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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
PRELIMINARIES
Ceremonial eating and drinking are a conspicuous feature of ancient society. They brought together families and their guests, patrons and their dependants, politicians and their friends, aristocratic youth, members of occupational groups, social clubs, religious brotherhoods, the soldiery, the citizenry, the population of a town. Large or small, these displays of commensality or collective consumption carried significance well beyond the nutritional function of the meal that was consumed. In the domestic setting, they might demonstrate, as in the act of hospitality shown by Baucis and Philemon to two strangers (who happened to be gods) the moral integrity of the simple peasant household; or they might celebrate rites de passage, a funeral, or the acceptance of a neonate into the family, in classical Athens, the Amphidromia:
Ephippus says in Geryones: ‘If that is so, then how is it that there is no wreath before the doors, no savour of cooking strikes the tip end of the projecting nose, though the feast of the Amphidromia is on? For then it is the custom to toast slices of cheese from the Chersonese, to boil a cabbage glistening in oil, to broil some fat lamb chops, to pluck the feathers from ringdoves, thrushes and finches withal, at the same time to devour cuttle-fish and squids, to pound with care many wriggling polyps, and drink many a cup not too diluted.’
(Athen. 370c–d)Outside the home, commensality demonstrated and confirmed the membership and solidarity of the group, paraded the status of the group vis-à-vis outsiders, and set out the hierarchies that existed both in the society at large and within the group itself.
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