because more ambitious social events might be linked to hunting exped-
itions, when feasts were in any case more easily managed close to the
scene of the kill.
Any assessment of dining practices drawn from such evidence as
Athenaeus’tall tales is frustratingly tentative. There is surprisingly little
detail about what was actually consumed in surviving narrative accounts
of Macedonian and Thracian dinners. Athenaeus refers, for example, in
Book 4, to the wedding banquet of Kotys I’s daughter to the Athenian
general Iphikrates, as portrayed in Anaxandrides’ play Protesilaos
(4.131b–c), but focuses mainly on the atmosphere and humorous possi-
bilities of the incident—the purple rugs contrasted with the‘butter-
eating’hoi polloiand Kotys himself tottering about with a golden jug.
There is implied distance between the epic content of the poetry with
musical accompaniment and the unrefined behaviour of the principals,
but the reader has no way of knowing how Athenaeus selected and
compressed his source material to produce this rather bizarre portrait,
followed by an even more bizarre extract from a list of wedding presents
for the groom—the herd of chestnut horses; the herd of goats; the golden
sack; the limpet-shaped vessel; the jug of snow, for cooling liquids; the
pot of millet; the cellar of onions; and the hecatomb of octopuses. The
selection reads like a collage of deliberately chosen polarities, with a
strong dose of predictable comic exaggeration. What is more, the cultural
polarity that Anaxandrides may have adopted to reinforce his comic
effects is strikingly absent from Xenophon’s description of a dinner
party. This merely underscores the extent to which Athenaeus’anec-
dotes, which play such a significant role in most historical evaluations of
northern dining, are the product of conscious,fictive strategies.
STORAGE AS A PROXY FOR FOOD CONSUMPTION?
In order to understand the economic role of dining in the northern
Aegean we must move beyond these syncopated anecdotes. Students of
literature have rarely attempted to integrate literary references to diet
and recipes with what can be known from other types of evidence.
Historians, on the other hand, tend to look at broad patterns of con-
sumption.‘Consumption’is integral to any contemporary evaluation of
economic performance, whether at state, national, or local level. Yet
consumption is neither a predictable nor a mechanical process. How
we use resources is highly dependent on cultural patterns of behaviour.
Consumption per head of population, and household consumption as a
276 Dining cultures