Good food and bad: Nutritional and pleasurable eating in ancient Greece

Abstract

Ethnopharmacological relevance

This paper speaks to the theme of the boundaries of food and medicine as constructed in the Greek and Roman worlds. It examines how physicians developed innovative ways of thinking about the body that did not attribute health and sickness to the intervention of gods. Ancient physicians and natural historians conceived of new potencies for substances and described their impact on the body׳s physiology between the late fifth century BC and the early third century AD. The legacy of these ideas and practices had great traction in the Mediterranean world and survived into Early Modern Times, and until the rise of new forms of science.

Materials and methods

This article analyses texts transmitted from the ancient world and considers how substances were attributed nutritional and medical potency. The texts relevant to this analysis include medical and philosophical treatises as well as cookery books. The article highlights discussions about the nature of food and drugs and the herbs thought to cross the boundaries between them. It interrogates different contexts within which foods were thought good or bad for the body, and the social and moral connotations attached to those perceptions.

Conclusion

Much of the analysis is devoted to understanding the flavours that were a key marker in the nutritional potencies attributed to foodstuffs. However there are clear and influential moral boundaries set by Plato in the discourse around food and pleasure. While every physician should be a chef, and many wrote cookery books that have been lost, a chef׳s talent was located in increasing pleasure, and therefore a less valuable skill. However the different literary genres show overlapping terminology and concerns, particularly with the quality of ingredients. Poor taste was not only a culinary concern. With regard to the setting of boundaries between foods and medicines, the transition between one category and another is frequently determined by the preparation and strengthening of a food׳s potency.

Introduction

In the Greek medical tradition, ‘rational’ medical treatises were first written in the fifth century BC. They distinguished themselves from earlier, poetic accounts attributing the cause of disease to the gods, though they did not deny divine causation outright, instead building the gods within their scheme of nature. These treatises were written by a number of authors associated with Hippocrates and his thought over a period of more than 150 years. It is not possible to identify Hippocratic authorship of any of them with certainty. Among many shared features, the majority of the 60 treatises in the Hippocratic corpus identify key liquids in the body such as blood and phlegm as essential to life (the later canonical four humours appear only in the Hippocratic treatise Nature of Man). A second key feature is the activation of bodily processes by powers (dunameis) which are triggered either by the body or by what it encounters in foods, drinks, exercise, bathing and other external activities. The importance of this ‘Hippocratic’ medical system is that it constitutes a Western – and probably older, if Vivienne Lo is right – equivalent of Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. Galen in his adaptation of the Hippocratic system in the second century AD sometimes identifies nutrition and drug therapy as two of the three branches of medicine (along with a perilous third, surgery). Powers identified in foods or in their stronger correlates drugs therefore constitute major causes of health and disease in ancient thought.