Quis movit caseum meum?

A Food Studies approach to Classical Literature

 

 

In The Loaded Table (Oxford, 1993), Emily Gowers wrote that, “the significance of food in its literary representations lies both in its simple existence and in a bundle of metaphorical associations, a capacity to evoke a whole world of wider experience.” Building on Gowers’ observation, this paper first briefly surveys the appearances—and some surprising non-appearances—of one foodstuff, cheese, in a wide-ranging group of works, including the Iliad and Odyssey, Euripides’ Cyclops, and Theocritus’ Idylls, the agricultural treatises of Cato and Varro, Cicero’s letters, Horace’s Satires, Tibullus’s Elegies, Martial’s Epigrams, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, and the collection of recipes attributed to Apicius. Then focusing on Varro, Tibullus, and Longus, it examines how their use of cheese evokes Gowers’ “world of wider experience.” The presence of cheese not only stamps particular scenes as belonging to the pastoral genre, it also serves as a boundary-marker for the limits of Roman identity, urbanity, and agriculture; at the same time, this “pastoral coagulate” (Gowers) provides a point of entry into the conceptual worlds of Greek science and medicine. Fifteen years after Gowers published her book, Food Studies continues to provide an intriguing angle of approach to classical literature.