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Abstract.
Changes in foodways were an object of literary reflection on the Roman past in the early empire. They offered a rich set of ingredients with which to characterize social, economic, and cultural change. Varro is prominent in attesting and shaping this tradition, but it is an older, and more broadly based means of narrating Roman social history. Varro developed this material in his treatise, On the Life of the Roman People, which adapted the Life of Greece of Dicaearchus of Sicilian Messene, written at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. This article argues that Roman ideas of cultural and social history already took an interest in changing foodways at this time. The production, preparation, and consumption of food raised ethical and economic questions common to the milieu of Dicaearchus and to Rome in the age of the first conquest of Italy.
INTRODUCTION
IN THE HISTORY OF DIET AT ROME from the seventh century B.C.E. to the end of the Republic, there were no doubt major changes and discontinuities. The study of foodways, moreover, cannot be separated from the study of production, so that these dietary changes should track a rapidly changing agrosystem. This paper is not, however, primarily about these realities, but about mentalites as they are reflected in themes in Roman literature, and it attempts to show that texts about food are both less and more useful than they can appear to be in the standard modern accounts of Roman diet. Rather than what actually changed in Roman nutritional patterns, I want to trace the self-consciousness of Romans about nutrition and the way that diet, and implicitly agriculture, were made into a way of narrating historical change, especially at Rome. The object of the research was twofold. One target was Roman popular culture-those reactions and values that genuinely united Romans of different statuses-and the light that it might shed on that perennially tricky issue, Roman-ness. The other was the development and uses of a sense of passing historical time in a society where historiography was for long even more rarefied a freak of high literature than it was in Greece.1
Thus, when the antiquarian Verrius Flaccus, in the Augustan period, says to us through Pliny that the Roman people (populux Romanus) had...