This splendid volume is part of the Routledge series devoted to the senses in the ancient world and comes strongly recommended: taste is a sense that almost every human being possesses and a perception that almost all have opinions about. The essays are wide-ranging: their breadth prompts reflection on further forays into the sensory worlds of antiquity, which worked powerfully in medicine, religion and thought. Many revelations are made.
Standard ways of thinking lurk in discussions of taste, often attached more to food than to wine. E. Gowers alludes to one in the preface to her very fine chapter on taste in Roman thought with the observation, ‘taste and smell, associated as they are with physical appetite, with the mundane processes of fuelling and evacuating the body … tended to occupy a lower rank in the hierarchy of the senses than sight and hearing’ (p. 90). Gowers notes ‘these ancient prejudices’. Augustine, just mentioned, qualifies for this description, but this is more like Musonius Rufus than Plato or Seneca. Literary authors, moral philosophers and Christian authors certainly did express concerns about appetite and the valuation of pleasure over virtue and the intellect.
A second standard is that the ancient eater had ‘few discriminators beyond the four main flavours’, again alluded to by Gowers (p. 93). This may be true of literary constructions that ignored or feared complex flavours, from Homer to late antiquity; but it does not apply to authors who sought to describe and interpret the natural world and its plants, nor to Gowers's sophisticated discussion of the physical and metaphorical. Many authors conceptualised flavour much more widely, literary authors especially when describing wine, technical authors in medical and scientific contexts.
The volume is particularly strong in bringing together philosophy with literature, and archaeology with technical texts. J. Paulas (p. 218) lists the nine or ten flavours identified in different branches of science. P. Baker's extensive lists of foodstuffs (pp. 145–50) links the foods found in the archaeological record with Galen's descriptions of them in his works on nutrition and diet. Similarly, A. Livarda (pp. 189–90) on the archaeological record in Britain, identifies foods that were found at the periphery of the empire, whose tastes were not limited to sweet, sour, sharp and salty. Bitterness and ‘pungency’ are widely found. Where literary texts reduce them to four, reasons need to be found for that limitation.
Taste does indeed come lower down in Aristotle's hierarchy of the senses. But sight and hearing are insufficient to keep the body alive, as is fuel alone. The body needs nutriments as well as energy; it needs its natural health, its mixture of qualities, among which are numbered heating, cooling, moistening, drying and astringent, pungent, bitter, sweet etc. Sweetness is fuel, but the rest of the flavours are not: they act on the body and rebalance it. Philosophy, for Plato in the Republic, Gorgias and Timaeus, depends on the health of the body before the mind gets to work. Ancient writers and thinkers were sometimes prejudiced, but they did not take health for granted. Rudolph's contributions show how philosophers built on taste, beyond concerns over the excesses of the wealthy. Interestingly, in matters of taste the philosophers led the pack, ahead of literary authors and their concerns over the wealthy eating too much, though the philosophers dealt with that also, of course.
Rudolph introduces Democritus, Aristotle and Galen, to establish the ground on how the senses work physiologically and how they connect to the mind or soul, a connection very much in debate in the twenty-first century as scientists unshackle themselves from downgrading of the senses (cf. p. 59: a number of the authors refer to modern studies of flavour). Rudolph refers to Galen's studies of nerves and taste (pp. 9–10): it would be interesting if she had taken this further to include how taste and flavour work in the long book Galen devotes to it, Book 4 of his drug treatise, Simple Medicines, to which she alludes. Plato's Timaeus, intriguingly, is Galen's starting point, even though his debt to Aristotle is clear enough. Plato valued the mind over the senses, but as far as Galen was concerned, the Timaeus was the last word on the mechanisms of flavour. The astringency of a pomegranate will have an internal impact as well as the puckering effect on the mouth, while a sweet flavour will nourish as well as give pleasure.
Paulas, in a valuable chapter on the extraordinary in Pliny, Galen, Alcinous and Pollux, comes up with the astonishing pronouncement, ‘a product of his time, the doctor Galen occasionally appears to be more concerned with displaying his knowledge of the textual tradition and linguistically differentiating the traditional flavour vocabulary than focusing on the sensory perception of or medical reasoning about flavour’ (p. 217). Who in world history is not a product of his or her time? Yes, Galen writes in the rhetoric of the second century; yes, he is concerned with linguistic accuracy because he writes commentaries like those still written in the present century; but he does write about flavours and how they work in the body in each of the eleven books of Simple Medicines, the treatise Paulas has targeted. Indeed, Book 4 is concerned with nothing but flavour (noted by Rudolph and L.B. Totelin, p. 64), with sensory perception (aesthesis) and with medical reasoning. Ignoring this evidence, Paulas concludes (p. 218) that ‘the passage [11.450 K] simply shows Galen to be the second-century ce intellectual he was’. Paulas goes on (p. 219) to criticise Galen's distinction between pharmacological and natural scientific terms for taste as ‘proliferation for its own sake’. What Galen usually means by the distinction is not pedantic but scientific: between what applies to animal and human bodies (biology), and what to the wider cosmos (natural science), the enquiry into which is too big to be useful in medicine. Galen knew his way round the body and the flavours it ingests from plants, animals and minerals better than Paulas claims.
The medical theme is well taken up by Totelin. Taste is the key sense in Galen's pharmacology (Simple Medicines 11.390 K, touch in his physiology, Mixtures 1.594 K), marking a major difference between the ancient material world and ours, which tends to limit taste to food. Totelin shows how taste and flavour were developed in Theophrastus, doing for him what Rudolph does for Democritus and Plato. Building on Aristotle, Theophrastus was constructing flavour-science based on plant physiology and their actions. Galen went on to develop this wholesale, explicitly from Theophrastus, following the journey of the plant qualities into the body, to show how foods and drugs impacted on the fluids and vessels of the body and adjusted the balance of health.
S. Hitch focuses on taste in Greek literature, noting its frequent omission in earlier discussions. She observes, importantly, (p. 23) that post-epic metaphors of taste include notions of danger and experimentation (cf. Gowers p. 92), developing epic's focus on food distribution and commensality. The heroes tasted the innards of animals to share in the sacrifice with the gods and had good things brought to them by the housekeeper, but the specifics of taste did not concern the poet. M. Telò discusses the gastronomic poem of Matro of Pitane (fourth century bc) where the poet describes consumption of bread and fish. The intertextual sophistication is more focused on consumption of the heroic foods, Nausicaa, Thetis and Ajax in the mouth than in the exploration of taste and flavour: the texture of flesh, fish and human is the bigger interest for the poet.
Gowers explores intersections between physical taste with transferred and synaesthetic meaning, these going some way towards aesthetic taste in the modern sense. Through examples from Dido's court, poisonings at Nero's court and youthful misdemeanours by Augustine and his mother Monica, Gowers shows how taste is used to negotiate barriers between the self, the lips and mouth, and the wider environment. B. Caseau shows the importance of taste in Christianity in late antique and Byzantine thought: the challenge of homogenising Jewish and pagan foods and flavours; integration of pagan warnings against pleasant tastes and vice; and ‘tasting the sweetness of god’ in the Eucharist and at the shrines of saints.
M.J.C. Warren explores the larger boundaries between the worlds of the gods, the living and the dead through the eating of food from another realm. Greek and Latin versions of the Persephone myth are studied, alongside Adam and Eve. The pomegranate seed is called honey-sweet by the author of the Hymn to Demeter, interesting in a complex fruit listed as one of the standard astringent plants by Galen and well discussed by Warren (pp. 108–9). She and Hitch (p. 33) note that, once a food is eaten, the consumer is changed, once again pure Galen, literary and religious concept matching scientific alloiosis. This compelling chapter also considers eating and tasting sociologically, as a more intimate form of commensality and acceptance of power-relationships.
L.M. Banducci reviews the flavours of Republican Rome through the texts of Plautus, Cato and Pliny and the archaeological record. She tries to steer clear of literary ideologies and finds a reasonable match between material finds and texts over time, as Rome became more rich and powerful. I would still like to know what Pliny means (p. 127) by pork providing fifty flavours and other meat one. He is presumably speaking of suitability for sauces rather than the differences between kidneys, livers and udders. Baker offers a much closer match of food and flavour between Galen, Vesuvian archaeology and Apicius (in a medical section). She demonstrates that the archaeological species match Galen's in 69 out of 77 cases, almost all of them eaten beyond the narrow elite, and 39 with flavour characteristics included by Galen (indicating medical properties). This is a precise and compelling matching of archaeological science and ancient nutritional science. M. MacKinnon, on the taste of meat, emphasises the role of urbanisation and the army in the Greco-Roman world to extend meat-eating, especially of pork, and counsels against too-strict divisions into religious and secular categories. Fat remains key in the flavour and desirability of meat, as do modes of cooking and preservation. Livarda brings together the archaeobotanical record for the northern provinces to highlight the varied impact of imported foods and flavours on military, urban and rural sites over time. She suggests a number of cultural prompts and influences that may have brought the plants to their find sites. T. Boulay approaches the tastes of ancient wine with aplomb, as he has done in other contexts, taking account of modern methods of production and tasting, and five Galenic categories, sight, taste, consistency, smell and strength.
The volume excels in its range of approaches and materials for study. There is also an excellent bibliography and index. The most surprising outcome is that, in textual evidence, philosophy – not least Plato – asked bigger questions of taste than did literature, as did medicine, perforce.
