Eat, Drink, Think

What Ancient Greece Can Tell Us about Food and Wine

David Roochnik

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350120792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What role does food play in the shaping of humanity? Is sharing a good meal with friends and family an experience of life at its best, or is food merely a burdensome necessity? David Roochnik explores these questions by discussing classical works of Greek literature and philosophy in which food and drink play an important role. With thoughts on Homer's The Odyssey, Euripides' Bacchae, Plato's philosopher kings and Dionysian intoxication, Roochnik shows how foregrounding food in philosophy can open up new ways of understanding these thinkers and their approaches to the purpose and meaning of life. The book features philosophical explanation interspersed with reflections from the author on cooking, eating, drinking and sharing meals, making it important reading for students of philosophy, classical studies, and food studies.

1

The Eatingest Epic

I Supper in the Odyssey

Come, we’ll shake off this mourning mood of ours

and think of supper.

Homer, Odyssey IV.229¹

The lines above, also used as the first epigraph of this book, are spoken by Meneláos in Homer’s Odyssey. He is at home, hosting a wedding feast for both his children, when he is informed that strangers have arrived at his doorstep. His friend Eteóneus is unsure whether to invite them to join the party. Meneláos rebukes him sharply:

You were no idiot before, Eteóneus,

but here you are talking like a child of ten.

Could we have made it home again—and Zeus

give us no more hard roving!—if other men

had never fed us, given us lodging?

Bring these men to be our guests; unhitch their teams!

IV.33–9

In the world of the Odyssey, “strangers and beggars/ come from Zeus” (VI.221) and so merit special consideration. As such, being a good host and welcoming them—and, above all, this means offering food and drink—is a cardinal imperative. And so Meneláos, good man that he is, warmly invites the strangers in, and treats them royally:

Maidservants gave them baths, anointed them,

held out fresh tunics, cloaked them warm; and soon

they took tall thrones beside the son of Atreus.

Here a maid tipped out water for their hands

from a golden pitcher into a silver bowl,

and set a polished table near at hand;

the larder mistress with her tray of loaves

and savories came, dispensing all her best,

and the carver heaped their platters high

with various meats, and put down cups of gold.

IV.53–63

Details lovingly saturate this scene. The strangers, ragged from hard travels, are given warm clothes and a bowl of water in which to wash their hands. But not just any bowl: it’s a silver one, and the water is poured from a golden pitcher. A table, freshly polished, is brought to them, and from it they are served ample portions of the best food in the house, including a variety of grilled meats. Finally, they are given cups made of gold to hold their wine. In Homer’s Odyssey, the good host, the good person, spares nothing for his guests.

The guest code has its rules: Bathe and clothe strangers if they need it. Then feed them and give them something to drink. And only then ask for names. Meneláos does it right. “When you have supped,” he tells his guests, “we hope to hear your names, forbears and families” (IV.67).

It turns out that these two strangers are, in fact, not so strange. Both are sons of Meneláos’ old comrades from the war in Troy. One is Peisístratos, son of Nestor; the other is Telémakhos, son of Odysseus. They have come to Lakedaimon specifically to visit Meneláos since Telémakhos desperately wants information about his father, who has been gone for twenty years, and whom he has never met.

After they introduce themselves, the men share stories. And that’s when the gloom sets in. The Trojan War was a ten-year ordeal of terrible violence, in which good men on both sides, including Peisístratos’ brother, were killed. Furthermore, since travel in the ancient world was no easy matter, even after the war had ended with the Greeks as victors, their voyage home was a prolonged struggle. Odysseus had not yet returned, and Meneláos himself spent years wandering before he made it back to Greece. When he finally did, he discovered that his brother, Agamemnon, had been murdered by his own wife and her lover. Despair threatens to overwhelm him:

How gladly I should live one third as rich

to have my friends back safe at home!—my friends

who died on Troy’s wide seaboard, far

from the grazing lands of Argos.

But as things are, nothing but grief is left me

for those companions.

IV.105–110

The feast seems to be on the verge of emotional collapse as “a twinging ache of grief rose up in everyone” (IV.195). The men, all of whom feel the pain of irretrievable loss, begin to weep. But then Meneláos catches himself and utters the lines with which this chapter opened. Let’s eat, he says. Since a Homeric supper is never without wine, he calls his guests to the table not only to share a meal but also to take the edge off with drink.

Meneláos’ response is quintessentially Homeric, for the Odyssey is, to cite a wonderful phrase attributed to Henry Fielding, “the eatingest epic.” This chapter will be devoted to explaining what this means and why it is worth thinking about.

II A Good Meal as an Affirmation of Transience

In the poet’s eyes, loss defines human life. If death by disease, accident, or violence manages to be avoided, the best-case scenario for each of us is to grow old, wither, and then disappear. For Homer’s is a world in which nothing is permanent or entirely solid. One story, told by Meneláos, vividly expresses this view.

After departing from Troy, his ship was becalmed on an island near Egypt where there was no wind to power its sails. Provisions were running low, and Meneláos and his men were failing. Fortunately, he bumped into a goddess who took pity on him: Eidothea, daughter of Proteus, the old man of the sea. Meneláos begs her for help. How, he asks her, “am I going to make my voyage home?” (IV.409). She tells him that he must find her father, for only he knows the route back to Greece. But this is no easy task. For Proteus is, well, Protean. He is a shape-shifter who “can take the forms/ of all the beasts, and water, and blinding fire” (IV.446). Meneláos must therefore seize him and then somehow hold him fast. The moment to strike, Eidothea explains, is when, after having gathered his pet seals in a cave, Proteus takes a nap. Then Meneláos should grab him, and force him to stay still and to talk.

Meneláos follows Eidothea’s directions carefully. He and a few of his men, draped in sealskins for disguise, catch Proteus when he is asleep:

When at last he slept

we gave a battlecry and plunged for him,

locking our hands behind him. But the old one’s

tricks were not knocked out of him; far from it.

First he took on a whiskered lion’s shape,

a serpent then; a leopard; a great boar;

then sousing water; then a tall green tree.

Still we hung on, by hook or crook, through everything,

until the Ancient saw defeat and grimly

opened his lips.

IV.483–92

This story is the keynote of Homer’s Odyssey. The world itself is Protean. It has no stable shape, no abiding form. Instead, it is fluid, ever shifting, on the move. Human beings, however, need some measure of stability in order to survive. Meneláos, for one, wants to go home, and for this he needs a reliable path to follow. But to acquire it he must use violence. He must hold Proteus down and force him to provide information. For the world does not give us form for free. It must be won by hard human effort, and the victory will never be more than brief.

Dwell, for a moment, on the word “form.” Its Greek version is eidos, which is derived from the verb “to see.” In its most basic meaning, then, an eidos is the “look” of a thing. And it is precisely such “looks” that make the world in which we live intelligible.

You enter a classroom and, almost instantaneously, see a variety of objects: other people, desks, tables, windows, books, carpet on the floor. But you have no doubt as to where you will sit: in one of the chairs. These you recognize, again almost immediately. And so you select an empty one and seat yourself. Rarely will you make a mistake in this exercise. You will not sit on a table. No, you will find a properly empty chair and, unless it is broken, it will accommodate your body when you plunk yourself down.

You successfully navigated the multitude of objects in the classroom and found your seat for a simple reason. A chair looks like a chair and not a table. Now, there may be many chairs in the room. Some may be black and made of wood, others brown and made of plastic. But this diversity does not thwart your effort to find a place to sit. For, however much they vary, they are all alike in one decisive respect: they look like chairs. This is hardly surprising since they have been built specifically to accomplish the same one task, which is to allow a human body to sit in them. Their form follows their function.

The vast variety of different chairs in the world come and go. But the form of the chair is (relatively) stable, which is why you recognize one when you see it. Turn off the lights in the classroom, however, and the story changes. You would not know where to sit. Yes, of course, by feeling your way around the room you would eventually locate an empty chair by tracing objects with your hands. But this would take a while. Most of us, most of the time, perform such an operation without noticeable effort. We see what looks like an empty chair and then sit in it. The fact that chairs share a form is why, even if you were entering the classroom for the first time, you were not terribly confused. The room made sense to you. Despite its many unique features, it was not hugely different from the classrooms you have entered in the past.

Were there no forms in the world, our lives would not make a bit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright Acknowledgements
• Prelude
• 1 The Eatingest Epic
• Interlude
• 2 Dionysus
• Interlude
• 3 Socrates
• Interlude
• 4 Aristotle
• Postlude
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page