Trade makes some private citizens very rich—something we
haven’t really encountered elsewhere. Vibrant Greek culture is also
the product of wealth being spread out among a good percentage of
the population. It’s for very good reason that the Greeks produced
the very fi rst cookbook, by Archestratus. Many people were
interested in gastronomy. Because all the parts of Greece are relatively isolated, it will be
very hard to unite the whole peninsula under one ruler, so Greece
will be politically fragmented (unlike Egypt). There is no single all-
powerful ruler; rather, there are lots of little city-states, each with its
own form of government. As a result, there won’t be a grand court culture radically separate
from the food of the masses. In fact, most people ate relatively
simple foods—the stereotypical Mediterranean diet of bread, wine,
olives, cheese, some vegetables, and a bit of meat. The geographical dispersion also meant that although it’s relatively
easy to invade one part of Greece, it’s nearly impossible to hold
onto anything or engulf it in an empire, as the Persians tried to do.Archaic Greece
The earliest record of Greek food habits is the description of what
Greek kings of the heroic age ate as described by Homer in the Iliad
and Odyssey, which were written in about 800 B.C. but describe a
Mycenaean culture that existed a few centuries before.
We also have many clues about early food culture in Greece from an
author writing shortly after Homer, Hesiod, whose Works and Days
tells about ordinary people’s lives. What is really fascinating about
Hesiod is that many of his stories parallel the biblical ones. Just as
in the Bible, there is a procession of different historical epochs. Hesiod’s Works and Days also gives a full picture of what the
average Greek farmer had to do day in and out and season to