Andrew Dalby

This is very true -- and yet, think how much worse off we are for some other periods! For Trajan's rule, with the conquest of Dacia and many other events, there is only one worthwhile narrative source, and it's incomplete: I mean Dio Cassius's History (written more than a century after), which doesn't survive in full, we only have a Byzantine abridgement. For the whole period from Severus Alexander to Diocletian the sources are again very brief and in some cases seem to have had little information to go on themselves. As for Alexander the Great, the earliest narrative source we have (Diodorus) was written nearly 300 years after Alexander's death. And the best (Arrian) 450 years after Alexander's death.

Very important, in my view. Petronius was a true stylist -- and the Satyricon isn't pure gritty realism, it's a well-constructed and well-written story -- but he seems to have wanted to characterise people by speech and mannerisms in a way that hardly any other ancient writer does. So the conversation at Trimalchio's dinner gives you plenty of ideas about how people of different backgrounds really spoke.

You're exactly right, Kosmo. The banquet fascinated me, I wanted to work out explanations for some of the strange details, and finally I decided that an amusing way to do it would be to write an epilogue.

It's really good to see you back, Viggen -- Andrew

A.D., the link to Gastronomica in your Wikipedia article doesn't appear to be working. -- Nephele Yes, I just noticed that. U.C. Press appear to have sold the url "gastronomica.com". Hope they got a good price for it ... You may find that the link works again now, but it doesn't get you very far. If you'd like a copy of the story, Nephele, send me a pm with your address and I'll mail you one!

Several people have tried. In fact I made a list of various attempts to "fill the gaps" in an article I wrote on Wikipedia headed Supplements to the Satyricon. I have to admit that I wrote this partly so as to draw attention (with proper modesty ...) to my own Satyricon supplement, which appeared a couple of years ago in the magazine Gastronomica from California University Press. I imagined Encolpius and his friends and rivals, twenty years after, getting together for dinner in Massilia, from where he originally set out. There are one or two twists in the tail (or tale). Our local emperors Pertinax and Augustus Caesar have both asked me if there's an online version. There isn't, as yet (except at the U. Cal. Pr. website, where you have to pay for it). But I do have a few copies left ... If anyone looks at that Wikipedia article, and knows of any other extended Satyricon versions that ought to be added, please add the information, or mention it here. But to answer Kosmo's other question: no, none of them are any good! No one yet can match up to Petronius's own work.

I know what you mean and I agree that Marcellinus and Procopius would have used traditional, but archaic, forms of language. However, they were a continuation of a tradition and that tradition was still unbroken. That is the crux of the argument. The fact that any readers of the time would have had to have the same background education to understand the texts in their entirity is true, but then the same holds true for many academic works today: the average reader would have to dive for his dictionary at least once per page!! How true!

Very interesting points. I don't think I quite agree about the Latin of Ammianus Marcellinus and the Greek of Procopius: I reckon these were already archaic, fossilised, forms of language very far from what was used in everyday speech. But, yes, I must admit that at those periods lots and lots of people still wrote more-or-less-classical Latin and Greek every day. The classical languages still fully existed as standards. Later, in medieval times, they gradually became the preserve of a smaller elite.

The study may well be more challenging than the newspaper reports (it can be hard to get your research noticed!) but my comment would be that women and phalluses (which are necessarily attached to men, but the phallus is the only useful part) are essential to the production of babies. 30,000 years ago, people had already noticed this. So the two artworks don't prove that "sex was about far more than babies"; they could just as well prove that baby production was seen as necessary to the community. As for transvestism, I'm a bit sceptical. Has research shown that people wore clothes, and that they wore them when not out hunting, and that the two sexes wore them differently, 30,000 years ago? That would be needed first, I feel ...

A nice thought, sonic. I am now picturing an early Germanic tribesman waking up in the morning, looking vaguely at his one undifferentiated item of clothing, and trying to remember: "Above or below the waist?" Safest to go back to sleep.

You got it? You really are a docoflove, Ph. D.? Splendid news!

Of course they do (and it's because computer programs don't understand things that they can't translate effectively). But many single words, when you think about them carefully, mean more than one thing. Yes, you can translate "just words", and people often do. But if you check a good dictionary, online or not, you often find that more than one word in the "target language" seems to correspond to the word you looked up. The choice you have to make depends partly on the context. So, by all means, use your translator or online dictionary to give you possible words. Afterwards, feel free to check with people on this site -- we could probably help.

28th GO old bean, any emissaries will be entertained by endless tea and crumpets. Thank goodness you put that last item in the plural, Pertinax.

I know nothing ... but it sounds good to me, especially because of the neat alliteration! I heartily agree that Neil deserves the accolade. If I could think of the Latin for "master of the motorbike" I'd award him that as well.

It's a curious piece. The author classes as an error the idea that a bulldog represents Britain, but why? A bulldog often does represent Britain in political cartoons etc., and if 43% of Britons think it does, they are right! On whether the Lake District is a theme park, I just want to ask this. How many of the 7% who reached this view did so as a result of having visited the Lake District? As for where Hadrian's Wall is, it does seem that some re-education is wanted there. I look to Augustus Caesar's website to deal with this problem.

Thanks for the link! The alphabet shouldn't be a problem (if I understand your question). For inscriptions, it's the same that we use now (but upper-case only). They did not use J or U or W; for J substitute I, for U substitute V. If you want an alternative to W (for a name or something) you can use VV. You should know, though, that translation programs can't really write Latin (or any other language). They can give you words, just like dictionaries can, but you don't always know that they're the right words! And they can't put the words together into real sentences.

OK, OK, the garden fresco from "Livia's House" in Rome depicts a fruit which might well be either citrons or lemons. I haven't seen it at first hand or in colour. If one decides they are lemons, then this would be the first definite evidence of lemons in the Med; if citrons, then it is evidence that citrons had reached central Italy by the time of Augustus.

Sorry about the delay replying, GO -- in fact it's hardly possible (I think) to give a more definite timeline than my sketch earlier in this thread. On the whole, when gardeners share plants with their neighbours to west or east (and that's how plant migrations often happen) they don't bother to write it down ... However, the earliest date is fixed -- the text is date-stamped! As a not-quiter-answer, I'll tell you what (I think) we can learn from this earliest mention. Theophrastus in "History of Plants", which reads rather like the papers of a research seminar in the Aristotelian school, says specifically (at one point) that he is writing in 310 BC (he names the archon of Athens for the year). In the same book he describes many plants that are never mentioned in earlier Greek literature before and says that they are found in Persia, Media, Aria and India. It is universally assumed, I think rightly, that he can do this because he is reporting discoveries (by Greeks) of very recent years: it is known that Aristotle, Theophrastus's predecessor as head of the school, had sent scientists ('philosophers') along with Alexander's expedition. One of the plants, very carefully described, is a tree that just has to be the citron. This means that it was NOT known in the Mediterranean area at that time, nor, probably, in Iraq (otherwise he wouldn't have described it as a new discovery in Media and Persia: and if it had been already grown in Iraq, Herodotus and Xenophon might already have mentioned it. But, admittedly, you can't argue too strongly from a negative). There is plenty of other evidence that Persians were enthusiastic gardeners and transplanters of useful plants, so it would not be surprising if Persians had been the first to bring this plant westwards from India. The next bit of evidence about the citron is (as said by others above) that it came to be used by Jews in their ritual. But when, exactly? I'd like to be able to say, but I think those who can read Hellenistic and Roman Jewish texts (in Aramaic mainly) are better placed to comment ... The later spread of the citron in classical times can be traced with the help of mentions by Dioscorides, Galen and -- especially -- Athenaeus. How's that for a start?

I have usually seen commentaries equate the Citron to the Persian Apple. However, why am I also wanting to say that this has also been used as a nomeclature for peach/apricots? Whatever book that is, the statement is about a quarter true. Unless seeds have been found there since about 1998, there's no evidence the Sumerians cultivated any citrus fruits. On Alexander's campaign (probably) Greeks first encountered a "Median or Persian apple" -- but northeast of Iraq, in Iranian country, hence the names. This is the one that Theophrastus describes; he gives it those alternative names, and it is evidently the citron. After that time, Greeks began to spread it around the Med. Theophrastus seems to have no description of the peach. In all later classical sources, the "Median apple" was the citron (hence its modern scientific name, Citrus medica) and the "Persian apple" was the name given to the peach. For what reason is not clear -- but possibly because it was grown there in classical times -- the apricot was originally known by Greeks and Romans as "Armenian apple". Our word "peach" actually does derive from the Latin "persicum" (Persian apple). Nowe I must go and do some gardening ...

I don't like to spoil people's illusions, believe me, but about a third of the statements on that page are shameless untruths. This is quite normal for writing about food history by journalists and other non-historians. To many of them, sadly, history doesn't matter -- it's just stories. It doesn't matter that there's not the slightest evidence in ancient Egypt or Iraq for any citrus fruits before Alexander's time, and not the slightest evidence that Romans paid anybody to grow oranges: they'll say it anyway, because history, pseudo-history and historical fiction are all the same to them. If you want references on what is really known about the spread of citrus fruits: fairly reliable are Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, "Domestication of Plants in the Old World". I have the 3rd edition, 2000. In their brief survey on citrus fruits (pp. 184-5) they make two minor false deductions (I think) -- they place the citron in the Medietrranean basin a bit too early (because they didn't read Theophrastus carefully enough!) and the orange a bit too late (but you can't blame them, because the late medieval textual evidence for oranges in Europe wasn't yet generally known when they wrote: I drew attention to one source in /Flavours of Byzantium/, 2003). Sorry about the rant, but it is quite difficult to do food history using the evidence, and it becomes more difficult when so many people pretend to do it without even caring about the evidence.

I've done some work on this. Citrus fruits all seem to come from southern China and southeast Asia originally. The first citrus fruit to reach the attention of Greeks and Romans was a not-very-well-known one, the citron -- same colour as a lemon but bigger and knobblier, not very good to eat. This one is described by Theophrastus, 310 BC (and it is still quite widely grown in Mediterranean countries). It's possible, but not certain, that by later Roman times the lemon was known. It came second, anyway. Bitter oranges -- Seville oranges -- seem to have reached the Arabian peninsula by the 10th century AD, and from there they must have been spread by Arab fruit-growers to southern Spain (hence Seville!) They do turn up in Byzantine texts in late medieval times (the medieval Greek name is nerantzion: you can see the link with the Sanskrit and Arabic terms mentioned by the Doc). Finally, sweet oranges apparently didn't get to Europe till about the 16th century. Others -- tangerines, grapefruit etc. -- are very recent arrivals, and some are definitely hybrids. Any use, Augusta?

No, Hadrian's Wall is too far away. WW do you wish to suggest a "Southern" itinerary? Maiden Castle etcetera etcetera? I don't think I can manage the Wall this year, much as I would like to. However, very likely I could get to a southern destination. As someone already said above, it could be a very good idea to invite Sally Grainger. She knows more than anyone else I can think of about the real practical aspects of reconstructing Roman food.

All praise to Pertinax for making everything run smoothly. I much enjoyed Friday evening and Saturday and it was really good to be able to put faces (fairly human faces in certain cases ...) to names. So much was fitted into so short a time! I envy those who participated on Sunday as well -- Mrs D wanted to see the Jorvik Centre, and so did I, and then we had to set off home, so we missed the Sunday activities. But I'm hoping, like Pertinax, that the meeting can be repeated before too long.

With us (and particularly with those who live in the US and Britain!) food is extremely cheap, a very small proportion of what we spend day by day, and we don't spend much time on it either -- and our media (in Britain anyway) are still trying to get the cost and time down, I guess so that we have more money and time to spend on their kind of entertainment. And bad-but-attractive food (I'm speaking with a bit of bias here, as anyone will see) costs less than good food and takes less time to eat. So we have every reason (except health) to choose bad food and eat a lot of it. Less-well-off city Romans ate 'fast food', OK, but not in our modern sense. They ate food from bars and cookshops, but there was no big range of fattening foods for them to choose from. What the bars and cookshops sold was bread, vegetable soups and stews, not much meat or fish unless you paid a lot for it, very little animal fat, not much sweet food: all sweeteners were expensive except maybe dried figs and raisins, and both of those happen to be seriously good for the digestion! Flavour additives included onions, garlic, maybe ginger and pepper if you could afford them, all beneficial; and salt, and in a hot climate working hard you need plenty of salt. So eating a lot of the wrong sort of food, and resultant obesity, would have been a problem for the very rich and indulged.