PRELIMINARIES

Ceremonial eating and drinking are a conspicuous feature of ancient society. They brought together families and their guests, patrons and their dependants, politicians and their friends, aristocratic youth, members of occupational groups, social clubs, religious brotherhoods, the soldiery, the citizenry, the population of a town. Large or small, these displays of commensality or collective consumption carried significance well beyond the nutritional function of the meal that was consumed. In the domestic setting, they might demonstrate, as in the act of hospitality shown by Baucis and Philemon to two strangers (who happened to be gods) the moral integrity of the simple peasant household; or they might celebrate rites de passage, a funeral, or the acceptance of a neonate into the family, in classical Athens, the Amphidromia:

Outside the home, commensality demonstrated and confirmed the membership and solidarity of the group, paraded the status of the group vis-à-vis outsiders, and set out the hierarchies that existed both in the society at large and within the group itself.