A Companion to Food in the Ancient World by Wilkins John; Nadeau Robin; & Robin Nadeau

Author:Wilkins, John; Nadeau, Robin; & Robin Nadeau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Historiography

Research and publications on Greek dining have increased in the last 20 years. It is now possible to read a continuous history of this practice from the Mycenaean period to the end of antiquity, to know the characteristics of different cities, to identify different types of discourse, and clearly to mark the originality of the iconographic corpus, which, far from being an illustration of the practices of the banquet, is an independent construction of the Greek imagination.

The Mycenaean world opens the history of festivities through the study of the Linear B tablets but mainly thanks to recent excavations. The erudition needed to work on these early periods is coupled with a range of key issues in the eyes of historians: how to differentiate between banquets and forms of daily consumption, how to distinguish different types of banquet, how to understand the role of these festivities in Mycenaean society (Hesperia 73.2, 2004). The different categories of sources are ceramic tableware and bronze, often from tombs, the Linear B tablets that provide lists and prescriptions for the organization of feasts, the representations of banquets in wall paintings and pottery. One of the recurring features is the dual function of the banquet, both a unifying factor in the creation of a common identity and a divisive factor as a marker of social inequality.

In the Homeric world banquets find their place in an anthropological study of the system of gift and counter-gift (Scheid-Tissinier, 1994), and in the discussion on the origins of the symposion (Wecowski (2014); see Corner in the present volume).

Archaeology has enriched what can be said of commensality in the Geometric period and the early Archaic: the practice of dining was closely linked both to the rite of sacrifice and the establishment of communities (Schnapp Gourbeillon, 2002). Our knowledge of banquets in the world of Archaic and Classical cities has diversified through publications on dining at Sparta, Crete, Athens and other cities, and also through general studies of other places of the expression of commensality such as the oikos, kinship and family, and associations. The context of meals in the home and in the sanctuary is now better understood. Studies on the function of different parts of the oikos, and in particular on the place of the andron and the improbable gynaeceum, stimulate our understanding of the space reserved for meals and of the further spaces of masculine and feminine activities beyond it (Nevett, 2001; Morgan, 2006).

The banquet has also been taken out of its isolation and placed within a larger ensemble, that of the pleasures of the flesh in democratic Athens, the amorous body meeting the gourmand body for a new cultural history (Davidson, 1997). Along a similar approach, of putting in perspective in a broad context, the meal can also become a place of observation of social and cultural phenomena that are not limited to table practices, and of understanding the relationships between rules and practices, norms and transgressions (Catoni, 2010).

Finally, the theme of the banquet has encountered other themes favored by research over the past 20 years, particularly gender.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.