What sort of food did the elite members of the ancient world eat?
In Rome, sumptuous dishes served by the elite at banquets to impress dinner guests included:
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Forbidden by sumptuary laws
In Petronius Arbiter's fictional Trimalchio's Dinner from the first century CE
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Raff
What sort of food did the ancient poor eat?
For the poor, it was a different story.
This diet consisted mainly of cereals, but how were they prepared?
Barley and millet - easier to grow than wheat, and thus more common - were often eaten as flatbreads or as gruel. The wheat which was distributed to citizens as a grain dole was given to bakers to be baked into bread. Corbier
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Subsistence farmers in the ancient Mediterranean grew a bit of everything, usually focusing on cereals. Land was parceled into small areas, so that the variation in geography and type of crop served as insurance against isolated crop failure.
The "everything" here is mostly cereals, olives, and grapes. The latter two would be made into oil and wine, respectively. Other crops included figs and other fruits, as well as legumes like beans or lentils. To the rural poor who operated these farms (whether as owners or as tenant farmers), these foods would make up the daily menu. Meat was a rare occurrence. Dalby, Osborne
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Helping the poor eat
By the end of the Roman republic, the government at Rome and the local elites would organize alimentary schemes to alleviate hunger among Roman children throughout the Mediterranean. The emperor Trajan enacted just such a scheme. The coin at the left is a gold aureus from Trajan, depicting a donation to children. According to Trajan's plan, all farmers whose holdings exceeded a certain limit had to give some of their grain to the state, which then distributed it among the children of the empire.
This plan certainly helped to ensure that there was enough to eat for Roman children, but did nothing to diversify their diets. Grain, as we see below, was sufficient for subsistence but not for total health.
This plan certainly helped to ensure that there was enough to eat for Roman children, but did nothing to diversify their diets. Grain, as we see below, was sufficient for subsistence but not for total health.
Garnsey and Saller 1987
Consequences of a limited diet in the ancient world
Most peasants subsisted pretty well on cereals and legumes, like the barley-and-lentil soup pictured to the right. But for the truly destitute, or for the rest of the lower classes when times were lean and food shortages struck because of ecological or political reasons, there were consequences.
Wheat and barley do contain protein, calcium, and iron. A regular daily ration of cereal contained enough of these nutrients for an active man, but women require significantly more calcium and iron, especially when pregnant or lactating. A deficiency in these nutrients at this crucial time threatens both maternal and fetal health. And the less refined the grain is when it is consumed (and less refined grain was more common among poorer consumers), the less effective the body's mineral absorption is. |
Additionally, cereals, even if they do contain protein and some minerals, are not rich in many vitamins, another crucial component of complete health.
Certain diseases such as anemia, eye diseases, bladder stones, and rickets, occur commonly in the modern world among the malnourished, particularly children. Additionally, infant mortality is higher among malnourished populations.
These same problems are likely to have afflicted ancient people who lived in similar conditions to third world communities suffering with these issues today and in the recent past.
Garnsey 1998
Difficulties in studying the eating habits of the ancient poor
It is difficult to know just how the poor lived in the ancient world. To quote Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, "Peasants do not leave monuments."
Nor do they leave a literary record. We cannot understand the lives of the lower classes through their own lives, and in the few cases when they are written about by their socioeconomic betters, we cannot entirely trust the sources as a record of lived experience. Even the evidence that seems to give straightforward answers to our questions about life in antiquity has its caveats. Ancient texts which provide numbers are subject to the intentional and unintentional biases of their authors. Some authors preferred rounded or symbolic numbers, some merely neglected to report numbers accurately. Even the study of human remains is not always trustworthy: skeletons may be preserved at different rates. Scheidel
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The strategy of applying predictive models to ancient patterns and behavior based on modern data is another option. The discussion of diseases among malnourished populations above is one example of such extrapolation. Some scholars also check ancient sources against the modern models as a way of verifying their authenticity.
Scheidel
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