PRELIMINARIES

The literary sources of antiquity depict the inhabited world as culturally heterogeneous, and regard food as one or the more significant markers of divergence. Most obviously, they contrast the food choices and eating customs of the urban elite, to which they themselves belong, and those of societies at the farthest reaches of the Graeco-Roman world or beyond its limits: the Scythians of Herodotus' History, the Mossynoeci of Xenophon's Anabasis, the various Celtic peoples of Strabo's Geography, the northern tribes of Tacitus' Germania, and so on. The construction is ideological, the details inaccurate or imaginary, and the purpose of the exercise is to emphasise the identity, singularity and superiority of the dominant cultures of Greece and Rome over those of sundry ‘barbarians’.

The fragility of the edifice constructed by our sources is transparent. Discrepant versions are offered of the diets of the same peoples. Contradictions and implausibilities occur in the treatment of major cultures like the Egyptians – for although their level of civilisation was in fact comparable with that of the Greeks, they too were seen by the Greeks as barbarians, simply by virtue of being non-Greek. Then, the inclusion of particular ‘barbarian’ tribes such as the Celts within the expanding Roman empire, and the cultural advancement that they were making in the view of their Roman overlords, created a particular problem for authors like Strabo, well-practised at imposing prefabricated cultural dichotomies. In the assessment of the Celts, a spectrum of civilisation or barbarity might have been a more apposite image to apply than a polarity of opposites.