connect them directly with Macedonian kings and princes. In one story, a
letter had just arrived for Philip II from King Kotys, which triggered a
humorous story whose exact purpose has been lost in the retelling (6.24e).^9
However memorable, these were either exceptional events (not least
because of their prohibitive costs), exceptional expenditure that found its
way into the record books precisely for being out of the ordinary; or the
cost includes maintenance for a much larger group of people.^10 The price
for feeding some 60 or 70 royal friends of the Macedonian king is put by
one writer, Ephippus, at 100mnaia day, which indicates a cost‘per
cover’of 143dr, as compared with 160dr for reports about the Persian
royal house, where the sum was apparently intended to feed retainers as
well as the individually honoured recipients. For the writers who
recorded these grand feasts, the sums spent by a king, whether Persian,
Macedonian, or other, were grist to an intellectual mill.^11 They were not
the least, it seems, interested in how these sums were arrived at, and how
resources may have affected what was on offer as refreshment at different
times and places. Yet this is precisely what we need to know, if we are
going to evaluate the consumption of royal households.
If we compare the dining habits of northern Aegean royal households
with those of early modern princes, then the size of a household living
from the proceeds of a country estate, royal, princely, or just wealthy, is
unlikely to have numbered much over a hundred. Only the very wealthi-
est households of the lastfive centuries numbered 300 or more, drawing
on resources from extensive territorial estates, often with additional
income from a range of other assets.^12 Since these numbers represent
(^9) The story is attributed to Hegesander of Delphi, to whom a number of other stories
about Philip II are ascribed (Athen. 14. 614d; 260b). Athen. 12. 536d–e:‘Isanthes, king of
the Krobyzi, surpassed all his contemporaries in luxury. He was rich and handsome,’(citing
Phylarchos 10 ’Histories).
The King of Persia might spend 400T on feeding 15,000 men at table (or 160dr a
head): KtesiasFGrH688 F39 and DeinonFGrH690 F24, ap. Athen. 4.146c (Ephippus
FGrH126 F2), in the same passage of Athenaeus, records Alexander feeding 60–70 of his
friends); Theop.FGrH115 F113 ap. Athen. 4.145a (20–30T paid by a subject as a form of
taxation to cover dinner for the Great King and his entourage); all cited by Davies 2005,
128 – 9 and n.19. Lenfant (2007) explores Athenaeus’references to Persian luxury in the
enlarged context of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Lane Fox (2007, 287 with n.145) believes that
it was Athenaeus himself who equated the cost of dinner for one Macedonian (Ephippus ap.
Athenaeus) with a sitting for 15,000 Persian court followers.
(^11) Phylarchus (FGrH81 F41) and Agatharchides (FGrH86 FF2–3) claimed that Alex-
ander the Great’s dinners exceeded the price of Persian jewel-encrusted treasures such as
the gold plane tree, but these are broad-brush evaluations; Lane Fox 2007, 287.
(^12) Davies 2005, 129 with further refs, nn.24, 25: Girouard 1978, 15:‘in the later Middle
Ages, at any rate, the normal household for a peer or great prelate varied between 100 and
200 people’; cf. ibid. 15–17, 84, 111.
274 Dining cultures