Hunter R., Koukouzika D., Food in Greek Literature.pdf

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CHaPTEr 1
Food in Greek Literature
Richard Hunter and Demetra Koukouzika
This is one of the passages in which, as has long been recognized, the tale of Menelaus’
homeward voyage, his
nostos,
foreshadows that of Odysseus, but does so in a lower, less
heroic key. The distinction which Menelaus draws between himself and his crew is
repeated when Odysseus and his men are stranded on the island where the cattle of the
sun‐god graze; hunger forces Odysseus’ men to fish (12.332 repeats 4.369), and finally,
when Odysseus is absent and asleep, his men succumb to their hunger and kill some of
the cattle, with disastrous results. Hunger and the incessant demands of the belly (gastêr),
a theme that resonates much more loudly in the
Odyssey
than in the
Iliad
(cf., e.g.,
Od.
7.215–18), becomes in fact a leitmotif of the scenes on Ithaca in which Odysseus,
disguised as a beggar, tests the suitors and plots their destruction. While the feasting
suitors consume Odysseus’ flocks, leaving it to the careful and trustworthy Eumaeus to
preserve the dwindling stocks as best he can (cf. esp. 14.5–28), the theme of the hunger
that pursues the non‐élite and outcast members of society is foregrounded in Book 18,
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.
CO
PY
RI
She met me as I roamed by myself, apart from my companions. They spent their time wan­
dering around the island, fishing with bent hooks, for hunger gnawed at their stomachs.
Homer,
Odyssey
4.367–9
GH
TE
In the fourth book of Homer’s
Odyssey,
Menelaus tells the young Telemachus, Odysseus’
son, who has come to visit him in search of information about his father, about how he
(Menelaus) was delayed on his return from Troy by adverse wind conditions on the
island of Pharos off the Egyptian coast. Supplies were running low, and with them what
strength Menelaus and his comrades had left, but Eidothea, daughter of Proteus, the old
man of the sea, took pity on them:
D
MA
Food
TE
RI
AL
20
Richard Hunter and Demetra Koukouzika
in which the disguised Odysseus is forced to fight against the beggar Iros for a haggis
(gastêr) “full of fat and blood” (18.45, on which see the notes of russo, Fernandez‐
Galiano, & Heubeck, 1992, 49–50, and Steiner, 2010, 162). The seer Theoclymenus
realizes that the day of death is at hand for the suitors when athena distracts their wits,
they are afflicted with weird fits of laughter, and “the meat they ate was foul with blood”
(Od. 20.345–8).
However, what particularly attracted the attention of learned readers in antiquity
about the respective tales of Menelaus and Odysseus was not, in fact, the way they are
used to differentiate the heroes from those beneath them, but rather the focus on the
eating of fish as a food of “last resort.” It was noted at least as early as the fourth century
bc
that fish did not form a regular part of the Homeric diet (cf. Pl.
R.
3.404b12‐c3, Eub.
fr. 118 Ka = 120 Hunter); in the
Iliad,
in fact, fishing only occurs in similes (cf. 5.487,
16.406–8, 747 (diving for sea‐squirts, a wretchedly unheroic occupation), 24.80–2),
and Hellenistic scholars, the so‐called “separators,” who believed that the two poems
were the work of different poets, used the absence of any fish‐eating from the
Iliad
as
one piece of evidence (scholium on
Il.
16.747). The greatest Homeric scholar of the
Hellenistic period, aristarchus, argued against the “separators” that Homer minimized
references to fish and seafood because it was trivial (mikroprepes), just as “he does not
show them eating vegetables” (scholium on
Il.
16.747, cf. ath. 25d). The matter has
been much discussed in modern scholarship (cf. Davidson, 1997, 11–20), but it does
seem most likely, as aristarchus essentially realized, that Homer’s focus on meat‐eating,
particularly as an accompaniment to sacrifice, is part of the creation of a heroic, distanced
world, and is not to be taken as a realistic reflection of élite life in the Bronze age. The
greater prominence of fishing and fish‐eating, even if under constraint, in the
Odyssey,
is  both a reflection of that poem’s greater concern with “the ordinary man” and the
lessening of poetic distance between the events related and the Homeric audience
(cf. 19.113, cited below).
as this example demonstrates, food and its uses in narrative carry symbolic value, as
they do in many cultures and literary traditions. The cannibalism of the Cyclops and the
corrupt and incessant feasts of the suitors both offend against the privileged good order
of a well run society, as is seen, for example, in the paradigmatic episode at the beginning
of
Odyssey
3 in which Nestor and his sons greet Telemachus and the disguised athena
on the Pylian shore and, after completing their sacrifice, offer their visitors “roast meat”
and wine. The most famous expression of this good order in antiquity was Odysseus’
so‐called “Golden Verses” from the start of Book 9:
I say that there is nothing more delightful than when good cheer holds the whole
demos,
and
through the hall feasters sit in rows listening to a bard, and beside them are tables full
of bread and meat, and a wine‐steward draws wine from a mixing‐bowl and pours it into
the cups.
The eating of food is, or should be, a sign of sharing in a community; achilles refuses
to eat as one manifestation of removing himself from the achaean fellowship in his
grief for Patroclus (Il. 24.129), but when he has accepted Priam’s offer of ransom for
the body of Hector, thus returning to the shared world of heroic social values, he him­
self urges Priam to share a meal with him, an act that seals their agreement (24.601–28).
This social value of eating is also stressed through the fact that, in the formulaic
Homeric mode of composition, more verses are standardly devoted to the preparation
Food in Greek Literature
21
and distribution of food than to the actual process of eating, which is often dismissed
in a single verse, “but when they had set aside their desire (eros) for drinking and
eating.”
The manifestation of these ideas at the macro‐level is the flourishing of the land and
the food supply in a justly governed state. The disguised Odysseus tells Penelope that she
is like a just king, under whom
the dark earth bears wheat and barley, trees are laden with fruit, flocks give birth without
fail, the sea provides fish, and the people flourish because of his good rule.
Homer,
Odyssey
19.111–4
So too for Hesiod, the presence of justice in a community is manifested in peace and the
absence of famine:
For them the earth bears abundant life, on the mountains the oak bears acorns and bees live
in its center; thick‐fleeced sheep are weighed down by their wool, women bear children who
resemble their parents, and the people flourish with good things continually. They do not
travel on ships, for the life‐giving earth bears crops.
Hesiod,
Works and Days
232–7
The
Works and Days
is centrally concerned with the relation between justice and the
ordering of agricultural life; the struggle for food is what determines life, and famine is
a reality, as indeed it was throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Work and the practice
of justice will mean that “Famine will hate you, but you will be loved by fair‐garlanded
Demeter, the revered lady, who will fill your barn with the stuff of life” (299–301).
Some four centuries after Hesiod, Callimachus told the story of Erysichthon, who
inspired Demeter’s anger by cutting down the trees in a grove sacred to her in order to
build a hall for “constant feasting,” itself a wasteful disregard of the proper use of food
and resources. Demeter punishes this impious desire by precisely inspiring Erysichthon
with insatiable hunger, so that he not only eats his parents out of house and home, but
also eats “the mules … and the racehorse and the war‐horse and the white‐tailed
creature [? weasel] which made the little animals [i.e. mice] tremble” (Callimachus
Hymn to Demeter
107–10). The prayer with which the hymn ends shows the persis­
tence of the Hesiodic ideal throughout antiquity, as indeed we would expect in any
pre‐industrial society:
Hail, goddess, and preserve this city in concord and prosperity, make everything abundant
in the fields: feed the cattle, bring fruits, bring crops, bring the harvest, support peace also,
so he who sows may also reap.
Callimachus,
Hymn to Demeter
134–7
Eating was not always a laughing matter.
Food, however, could be. a principal inheritor of the Hesiodic vision that associated
plentiful food with a Golden age (Op. 116‐20) and a world of peace and concord was
attic, as also Sicilian (Epicharmus), comedy. In comedy, however, such visions of plenty
had more to do with wish‐fulfillment and the carnival world created by these dramas –
note especially the culinary conclusion to aristophanes’
Ekklesiazousai
– than with mor­
alizing protreptic, as in Hesiod. Food could still, of course, carry argumentative force. In
aristophanes’
Acharnians
the central character makes a private peace treaty with the
22
Richard Hunter and Demetra Koukouzika
Spartans, which means that all of the good things of Greece of which the blockaded
athenians are deprived can flow into his private market. Particularly welcome is the eel
from Lake Kopais that a Boeotian merchant brings:
O dearest girl, desired for so long, you have come, longed for by comic choruses and dear
to Morychos. Servants, bring out my grill and the fan! Children, behold the noblest eel
which has come as we desired after five long years. Greet her, children! I will give you char­
coal in honor of this lady who has come to visit. Carry her out! Not even in death may I ever
be separated from you, wrapped in beets!
aristophanes,
Acharnians
885–94
Dicaiopolis’ emotion is marked by an amusingly paratragic tone (we may be reminded of
Electra greeting her brother at Soph.
El.
1224ff); the return and recognition of such
“dear ones” marks, as in tragedy, that the tables are turning and things are definitely
looking up.
Comedy’s delight in dwelling on fantasies of food is particularly seen in a series of pas­
sages from attic Old Comedy, preserved in athenaeus, which translate Hesiod’s Golden
age vision into exercises in imagination and ingenuity in describing “the way things used
to be” (ath. 267e–70a, cf. Baldry, 1953). This is a world in which everything grows
spontaneously, food cooks itself, and hunger is banished:
Every creek‐bed ran with wine, cakes battled with bread around people’s mouths, begging
them to swallow down – please! – the very whitest. Fish came home, roasted themselves, and
were there ready on the table. a river of soup flowed by the couches, rolling along warm
pieces of meat, channels of sauces were freely available … roast thrushes, with side‐dishes of
cakes, flew into people’s throats … and the children played knucklebones with slices of sow’s
womb and tastiest bits of meat.
Teleclides fr. 1 Ka
Comedy revels in descriptions of food. Our evidence is doubtless skewed by the dom­
inance of athenaeus as a source for the fragments of comedy, beyond the preserved
plays of aristophanes, but it does seem that fourth‐century comedy before Menander,
the so‐called Middle Comedy, did to some extent turn away from political satire
towards more social themes, and that dining narratives and, all but certainly, staged
meals and symposia became prominent. It is in this period that the boastful comic cook
becomes a standard, and standardly absurd, character (cf. Dohm, 1964), and the frag­
ments represent the same concern with gastronomy that is visible in, for example, the
contemporary hexameter verse of archestratos (see below). The search for the finest
(and most expensive) ingredients and their preparation now apparently becomes a
matter of great interest to the theatre‐going public, and culinary extravaganzas may
attain almost mythic status. Food has moved very far from being simply a way of
dispelling hunger.
The comic
mageiros,
a “cook” who also supplies and if necessary butchers the ingredi­
ents, is not a slave employed by an élite household, but (usually) a free man of relatively
low status available for hire. He is characterized by a very exaggerated sense of his own
skill and importance; comic cooks present themselves as philosophers, generals, musical
experts, and all‐round saviors and benefactors of humanity. One of Philemon’s cooks
claims that the merest whiff of his cooking brings the dead back to life (fr. 82.25‐6 Ka),

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