In classical times a person’s eating habits were considered an insight into their character, writes Daisy Dunn

“To know the measure of a man, look at his dinner plate” ought to have been a popular ancient maxim. The Greeks and Romans made a habit of judging people by what, how and even why they ate. Zealous carnivores were considered bellicose. Vegetarians were ascetic and repressed. Small eaters were deemed trustworthy rulers.

Today we’re hardly less guilty of drawing conclusions about new acquaintances by what they choose from the dinner menu. Steak-and-kidney pudding: clubbable man with good memories of boarding school. Cauliflower “burger”: zen yogi. Potted shrimps: secret drinker.

Stereotypes often proved to be well founded in antiquity. Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, ate modestly and blandly – fish, fruit, bread, cheese – and went down in history as one of the better rulers. His great-grandson Caligula drank pearls dissolved in vinegar and served bread baked in gold, and earned a reputation for ruthless despotism and cupidity. “A man should be frugal or be Caesar,” the callous emperor allegedly declared, “Caesar” referring to his family name. Power and wealth were naturally expected to buy a man an extravagant and envy-inducing diet. But the prudent realised that self-denial and frugality were key to earning the respect of not only the common people, but also the well-born Romans who would be writing the emperors’ biographies.

From at least the time of Homer, the way someone shared their food and drink with others was thought to be the first sign of the sort of person they were. In the Odyssey, the Cyclops Polyphemus was notorious for overturning the Greek rituals of xenia, or hospitality, in which hosts were expected to offer strangers sustenance before even beginning to question them as to who they were or what they were seeking. A formulaic passage in the epic poem detailed the correct protocol. A guest was to be provided with a basin and jug of water to wash their hands. A table was laid, and bread and meat placed on it. Everyone would eat and drink. Only then would the conversation and questions ensue.

Polyphemus’s apparent ignorance of these rules of etiquette (when Odysseus and his men arrive at his cave, instead of making dinner for them, the Cyclops makes several of them his dinner) revealed him as an outsider, a heathen, a monster. The Greeks were taken by surprise: before coming face to face with Polyphemus himself, they had happened upon the little baskets of fresh cheeses he had pressed from the milk of his flock. Thus they might reasonably have supposed they were in the home of a civilised being. Surely anyone who took such care of his lambs and kids and produced such labour-intensive food was capable of kindness to strangers.

Odysseus’s mistake was not simply to assume the best, but to join his men in gobbling up the Cyclops’s cheese before they’d even been invited in. Polyphemus may have trampled on the laws of hospitality well before he munched the first of Odysseus’s companions, but the Greeks erred too in helping themselves to what was not theirs. Those of them who survived Polyphemus’s unforgiving jaws were slow to learn their lesson. Later in their journey they ate something that was strictly forbidden to them: the Cattle of the Sun. As a result all perished, leaving Odysseus to complete his long nostos, his homecoming, to Ithaca alone.

Hundreds of years later, in Rome, the Cyclops became the paradigmatic carnivore. Ovid, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, likened humans who ate meat to that fearsome one-eyed brute. How disgusting, he wrote, that men should pile another creature’s innards into their own and chomp on bits of gristle when they could just as well satisfy their needs with herbs and honey! Ovid’s issue was with the vegetarian followers of Pythagoras, allegedly the first man in Greece to condemn the consumption of flesh as a habit for savages and sinners. Poor sacrificial animals, the poet continued mockingly, innocent beasts, forced to hear prayers they cannot understand, and to spill their blood over religious altars!

Meat was man’s treat on religious days. After the sacrifice was made and the smoke sent up to tantalise the nostrils of the Olympians above, the mortals made off with their share. Barbecued meat was considered the food of gods and heroes. The warriors of Homer’s Iliad feasted on comforting portions of goat, pork and mutton roasted on spits, and had enough strength to heave large boulders onto their shoulders and defeat their enormous enemies. Meat-eaters were strong, mighty, godlike. It was little wonder that the Spartans were raised on “black soup” – a kind of liquid black pudding made with pigs’ blood.

Wine was naturally the drink of celebration as well as of daily life. Teetotallers were odd. However, if you drank your wine undiluted you were viewed as a barbarian. Gauls typically fell into this category. The civilised watered their drink down and served it in beautifully painted terracotta cups with two handles. Swirl the mixed wine around the cup and a picture might appear at the vessel’s base. Hail Dionysus, god of wine, to drink you on your way. Surviving kylix cups, kraters and amphorae give a flavour of the bawdy humour that characterised Greek drinking parties or symposia. It’s not rare to encounter ones showing intoxicated satyrs balancing wine cups on erect penises.

Wine was of course no less popular in Rome. “Nunc est bibendum!” proclaimed that great lover of the grape Horace in his Odes, echoing the words of a Greek lyric poet named Alcaeus seven centuries earlier. It was almost always a time for drinking. While a taste for wine rarely reflected badly upon a man, some writers and philosophers expressed concern about rising levels of alcoholism, and the damage it could cause. Seneca the Younger wrote most censoriously of the ill effects that heavy drinking could have upon men of responsibility. Mark Antony came in for particular chiding. It is unlikely that the Romans of Seneca’s time were drinking any more heavily than the Greeks before them, or even the Macedonians – Alexander the Great died after a bout of heavy drinking – but intoxication certainly had the potential to impede Roman decorum.

It would be fair to say that in the ancient world the quantity you ate had a greater bearing on how you were perceived than the amount you drank. A hearty appetite could make or break a man depending on the company he kept. Pot-bellied men were frequently teased in ancient comedies, as were greedy women, but the actual exercise of eating was more often than not presented in a positive and celebratory light. The general message was to enjoy food and drink while you still had the teeth and tongue and stomach to do so. Dining room mosaics bore messages reminding diners that in death, reduced to mere bones, they would be deprived of all physical pleasures.

Nonetheless, taking this idea too far could lead to ridicule. This was especially true if a Roman had only recently come into wealth and wanted to prove his place in his new social surroundings through the food and alcohol he served. The most celebrated dinner party of the ancient world was that of Trimalchio, a fictional former slave who’d made a mint after earning his freedom and set out to impress his fellow citizens with a highly inventive spread. Written by Petronius, formerly “arbiter of excellence” to the Emperor Nero, Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio’s Dinner) was one of the funniest stories to come out of Rome, revelling as it did in the absurdity of food as a marker of social class. While the born-rich of Rome habitually impressed their guests with peacocks, flamingos and pork-stuffed dormice, the proudly nouveau Trimalchio went several stages further, presenting his awe-inspired guests with extravagant courses that defied belief. There were cakes that exploded with expensive saffron, false eggs with shells formed of flour, and dishes arranged to resemble the signs of the Zodiac. Only a very gauche man could think up such unusual dishes.

It’s possible that these or similar fancies caught on as more and more freedmen (former slaves) found their fortune in the first century AD. The great moralists Pliny the Elder and his nephew and adopted son Pliny the Younger were by this time despairing of the immoderate appetites of their contemporaries. The younger Pliny, a senator and lawyer, laid on lettuces, beetroot and snails for his dinner guests, and rebuked a rude friend who favoured more decadent delicacies such as sow’s womb, oysters and sea urchin; while the elder, a naturalist and admiral, held the popularity of seafood accountable for the decline of morals in Roman society.

By the High Empire there was often a feeling that one ought to eat within one’s means and focus one’s energies on activities known to improve the mind and morals as well as the lives of other people. It was in this period that Tacitus and Suetonius began to write their accounts of the Roman emperors. Reflecting on their leaders’ eating habits as clues to their characters, they found a strong correlation between gluttony and misrule. This correlation perhaps reached a peak with the Syria-born emperor Elagabalus, who was described by later historians as dishing up plates of amber with beans and fish dyed blue to match the colour of the sea. Any banqueters who were too full to move after dining at his table allegedly had mountains of natural confetti poured over them from the ceiling.

If there’s one thing we can learn from these excellent ancient eaters it’s that food and drink are best taken in the company of good friends and family and in beautiful and comfortable settings. They are to be savoured and shared at leisure. I have little doubt that this idea is firmly ingrained in us already. The past year has been a lesson in just how fervently we yearn to come together in order to satisfy our stomachs. With a virus raging, sharing a platter of cheese or meat, or a bowl of olives in ancient fashion, is no longer advisable. Gone for now, too, are the wedding buffet, circulating canapés and the indoor dinner party.

It’s easy to think of the ancient Pompeians expressing their sympathies with us as we endeavour to prepare our food in individual portions. Even their bread was baked in round loaves scored into segments so as to tear ’n’ share. In their town it was mainly the rich who ate at home, while the poorer frequented the communal bars, but both groups ate in the company of others. To eat alone was unusual. We can only imagine what they would have thought of us for eating in private, al desko, or in front of the TV. A deadly plague would perhaps be the only excuse they would allow us for committing such unsociable alimentary sins.

This article appears in Idler #77.

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