ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider the themes of hospitality, conviviality, and the impact of unsociability which recur as tropes throughout key ancient texts, from Greek Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey through to Roman Virgil’s Aeneid, and on to Petronius’s Satyricon, a range of over nine centuries (from 800 BCE to 200 CE). While it is common today to consider any text from the ancient world as ‘literature’ so rare and treasured are they as artefacts, the focus herein will be upon those written in what have become considered conventional literary modes. Falling within this range come writers of epics, drama (both comedies and tragedies), and a wide range of poets and satirists, including Hesiod, Plato, Aristophanes, Ovid, Catullus, and Athenaeus, but excluding non-fiction writers, historians, and politicians such as Julius Caesar, Cicero, and Tacitus, as a matter of necessity, in containing the time frame and range of sources. This chapter will first consider Greek literature and its discussion, and key representations of food, and then proceed to consider food in Roman literature. Key themes of hospitality or commensality and contrasting extremes of inhospitality will become evident, alongside the elements of conviviality, which derive from ritual or worship, in these texts.
