Food & Drink in the Ancient Mediterranean
CX252-30/CX352-30
This course uses the notion of the Material Body as a site for the thematic study of some areas of ancient culture, which are sometimes treated separately in modern scholarship, but which are closely related symbolically and structurally in the ancient world: food supply and nutrition, commensality, the body.
Foucault while writing his History Of Sexuality was happy to concede that to the ancients food was overwhelmingly more of a concern than sex, and over the past decade a number of scholars have shown an interest in this important area of study. This concern is manifested most obviously in four particular areas: the Symposium, with all its social and cultural practices, Religion, The Body and Medicine.
A course focussed on food and drink provides the most natural environment, therefore, for the study of some central issues in ancient Greek history, society and culture. Food, drink and the body constituted a privileged zone for constructions of identity and difference: differences between Greeks and Barbarians, gods and men, men and women, humans and animals, social and political distinctions. Practices of equal participation in the sacrificial banquet and medical anxiety about maintaining balance (isonomia) informed political ideologies, while the private symposium, the drinking-party, was a pre-eminent site for the forging of social bonds in the Greek world. The agricultural cycle complemented the cycle of waging war and trading overseas. An inability to maintain control of the routes of the grain-trade led to Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and remained a critical concern of foreign policy thereafter.
The relevant material is diverse and includes some important corpora: sympotic vases, medical writings, sympotic literature. The diversity of the material and the centrality of the subject mean that students will be able to deploy a particularly diverse range of approaches: comparative anthropology, reconstructions of the ancient environment from economic models, the study of skeletal remains, structuralist approaches to myth, cultic practices and death, Foucauldian approaches to regimen and self-discipline, new approaches to iconography.
Food and Drink topics 2025-6
Week 1: Introduction: Thinking about Food
Week 2: The study of food and drink: Semiotics, anthropology and sociology - Structures, Commensality, Symbolism, Distinction
Week 3. Sources for the Study of Greek Food
Week 4. The Environment
Week 5. Food Stuffs
6: Reading Week
Week 7. Famine and Grain Supply
Week 8: Symbolic Practices and Cultural Contexts: Sacrifice
Week 9. Demeter and Corn
Week 10. Dionysus and Wine
Term 2:
Week 1: Food and its Representations
Week 2. The Drinking Party in Classical Athens
Week 3: All men together: Dining Societies in Crete and Sparta
Week 4. Food and the Other: Centaurs, Cyclopes and Scythians
Week 5. Riotous Food in Comedy and the Carnivalesque
Week 6: Reading Week
Week 7. Cleopatra and Power Banquets
Week 8. Food and the Body: The Medical Writers
Week 9. Food and Dreams: Artemidorus and the Second Sophistic
Week 10. Roman Food: Trimalchio and Fellini: Satyricon
Module convenor: Prof James Davidson.