life is best described in Philo's treatise On the Contemplative Life, which purports to describe an actual group of people who lived near Alexandria in Egypt and devoted themselves totally to ‘‘philosophy.’’ They study for six days, each in solitude; only on the seventh does the group come together for a shared festive meal:
None of them would put food or drink to his lips before sunset since they hold that philosophy finds its right place in the light, the needs of the body in the darkness... they assign the day to one and some small part of the night to the other. Some, in whom the desire for studying wisdom is more deeply implanted even only after three days remember to take food. Others so luxuriate and delight in the banquet of truths which wisdom richly and lavishly supplies that they hold out for twice that time and only after six days do they bring themselves to taste such sustenance as is absolutely necessary...
When on the seventh day they come together for a feast:
They eat nothing costly, only common bread with salt for a relish and their drink is spring water. (Vit. Cont. 4. 34-7)
This sublime spiritual existence is, of course, a figment of the imagination. The human digestive system is simply not able to deal with the amount of bread and water at one sitting that would make up the loss of food intake in six or even three days. Adequate nutrition, the regular daily intake of basic nutrients, is essential to life, as most people would realize. Only those who never had to go without food would think it an ennobling experience to do so. But this fantasy became an increasingly popular literary device to single out individuals for philosophic sainthood among pagans; it had an even longer and more gruesome history among Christians. In the fourth century, the church historian Eusebius was so impressed by Philo’s otherworldly lovers of wisdom that he borrowed their eating habits for his own description of Procopius, an early Christian martyr, who
Dedicated his life to philosophy and from childhood embraced chastity of conduct and a most rigorous mode of living... he lived on bread and water, ate only every two or three days and often passed even a whole week without food. (Mart. Pal. 1)
Despite the fact that few could adopt this way of life and remain alive, the image of the ‘‘divine man,’’ a most popular literary figure of late antiquity, inevitably included descriptions of his miraculously meager diet. Dry bread, uncooked roots and herbs, no wine, no sex, no baths, sleeping on the ground, became the salient characteristics of the holy philosopher, pagan or Christian. Thus the concept of askesis, by which the Stoics meant a training of body and mind to be able to endure the ‘‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’’ and to live one’s life with dignity, acquired a totally different meaning. Influenced by the Platonists like Philo, Christians too longed for an unchangeable ‘‘eternal life.’’ The contemplation of eternity brought with it disdain for everyday life. The neo-Platonist ideal of the soul’s rising to the divine through detachment from the material world and freedom from passions was incorporated into an increasingly fervent ascetic propaganda, which devalued life on earth by promising another one after death; the body in the present life was unimportant, or even a hindrance to the glories awaiting in the next. As time went on, that glorious life in Heaven was promised only to those who mortified their flesh on Earth, while burning tortures of eternity in Hell were the rewards for pleasure lovers. Exhortations to vegetarianism in Christian literature had little to do with justice and fairness to animals, but a lot to do with the danger of sex. Fasting was urged as the only means of keeping one’s chastity (Grimm 1996: 191-7).
Roman literature, as we have seen, used innuendo and gossip, ridicule and shame to control or censure those who had taken more of the good things of life than was their due. Shame and ridicule are always effective social weapons; they were even more so in a face-to-face society where a man’s image formed a large part of his authority and where men intently scrutinized each other for any sign of weakness, ‘‘effeminacy,’’ luxury, or other undesirable qualities that could undermine it.
The effectiveness of shame and ridicule as weapons may pale, however, in comparison with that of fear and guilt. The great innovation of Christian ascetic propaganda in the late empire was the production of a literature which aimed to instil in the faithful the fear of an ever-watchful god in whose eyes the pleasure accompanying the satisfaction of the most basic human needs was sin.
The literary phenomenon of the Christian self-mortifying holy men, who would easily outdo even Philo’s frugal philosophers, is amazing indeed. In the mid-fourth century the exiled bishop of Alexandria offered to Christians in Rome his story of the life of Antony, an illiterate Egyptian peasant who spent decades in the desert fasting and fighting with ‘‘demons,’’ who was so edified by his experiences that, upon returning to human company, he could defeat in arguments the best of Greek philosophers, and whose life offered a new model for sainthood. Perhaps all the more for its patently fictional character, this literary genre was a success, and it was widely imitated. The public could read about holy men who lived for years on nothing but five dates a day and muddy water; others lived on grass, others again stood motionless, without support or sustenance, on the top of columns. There were female ascetics too, according to John Chrysostom:
Who even at a tender age go without food, sleep and drink, mortifying their bodies, crucifying their flesh, sleeping on the ground, wearing sackcloth, locked in narrow cells sprinkling themselves with ashes and wearing chains. (De studio praesentium 3 = PG 63.488)
How terrified should the common folk be if all these innocents who left the world with its temptations still lived in fear. ‘‘If it were possible that one should die of fear, the whole world would die of terror,’’ teach the Desert Fathers; ‘‘what a sight, to see the heavens open and God revealed in anger and wrath... We must weep without ceasing...’’ (Apophth. Patr. 4, 9).
What could have motivated the literature of this dire self-abuse and privation? The stories of ascetics and desert heroes were most likely created for the wealthy Christians in the cities who read books. To hold up an image of the desert-dwelling solitary who had no needs, not even for the most basic sustenance, was the new Christian way to warn against private greed and avarice. Jerome addresses his reader whom he expects to be a wealthy person:
Let me ask those... who clothe their homes with marble, who string on a single thread the cost of villas, what did this destitute old man ever lack? .. .But paradise awaits that poor wretch, while hell will seize as its own you golden people. (V. Paul 17)
But the intention was more than just to embarrass the rich, the aim was to instil guilt and fear of damnation in a Christian flock who, according to John Chrysostom, were often unwilling to keep even the fasts ordered by the church.
Human beings evolved as omnivores, a fact that contributed to the survival of our species. Our ability and, indeed, our need to sustain ourselves on a wide variety of organic matter, has always aroused anxieties. These anxieties were, and still are reflected in debates concerning whose choice of diet is right, who gets more, and why, what is healthy, what is ‘‘natural,'' what is edible, what is disgusting, and so on. Ancient Roman literature is full of food, bread, wine, olive oil, vegetables, fruit, and meat, a lot of it. Food appears in controversies, arguments, advice, and strongly held, highly emotion-laden opinions and attitudes. Those who hold today that the ancient Mediterranean diet was ‘‘starkly vegetarian’’ or ‘‘mostly vegetarian,’’ where only the rich ate meat and the great majority made do with bread and vegetables, have to explain the evidence to the contrary. It may be granted that a large part of this may reflect the life of the rich, but certainly not all. In addition to what was discussed above, consider the dietary laws of one ancient Mediterranean people, the Jews. These laws, binding on all the people of Israel, concern restrictions on what kind of meat could be eaten; there is not one law concerning vegetables. When the first Christians turned to converting the Gentiles, they relaxed the dietary requirements; a new convert could eat any meat except ‘‘animals that were strangled, had blood in them, or were sacrificed to idols’’ (Acts 15:19-20). When some of Paul’s converts worried about their diet, the apostle advised them to eat any meat that they could buy in the market (1 Cor 10:25). Paul’s converts in the first century may not have been the destitute poor but it is most unlikely that they were the idle rich. If the common diet was mostly vegetarian, the question would not have arisen. Church history indicates the difficulties encountered in imposing meatless fast days on the flock.
Analysis of food remains from around human habitations in recent archaeology seems also to contradict the vegetarian argument. Reports of the excavation in Rome, at the Schola Praeconum, indicate the systematic production of animals of standard age - young animals - for the Roman market, suggesting that the main meat consumed by the urban population was pork, followed by beef and lamb. The bone sample found that all parts of the body were represented for all three species. The authors write: ‘‘the inference is that some at least of the urban population whose food refuse was dumped in the Schola Praeconum had purchased even the poorest cuts of meat’’ (Whitehouse et al. 1982: 87-9).
A. King’s study (1999) of regional comparison of mammal bones in the Roman world further showed that domestic quadrupeds were butchered for food all around the Roman world; the ranking of preference for the meat of these animals varied across different regions of the empire. In light of the literary evidence supported by these studies the vegetarian argument is hard to maintain.
This short review of ancient arguments concerning food has not resolved the problem of‘‘who ate what’’ in the Roman world. The whole point is this: the question cannot be answered from a literature the aim of which was not the objective survey of facts and which may have been almost completely blind to the actual lives of the majority of the population. To conclude from this blindness that the majority lived in abject poverty is just as unjustified as would be its optimistic opposite. What Roman literature richly indicates is that concern with food and eating habits often expresses larger anxieties, about health, the body and sexuality, social position, and power relations in society.
World History
