EXARC Journal (May 2020)
Diet of the Poor in Roman Italy: An Exploration of Wild and Cultivated Plants as an Essential Dietary Component
Abstract
Most of the population of Roman Italy was poor, whether they were the poor who were constantly in search for food and shelter, or the temporarily poor who were artisans or shopkeepers but could fall into poverty at times (Garnsey, 1998, pp.226-227). In classical literature, pleasures of the mind were favoured over pleasures of the body (Gowers, 1993, p.2). Epictetus (Ench. 41) wrote that only stupid men spent time dwelling on matters of the body such as eating, and drinking, and that attention should be devoted entirely to the mind. Plutarch (Mor. 686 c-d) wrote that taking pleasure in the lingering smell of cooking was not the characteristic of a free-born man, and held contempt for those who were too fervent about minor pleasures (Mor. 1094 c). Gowers suggests that this bias, which is common amongst philosophers, could have affected the transmission of classical texts (Gowers, 1993, p.3). In other words, those works which concerned the simple joys of food and cooking may have largely been lost, as they were deemed unimportant. Although we do have surviving literature describing food and consumption, there are no candid descriptions of what the typical people in Roman Italy would have eaten. Instead, we have an upper-class bias of the sources which provide descriptions of extravagant meals and satirical dinner parties (Gowers, 1993, p.7), with little to no mention of the lives of common people. How then are we to determine what the poor inhabitants of Roman Italy ate, and how they experienced food? Three methods may assist in this pursuit. First, we can look to the past and identify the wild plants present in Roman Italy, as well as analyse the bones of the people living there to see what they consumed. Second, we can look to present-day poor Italians to see what their relationship to food looks like. Third, we may use experimental archaeology to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. This paper introduces these paths, exploring the archaeological data above, and ethnographical evidence. My aim is to provide greater distinction to our understanding of how diets may have varied among social classes during Roman antiquity, most predominantly as regards to diet among the poorer classes in Roman Italy, and to show that wild and cultivated plants played a more important role in these diets than modern scholarship suggests.
