The Way We Used to Eat: Diet, Community, and History at Rome

Abstract

Changes in foodways were an object of literary reflection on the Roman past in the early empire. They offered a rich set of ingredients with which to characterize social, economic, and cultural change. Varro is prominent in attesting and shaping this tradition, but it is an older, and more broadly based means of narrating Roman social history. Varro developed this material in his treatise, On the Life of the Roman People, which adapted the Life of Greece of Dicaearchus of Sicilian Messene, written at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. This article argues that Roman ideas of cultural and social history already took an interest in changing foodways at this time. The production, preparation, and consumption of food raised ethical and economic questions common to the milieu of Dicaearchus and to Rome in the age of the first conquest of Italy.

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