The Ancients - Food in the Greco-Roman World

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

When we think of the modern Mediterranean, delicious and vibrant food is one of the first things that come to mind. But how much has the regional food changed over the last two millennia? In this episode Tristan is joined by host of 'The Delicious Legacy' Thomas Ntinas to discuss just how much the food has changed and helps by providing Tristan with some mouth-watering home made recreations of just what they would have eaten. The importance of fresh produce, who would've eaten an extravagant meal just like the one Tristan is served, and the importance of honey and wine, Thom takes us on a flavoursome journey through history.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we're talking all about food in ancient Greece and Rome. Finally, we're talking about the all-important part of our lives, of human lives through history, food.

And it's about time we talked about food in ancient Greece and Rome. In particular today, we're going to be, shall we say, focusing in on some recreated dishes. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, I'll explain because our guest today is a friend of History Hit. He's someone who also works at History Hit. This guest is Tom, Tom Dinas. Tom, now, I love this about Tom. Tom is absolutely fascinated, really interested in ancient food.

But he doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk too, because Tom recreates dishes from ancient history he's got his own podcast the delicious legacy podcast he's got his own youtube channel where he releases really cool videos of him recreating ancient dishes and having i guess say an ancient dinner party in the modern world and so we have tom right on our doorstep. We have Tom at History Hits. So we at the Ancients team, we're just like, okay, Tom, we've got to get you on the podcast. We'd love to come over to your house. We'd love for you to recreate some ancient dishes for us for a very special podcast, all about food in ancient Greece and Rome. And Tom, he was

absolutely delighted. In fact, I can't deny he came up with the idea and I'm so glad that we pounced on it. Elena, Annie, and myself, Annie and Elena, they're key parts of the Ancients team, we headed over to Tom's. We tried a variety of dishes that Tom created, that he cooked up for us, that have their origins in the ancient Mediterranean world. And here is the podcast that we recorded at the same time. So without further ado, to talk all about food in ancient Greece and Rome,

recreating ancient food in the modern day, here's Tom. Tom, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. Thank you, you're welcome. Wow, it's wonderful to see a fellow History Hits employee, shall we say, person on the team on the podcast today. And, you know, with good reason. You've got this expertise in ancient food.

And if we're looking at ancient food in the ancient Mediterranean today, first of all, did it matter a lot what type of food you ate? For instance, let's say in regards to social status and so on. That's a good question. And obviously, does it matter today as well? It's a kind of thing that you have to ask. Of course it mattered, as it matters in our days what you ate. It's a little bit about showing off to your fellow friends or even to your enemies and your rivals,

isn't it? So in that respect a lot of that mattered, yeah. And is it one of these things, a medium like food, is it good when looking at the ancient Mediterranean for learning more about everyday life? Or are the things that we have surviving around food more centred around, let's say, the elites of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of ancient Carthage and so on? Well, I mean, this question, if you asked me about 40 years ago, probably would suggest the latter, that we are mostly centred in the elite of the ancient Mediterranean world. But I think eventually there have been many discoveries by archaeologists and food historians and culinary historians. And through the sense that science progressed as well. So we have a lot more ways of detecting what the ancients ate by the remains of the ancient pottery. So when there's an excavation and they find a house with kitchens and stuff,

the archaeologists and scientists can actually trace elements of what was cooking in the kitchen, what remains were in the DNA analysis, what remains are in the pots. So all that's been happening a lot, especially the last 20 years I think. So what we have is a lot more information about what the simple everyday people ate alongside with the elites. So what we have is a lot more information about what the simple everyday people ate alongside with the elites. So that's brilliant. So like from excavations for let's say a Vindolanda or wherever, thanks to improvements in science and the excavations, the archaeological remains, you can piece together these little clues into the everyday foods of these people, whether it's living

on a frontier like Hadrian's Wall or, you Wall or on a farmstead in ancient Greece. Yeah, and of course we can't piece together exact recipes, but what we find in the remains of the pots, we can actually see what they cooked in there. So we can find traces of X amount of wheat and barley, if it was wine or olive oil or figs, and what types of meat they ate. But that would be like deposits layering up meal after meal so you might have actually goat and chicken and beef but actually couldn't be the same meal might have been different cooking days of that ancient household basically so we have like a broad picture of what the ancients ate really so interesting i know for instance comes to mind there was like a recent excavation in like northwest Scotland of like a nine age house tower and they found like the

charred remains of grains they could try and learn piece together a bit about their diet from that. It's just fascinating isn't it? You find this amazing archaeological evidence that has survived largely sometimes by chance which can just tell you so much about these everyday people. Yeah it's completely fascinating and that's what made, one of the reasons that made me focus on food in the ancient world, because we find more and more. And I really want to explore that forgotten corner of antiquity. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we've talked a bit about the archaeology, but let's talk about literary sources. What types of literary sources do we have or other sources in general for food

in the ancient Mediterranean? Certainly in literary sources we have plenty I think. If you think about poets and philosophers and the ancient Athenian comedies so all these are part of commentary, social commentary about how they lived, how to critique the elites and the powerful. So all that had elements of their everyday life and that food is part of our social life today as it was 2,000, 2,500 years ago. So from all this stuff we can find and piece together a more complex picture of how was ancient table. So from that like 700 BCE we have an element of how the ancients evolved around food and agricultural work and the labour, and then you have things as Pliny and Cato and Columella writing agricultural manuals. They've been used as late as medieval times. So all this information about not only

how to grow something, when to grow it, they also include elements of how to cook it, what to cook. All these give us valuable information about the ancient cuisine. And talk to me about, therefore, these papyri fragments, which you seem to be absolutely fascinated by, which also seem to give us an insight into all of this. So these papyri are from Egypt, of course. They are the Oxyrhynchus papyri, and they are a group of manuscripts that was discovered in the late 19th century by Grefnell and Hunt, two papyrologists from Oxford. Basically, they were looking at the ancient town of Oxyrhynhus.

They were looking for manuscripts such as Gospels, the Bible, or lost plays from ancient dramatists and so on. And they found this bunch of papyri in an ancient rubbish dump. And in a sense, you know, this rubbish dump in Oxirinhus contained a time capsule of a very special kind. As Pompeii preserved a snapshot of the Roman life just on that day, the Oxirinhus papyri offers a lot more in a sense, not the bodies or the buildings, but a paper trail of whole culture. So yeah, because it was dry, as it's in the desert, all these papyri were preserved. And that gives us an open window to the ancient inhabitants' lives. Because we have all these different fragments of contracts, of private letters,

invitations to parties, merchant shipments, and so on and so on. And a lot of legal documents and so on. We find on these fragments, we also find ancient surviving cookbooks in the Greek language from antiquity. So yeah, there are some recipes there for a fish soup, for pickled slash cured meat, for a lentil porridge, sprouts with honey, liver skewers, that's about it. And we still haven't translated all of them. There's many, many left to be investigated. Here is where we find some ancient chefs' names like Mithaikos, Erastritos, Glafkos, Epennetos, Hergesippus. Mithaikos is one of the oldest known authors of cookbooks, by the way. So ancient cookbooks really were a thing, and I'm guessing the cooks themselves,

they travelled across the Mediterranean. Yeah, totally. Especially in the Greek world, cooks and chefs were a thing. There was a fad for celebrity chefs even back then, 2,500 years ago. So you had all these chefs that were making the name and they would be hired by merchants or rich people across the Mediterranean. And they were well sought after for their culinary skills. And some of them, they were writers.

So we have fragments mentioned by Plato, for example, about this famous Sicilian cook called Mithaikos, who's basically, for some reason, Plato didn't like. Because, I guess, because of the luxury and extravagance and the rich food, and Plato was more about restraint. So we have a few of them. No cookbook from the ancient Greek world survived, just tiny fragments or a recipe here and there.

So we only have a little bit of information for these people and their work, unfortunately. Is this where names such as Apicius and Archaeostratus, do they come into their own here? Archaeostratus, yeah, comes to his own here. And then you have people like Chrysippus of Tyana, who has a book on bread and baking, which nothing survives.

We just have the name and what the book is about. Ephesimus of Athens on salt fish. Salt fish? Salt. Oh, salt fish. And Sophon of Acarnina, another famous cookbook writer slash chef of the ancient world. Among the other names of course, we have plenty of other names, but those

were some of the main ones. Yeah, it tells us something that these books haven't survived at all. I guess they weren't so important in the ancient world. I guess it was just a subcategory of medical writing, because food is medicine and for your well-being as well. Food is considered something that you would use to keep yourself healthy and not only just feed and be alive the next day, but also how to treat ailments. So we have from Hippocrates and Galen, we have medical manuals that talk about all the stuff about how to use food to treat yourself. And that's where the humoral theory comes in place. So we have the four humors, black bile, yellow bile, flame and blood, which they have to

be in balance in the body in order for a person to be healthy and live a well-balanced life, an active life. So depending with the season, something will be unbalanced, so you have to bring it back to balance with some certain foods. Ah, okay, so certain foods

heal certain things, as it were. Yeah. The humoral theory is very important. It was a theory of maintaining or regaining one's health through a lifestyle of moderation and balance called dietetics. And as in our days, and even more so back then, diet played a role in preventing and curing diseases. And in fact, was one of the main areas of study for the medical schools as well. So yeah, foodstuffs and dishes were seen in the same way as simple and compound drugs. They were classified in accordance

to the theory of the four humours. Yeah, foods had to be judged and balanced for their effects on the bodily humours, month by month, hour by hour, and according to individual person's constitution. The whole approach of the humoral theory and the way they used food and the way they used food and the way they

use to balance the different elements of food reminds us a lot of the Far Eastern cuisine as well. There's a holistic approach to the meal time and there's an emphasis in balance. It's kind of similar with China when you have the yin and the yang. So that's common to both cultures. I mean, if we're talking about food in the ancient Mediterranean, but just so we get a clear idea, what sorts of foods that, you know, we commonly likely eat today, should we not associate with meals, with food of the ancient Mediterranean? So this is a brilliant question, Tristan, because if we think about Mediterranean food today, what do we think about Italian and Spanish and Greek food? We think about rice, pasta, tomatoes. So, for example, potatoes, peppers, chilies, all came from Americas.

And all these came from Americans after the 15th, 16th century. So ancient Roman Greece had nothing to do with these foods at all. Then food as rice, aubergines, lemons, oranges, they came with the Arabs via Persia and with the Arabs around 600 CE. So that's, again, around a thousand years after the classical antiquity as we think of, you know, the golden age of Athens and so on. So yeah, none of this existed. So we didn't have the staples of potato. We didn't have rice. We didn't have lemons to give a bit of zinc to the food. What did they eat though? That to the food. What did they

eat though? That's the question. What did they eat? So they had barley. Barley was a mainstay in ancient Greece because the land wasn't as fertile as the Italian hinterlands. So barley grows better in poor soil. So they had more bread made from barley and that's more of a flat bread. It doesn't rise so much. So that was a lot in Greece. In Italy and Black Sea and Egypt, you had obviously wheat. So you had nice sourdough type of breads with ancient grains like emmer. Emmer and farro is two of the ancient grains that used a lot. So that's all wheat and we're talking about bread here. Then you had pulses and legumes like chickpeas were very important.

You had lupins, which is a type of broad bean and broad beans. So you had this the food of the masses. Onion, garlic, leeks, cabbage, of course, mainstay. And the most important ones is olives and olive oil, and figs, and grapes, and wine, and honey. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we'll get into that now. I mean, keeping on that topic then, I believe you've got some food prepared for us today. Indeed, I have some ancient recipes straight from the book of Apicius. Apicius. Now, who is Apicius? So Apicius is the oldest surviving cookbook from the ancient Mediterranean.

What we think is that the book was written at the time of Gaius Apicius, which was a Roman aristocrat, a very rich and extravagant Roman, what we call gourmand. He was passionate about food. So we think it's from his era. So we're talking about first century of the Common Era, the time of Emperor Tiberius. But the actual book is written around 300, 400 years later. So what we have survived, that book from 400 CE. So these recipes are all what we have from the ancient world surviving intact.

They are an eye, they're a glimpse on the world of ancient Rome and Greece basically, because we have very rich dishes, spiced to the full with exotic spices all the way from India, like long pepper and grains of paradise, and you have silphium and you have herbs, lots of herbs and mustards, things that are very spicy and very sweet with lots of honey and lots of wine and all that, yeah. You mentioned words like silphium, I'm definitely going to be asking you more about that in due course because it does feel like certain foods aren't there, as I'm sure we'll chat about in a second too. Well, maybe there is mystery surrounding them. There are some ingredients of antiquity that still boggle the mind today.

You know, what were these ingredients which they mention and seem to come up again and again and again? Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's two spring to mind right away, which are the most famous, I suppose. Garum, or garos in ancient Greek, and silphium. So we have two things here really important in the ancient world but we cannot really say what they are. We have some vaguer collection and we have, as I said, archaeologists and culinary historians working on it and they have plenty of hypotheses on what are they. And so yeah, garum, a sauce, and it has its origins in

Greece, ancient Greece, probably from the Black Sea colonies. So Greeks, because the land wasn't fertile and it was poor, they moved all across the Mediterranean and they built big cities in the Black Sea. And Black Sea is rich also in fish and fishing grounds, so a lot of fish, plenty of fish. And this garum is basically a fish sauce made by fermented fish. And that was something used a lot as a condiment or as a flavouring agent or in the place of salt. Yeah, the modern equivalent would have something like the fish sauce from Thailand or Vietnam, which is very similar in a lot of ways.

Then, if we go back to ancient Greco-Roman times, with expansion of Rome into the Carthage and Spain, they took over the production of garum. And garum obviously took many many forms, because you can make it in many different ways. Each way even more labor-intensive and more refined, which makes the garum more expensive. The product that you use on the table as a condiment, only putting a few drops in your food, have it on the table with your rich friends to show off, look, this garum costs an equivalent of a thousand loaves of bread or something like that. So you would have something like that to

show off to your rich aristocratic friends. It's basically we only now have some idea of how it was made thanks to archaeologists that they reproduce it trying to do experiments and find out how it was made. There is one sauce still made in Cetara in Italy in Napoli area in the Amalfi coast which is made by the local fishermen of the small village of Tsetara. And they make it with salted fish in a barrel, and they just take the liquid afterwards, according to the thousand-year-old recipe from a local monastery. And quickly, just before we go on to the recipes themselves, talk to me a bit about silphium.

This is the other big one, isn't it, of those two? Yes, silphium is another big mystery, because apparently it grew only in Cyrenaica, in ancient Cyrene, in modern Libya. Obviously we think now it's a desert but it was a fertile land. Rainfall was a lot more back then so it was a fertile land full of trees, grasslands and savannas and apparently this herb grew there and it's called silphium.

It looked a bit like a leek and apparently it was so tasty for the sheep, so the sheep grazed on that land, on that grassland, and it gave the meat a better taste. So sheep fed sylphium, supposed to be like the Wagyu beef of today. By the time Nero was emperor, sylphium gone extinct. Apparently Nero ate the last stalk of sylphium. And what we know is that Romans ate it mainly in vinegar, so like a pickle, or dried and used as a condiment in foods, so like a powder. The other myth or rumor connected with sylphium is that when sheep ate sylphium, they fell asleep and the goats sneezed loudly. You knew when your sylphium was originating from Cyrene, because

the sheep would fall asleep. But that's all hearsay, right? Apparently it disappeared. But maybe that's something we should think on in our modern world, like the first man-made environmental disappearance. Because basically it's human greed, isn't it? They thought a valuable commodity would be even more pricey if it goes, if we have less of that. But at the same time, with Alexander's conquests, we have the silphium from Persia, from Media in India. What we call today asafoetida, that dry powder that we use in a lot of Indian curries and cuisine. So we have something very similar in this form today. So we can try that to substitute when we make ancient recipes. Hi there, I'm Kate Lister, sex historian and author, and I am the host of Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a new podcast from History Hit. Join me as I root around the topics which

have been skipped over in your school history lessons. Everything from the history of swearing to pubic hair, satanic panic, cults, there is nothing off limits. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods from ancient civilizations to the middle ages to renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We mentioned that right there, so let's go and have a look at some of these recipes that you've cooked up today. So, we have three dishes, and of course we have a drink as well. An aperitif. We start with an aperitif of spiced honey wine, which is in the Book of Apicius. And this is herbs, spices and honey with white wine all mixed together and let it

stay overnight. And that was kind of a welcome drink to the guests in the house. We have obviously white wine, honey, bay leaves, black pepper, very valuable in the ancient Roman world. It was kept with a treasury with a gold in ancient Rome. Saffron for this nice orange color. We have a mastic, which is raising from the tree that grows only in the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea and this is the first actual chewing gum that ancient used to use. First chewing gum? Yeah the ancient used to use it to clean their teeth. Chew it and gives you a nice breath, fresh breath and also has a very distinct subtle sweet aroma that impermanence all the food and all

the drinks so it's very nice in alcoholic drinks and sweets and so on it is is such a beautiful color isn't it i know the whole ancients team here today were you know they're loving it at the moment and like it is beautiful and it's kind of i guess you can kind of understand why they would have given that as an aperitif if it's in the cookbook for these elites it kind of also i guess feels like the nectar of the gods isn't it it is the nectar of the gods it really't it? It is the nectar of the gods, yeah. It really reflects that, isn't it? It's this symbol of, I guess, power, wealth and status. It's the first recipe in the book.

The first? Yeah. Ah, so prime of place. Yeah. So for this one, we have quantities, as we do with the main dish of the day today, which is a slow-cooked beef, which has been marinating in milk and honey and asafoetida all night.

This is in the recipe book of Apicius and this is probably one of the few recipes that has exact quantities of ingredients, how much of each and all the ancient cookbooks. They were from cooks to cooks basically and you would adapt it as your master wanted or how many guests you would have the recipe. They never mention any precise amounts of ingredients and this is one of the few ones that we have with precise amounts. So once we marinate the meat, we cook it with wine, honey, dates, fish sauce, then we serve it with something like bread or flatbreads to absorb all the liquid, all the juices, or with legumes like lentils or some other kind of wheat-based like bulgur or something like that.

You mentioned, of course, the meat for the main course. What was the starter then? What was the main course? The starter is a garlic, cheese and herb mix, which appears in the poem Moretum, which is attributed to the poet Virgil. The first course is inspired by this poem, which has a slave digging for some garlic bulbs and making a starter for his master with cheese and olive oil and wine and vinegar

and this garlic. So it's a very spicy pungent dish, something that's definitely going to wake up your taste buds. And it's something that I guess you would eat as a first course in the ancient Roman and Greek world. And the main dish is the slow cooked marinated beef, which the original recipe is with goat. So it talks about goat, but I thought we'd make it a bit more modern, present our modern world a little bit better. I made it with beef. And so this is the main recipe that we're going to taste today,

the main dish of the day, which has exact quantities, which is very rare in the ancient world. And then we have another dish, honey glazed prawns, mentioned again in a poem from an ancient Greek called Philoxenus. So he has a poem of an ancient symposium, talks about the guests being welcomed with flower garlands and girls playing music and all that stuff, and talks about the food. He takes you through the different foods of the menu that they're going to eat, and one of them is honey glazed prawns so from that line and from other references we made a dish today with prawns honey olive oil fish sauce and lots and lots of oregano and black pepper which are things that the ancient greeks used a lot with fish or in seafood you're very hungry just mentioning all of that but i've

got one big question. One big question, first of all, is this whole idea of cheese with fish. Now, it's divided opinion here, okay, but 50-50 about whether that's like normal or not normal. I kind of sit on the fence of it doesn't really feel that normal.

Cheese with fish, prawns and all of that lot. How do you feel about that? Is it quite a popular idea in the ancient Mediterranean to have cheese and maritime food together? It seems so. It seems so, especially as what has survived to our days, people trying to impress other people. So once you have all these merchants and tradesmen becoming wealthy by commerce all over the Mediterranean and they find all these ingredients, they want use them they want to use all these different exotic foods and a big fish is a rarity is expensive and you have cheese and you have sauces and

spicy stuff and they want to show off basically as any normal human being would do they're showing off by combining all these elements and making extravagant sauces and pairing ingredients that you wouldn't normally think that will go together so, we have that element surviving. But at the same time, we have people like Archestratus, who was from ancient Sicily, but we don't know anything else about him. We have only tiny fragments of his poem, Life of Luxury, surviving in Thenaeus, and his book, Philosophers at Dinner.

So we only have about 62 fragments of his epic poem. But yeah, he talks about going all over the ancient Mediterranean and finding the freshest thing to eat from the local place. So he's kind of talking about terroir and about the freshest ingredients and don't dress it with rich sauces and spicy stuff because you're masking the flavor of the food. Yeah, so we have both elements here. We have people talking about making it as rich as possible, and then you have the other school of thought saying, keep the food simple, eat the freshest food, eat it now, in season, from the place, from the locale that it is. So yeah, it's complex. And Tom, you mentioned there would be no knives and forks back then, would there? No, no knives or forks. People ate reclining on the sofas. So you had one

hand supporting your head and you had one free hand. With the free hand you would grab a morsel of food and to grab that you would use a flatbread. Yeah I don't know if it's because ancient Greek bread was from barley and was flatbread and that influenced people eating like this or it was the other way around, if you know what I mean. Well you know what they say, or it was the other way around? If you know what I mean. Well, you know what they say, it went on the ancients, do as the ancients did. So, yeah, let's give it a go. Let's try some warm bread. Yes, okay. So we've got cheese and bread in front of us at the moment.

Oh, it's very strong, that cheese, isn't it? It's all the garlic. Mmm, that's the garlic coming through. It's lots and lots of garlic. That's me having the the garlic. Mmm, that's the garlic coming through. It's lots and lots of garlic. That's me having the recipe garlic, because otherwise it would have been extremely hot, extremely spicy. So what else, just a reminder, what else is in this cheese apart from garlic? I'm guessing the garlic gives it this kind of green colour. It's all the fresh herbs actually.

So we have celery leaves, parsley leaves and coriander leaves. All these mixed up with the garlic and the cheese. Alright Tom, so what have we got in front of us now? This looks amazing. Honey glazed prawns with lots of oregano and black pepper. Obviously this is cooked in olive oil, fish sauce for the salt and the pungency and honey and that gives it a kind of sweet and shiny element yeah with some fresh herbs it does look very glazed i must admit i can't wait to tuck into this so yeah let's let's see you don't have to necessarily like this stuff obviously this is ancient type of food i just make it to see how they ate that's right fortunately everyone can't see our facial expression so it's all good but i'm

sure it's lovely anyway yeah the whole thing is about the sauce because it's something you really feel that flavoring with the porn Don't you that sauce as you mentioned there? So far everything had honey honey was very important element Not only as sweet but also in the savory dishes, too It is really sweet isn't it for fish dish as well. You can see, you mentioned that honey. It's quite funny that you got that, we're drinking this honey aperitif at the same time. So it's just honey as the drink and honey in the sauce for the food too.

So here we have the main dish. It's quite, it's quite something to look upon. What is this we're looking at? This is the beef? The beef, yeah. Slow cooked beef, which has been marinating all night in milk and honey and asafoetida and black pepper with some parsley root, actually. That's not the parsnip, but it's parsley root. Let's see how it tastes.

It's very tender, isn't it? Yeah, it should be. Don't need the peppercorns. But yeah, that's the idea. Lot of spices, lot of wine, lot of honey, a lot of wine, a lot of honey. I said it before, but I'll say it again. It's so soft and tender, isn't it? And with the spices, as you say,

it kind of gives that extra flavour into it at the same time. I'll tell you what, it's so difficult to tell that it's been marinated in milk at the same time. I mean, especially if you do get one of those peppercorns, which does just kind of then... You're eating the beef and then it just kind of explodes with pepper as you eat into it. But was milk used quite a bit as a marinating, you know, kind of sauce, should we say? From what I've seen, not so much, actually. That's one of the few recipes

I've seen that they've used milk with their meat. Yeah. Generally, yeah, I think things like beer and milk, they've been seen a lot more like the Northern tribes or barbarians doing that. It wasn't something that you would do in Greece or in Rome. They would drink the wine always with water, so watered down wine, and yeah, so that would last throughout the night, you wouldn't get drunk. Again, that was considered barbaric, to be drunk and drinking wine without water., neat wine. So there's various types of wine, was that the main kind of, for instance this only thing that we're drinking now, was that the main sort of drink that you'd expect with a dish like this?

In the Roman times certainly, and then this same drink which is called conditum paradoxum would be served throughout the Byzantine period, so Eastern Roman Empire basically. The imperial court and all the aristocrats would have a conditum as an aperitif before the meals, before the big dinners and stuff and parties and events. But wine-wise, obviously every year you would have a new vintage of wine and generally there was lots of different varieties of wines. There is a story that Aristotle loved the lesbian wine most, so wine from the island of Lesbos, which has a very nice indigenous variety still to our age, to our day. You could try some nice

ancient varieties of grapes from the island of Lesbos. Chian wine as well from the island of Chios was very renowned, and from Byblos, which is the ancient Lebanon area. Phoenician. Phoenician, yeah, that was very, very famous wine. It's quite interesting how, you know, so many of these wines, it seems, you know, they're like the best of the best. They seem to come from like various islands of Greece. Yeah. Not really from the Greek mainland, is it? Yeah, exactly. The islands. I guess the microclimate, that was part of it. Yeah, yeah. And then there's two or three varieties of wines today that they have Greek name in Italy. You can't find them in Greece anymore. So they've been transplanted by the Romans to Italian land and you can't find them in Greece anymore so they've

been transplanted by the Romans to Italian land and you don't find these varieties in Greece anymore. So one is called Greco di Tufo, white wine, really good wine actually. Allianico, very nice red. Allianico again that sounds like saying Hellenic. So that's another one called Greganico again alludes to Greece. So I guess they're all varieties being taken by the Romans, which they like to copy everything Greek. And so, Tom, we've eaten these various courses now, from the cheese to the prawns to the beef. Now, what type of person would have eaten a dish like this?

Who would this have been available to? So this would be available to, like, a Roman banquet. You'd have various consuls and aristocrats and people who are very wealthy. So that's something from Apicius' book as well. If you remember well, Apicius was a very, very rich Roman consul. So he would serve something like that or a pork, a whole roasted suckling pig with honey and garum roasted in the oven. And this, the festive dishes on a long banquet, holiday banquet for the rich Romans.

Because you have all the spices as well, which they were very, very expensive. They were coming all the way from India or from the east coast of Africa up from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. I mean, Apicius was very infamous for serving massive, expensive dinners to his guests. And one day in a whim, he went to Libya from Rome he sailed

he hired a boat and he went to Libya because he wanted to find the best and biggest fattest red mullet available so he sailed all the way there nine days went found the local fisherman asked him for the mullet and he brought him a normal size mullet as you would find anywhere else and he left him he went back, straight back to Rome. But yeah, I mean, he was so rich, he could do that, I mean, hire a whole boat, travel for nine days in the middle of the winter, go to Libya, come back the same second when you couldn't find anything that you liked. And allegedly he committed suicide when he only had, in today's money,

the equivalent of £9 million left on his account. So no person could live with such a small amount of money, so he committed suicide. So no person could live with that small amount of money. He cried in disbelief when he saw that he had £9 million in today's money in his bank account. £10 million, yeah, yeah. And he committed suicide.

It's a different world today, isn't it? Tom, this has been amazing. It's the first world today, isn't it? Tom, this has been amazing. It's the first time we've ever done an ancients podcast like this where we're eating food too. The whole team are here, are very, very happy for inviting us over and to do this. Last but certainly not least, talk to me a bit about your podcast, all about food and antiquity. Thanks, Tristan.

Yeah, you can tune to my podcast called The Delicious Legacy. I explore ancient recipes, ancient food items, and herbs and spices from all over the world, actually. So I might go from Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and find something that is not known today and try and make it and talk about it or talk about the ingredients themselves or famous

or infamous characters from the ancient world. Brilliant. Well, that is a great podcast. So I'm wishing you all the best with it in the days, weeks, months and years to come. And it only goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you for inviting me. Well, there you go. There was history hits, very own Tom Dinas, a man obsessed with food of ancient Greece and Rome and recreating the food in the modern day. Also the host of the delicious Legacy podcast. I hope you enjoyed it.

As I've mentioned several times before in these outros, at The Ancients, we're never satisfied with where we are. We always want to go the next step, the next few rungs up the ladder. So we're always trying with where we are we always want to go the next step the next few rungs up the ladder so we're always trying out new formats once again as i said i really hope you enjoyed the episode you know what i'm going to say next then normal spiel if you want more ancient content in the meantime and can't wait until sunday's episode where you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter every week i write a bit of content for that newsletter

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as we continue to grow the podcast and spread the love further and further and further afield. I said it a long time ago, but I'm going to reiterate it now. Russell Crowe, we're going to get you on the podcast sooner or later. It's going to happen. But that's enough from me. Rambling on at the end of the podcast. I will see you in the next episode.