200 pp.; 155 x 220 mm; hardback 

ISBN 1903018145 £25

The cookery of Byzantium was a synthesis of the love of spices and exotic flavours so typical of Roman food and the emphasis on seafood and the local produce of the Aegean that emerges from the long tradition of Greek gastronomy. It prefigures modern Turkish and Greek cookery. The Byzantines were probably the first to twin rosemay with lamb; use saffron in the kitchen; make the 'pastirma' of modern Turkey; popularize caviar; and naturalize the orange and the aubergine. 

Andrew Dalby begins with chapters introducing Byzantium and its culture, and continues by discussing 'The Tastes and Smells of the City', then 'The Foods and Markets of Constantinope', before an account of some travellers' tales and an overview of the way in which Byzantium was entrepot of foods and flavours from the then known world. There then follows a translation over 50 pages of Byzantine texts relating to food, in particular in relation to medicine and human health, and the passage of the seasons. Andrew then distils a few recipes from his Byzantine researches, before compiling a very extensive glossary of Byzantine Greek food terms and words, with citations of primary sources.

This is an essential introduction to the subject which, as yet, has been little explored.

Andrew Dalby is a classical scholar, food historian and student of languages. His 'Siren Feasts' was a prize-winning account of ancient Greek food; his 'Dangerous Tastes' (also a prize-winner) was a study of spices and their history. Prospect has published his translation of 'Cato On Farming'. He lives in France. 

We know a lot about ancient Roman food, thanks to the second-century cookbook of Apicius. We have long had a pretty good picture of how the Greeks ate from Athenaeus's fascinating hodgepodge of dinner-table chat, the Deipnosophists. A few years ago Andrew Dalby added much to our knowledge about ancient Greek cuisine in Siren Feasts (Routledge, 1996) and was even able to present persuasive modern renderings of some ancient recipes in The Classical Cookbook (with Sally Grainger, Getty Museum, 1996).

The great gaping hole in the picture has been Byzantine cuisine, and Dalby fills it, about as well as it can be filled, in Flavours of Byzantium. Unfortunately, as he notes, the Byzantines had no Apicius or Athenaeus. We have to glean what we can from market regulations, travellers' writings, historical asides, monastic rules and a few short texts on diet, all of which are by nature something less than recipes.

He does have a chapter on "Recipes and Instructions", in which he manfully gathers everything that might show specific Byzantine foods in their concreteness. These include one recipe from Apicius (lucanica, a sausage that has living descendants), four from a dietary manual that a homesick Byzantine doctor wrote for the Frankish king he served, two for laxative preparations of fenugreek, detailed instructions on making the ancient fish sauce garos, a modern recipe for dried meat that continues Byzantine tradition, some advice on making bread, a supposed ancestor of tarhana (which looks to me more like instructions for removing the husk of emmer wheat by alternately soaking it in water and drying it), five recipes for curing olives and a dozen for spiced wine.

The recipes seem all too simple (except for the wines!). But then there's a detailed description of an extravagant dish called monokythron('one-pot'), and it truly deserves to be called Byzantine - cabbage, five kinds of fish, fourteen eggs, three kinds of cheese, olive oil, pepper, garlic and sweet wine. It comes from the Prodromic Poems, which Dalby declares present a genuine, if highly coloured, picture of Byzantine life.

So it must be said that this is not much of a cookbook. But it is a fascinating read, with its descriptions of the glittering centre of an empire. Along with his portrait of Byzantines feasting on spiced wine and sugary sweets (spoonfuls of jam served to guests with a glass of iced water and/or a cup of coffee, allowed even on the innumerable fast days), Dalby includes many colourful observations. For instance, Constantinople's perfumers and spice merchants were instructed to set up shop where their aromas might waft upwards to the icon of Christ above the Bronze Arcade "and at the same time fill the vestibule of the Royal Palace".

Some anecdotes have clearly been included not because they cast much light on food but because Dalby couldn't resist them. For instance, during the savage winter of 763 the Black Sea froze 30 cubits deep for 100 miles out from the north shore, and icebergs floated down the Bosphorus, one crashing into the city walls and shaking them. There is even a picture.

Byzantine cuisine, with its lavish use of spices and honey, was clearly unlike modern Turkish cuisine, though it contributed to it, most notably in the case of fish. In central Asia, the nomadic Turks had rarely eaten fish - or rarely admitted it if they did. A herdsman's wealth is his flocks, and to be reduced to eating fish showed extreme poverty; balik?i, (fisherman) was a stinging taunt.

But the Byzantines, living on the fish-rich Bosphorus, were proverbial piscivores. In a satirical squib entitled Timarion, a newcomer to Hades is accosted by a resident who wants news of how it goes among the living: "How many mackerel do you get for an obol? Bonitos? Tunnies? Picarels? What's the price of oil? Wheat and all the rest of it? And I forgot the most important thing: how's the whitebait catch?"

And of course this is still true. Turkish is full of Greek-derived names for fishes, and your real Istanbullu is still a fish-eater at heart. Years ago I used to take a young Turkish woman with me when I reviewed restaurants in Los Angeles. Dutifully she would study every menu; with the best will in the world she would weigh the options before her... then, inevitably, she'd order the bouillabaisse. She was a true daughter of Byzantium.

This delightful book must have been inevitable for Andrew Dalby, who had already written books on Greek food and Roman food.[[1]] Flavours of Byzantium offers a novel and humane approach to the Byzantines and their culture, and one that should appeal to Byzantinists as well as general readers.

In Dalby's brief introduction to Constantinople and the empire in Chapter 1, he mentions the arrival of three Illyrian farmers -- Zimarchus, Dityvistus, and Justin -- who had only twice-baked bread to eat on their way to the City. Greeks then and now call this twice-baked bread paximadia. Dalby goes on to say:

The paximadia in Justin I's knapsack were a standby that was well known Empire-wide, to judge by later derivatives of the name: these extend from Venetian pasimata, Croatian peksimet and Romanian pesmet to Turkish beksemad and Arabic bashmet, baqsimat. (p.27)

In another example, Dalby looks at foods with Latin roots. This is of particular interest because a smaller version of boukellaton, now wrist-sized rings of bread, sold all over Greece -- often carried on a stick by the man who sells lottery tickets -- and rodakinais still the way to ask for peaches. There is boukellaton (Latin bucellatum), the ring-shaped dry loaf typical of the rations for which the auxiliary armies depended. . . .There is Phouska (Latin pousca), the watery, vinegary wine that was typical of soldiers' drinking in early Byzantine times. There is konditon (Latin conditum), the famous spiced wine aperitif of late Rome and Constantinople. Then there are rodakina, peaches, whose Greek name seems to describe these fruits as 'rosy' . . . but actully derives from the old Latin variety name duracina, 'clingstone'. (p. 25)

Chapter 2 looks at Constantinople though its smells: the herbs and incense of religious processions, the perfumers' shops and the empress who made perfume, the foreign trade that provided ginger, sugar, sandalwood, and cinnamon. Chapter 3 visits the markets of the city through travellers' reports and Byzantine municipal regulations. Chapter 4 talks about the wines and waters in the city an Anglo-Saxon writer called Wonburga "cities of wine." Chapter 5 looks at reports of visitors and chroniclers to give an impression of food and banquets in the imperial palaces. Chapters 6-7 contain translations of Byzantine writings on food, and Chapter 8 provides 50+ pages of massive research into Byzantine vocabulary (and sources) for food. The book also includes a list of rulers and dates, along with the contemporary sources Dalby has used. This means a certain amount of flipping back and forth to keep dates in mind as he moves from Liutprand to Bertrandon de la Broqui?re to Constantine Porphyrogenitus.

Byzantines were theorists and makers of lists and compilers of authorities; this shows up with remarkable clarity in the quotations and texts Dalby provides, as does their interest in encouraging or inhibiting bodily excretions. [2] In fact, this presentation of food-by-theory offers an unexpected and useful access to the Byzantine mind-set. When Byzantines thought formally about food, their ideas for the most part derived from Galen's second-century On the Properties of Foods and used Galen's theories of the humours and the powers of foods.

The human body has four humours which rule individual constitutions or personalities -- blood (sanguine), phlegm (phlegmatic), yellow bile (choleric), black bile (melancholic) -- which ideally are in balance. Imbalance among the humours causes illness. Restoration of balance requires familiarity with the powers of foods: what humours does a particular food encourage or discourage, and how efficiently. Once the constitution and particular imbalance are identified, then an appropriate regimen of food, spices and drink can be prescribed. Dalby's Chapter 6 presents four major prescriptive texts. In Text 1, an anonymous Greek nutritionist classifies all foods and drink into eight flavours: sweet, pungent, salty, sharp, oily, astringent, tasteless, melting, and uses these to balance off the four elements (hot, cold, dry, moist) with the four humours. Text 2 categorizes goods into types and positions them on hot/cold, dry/wet axes. Text 3 classifies foods according to the way they affect the humours, and Text 4 is a prescriptive dietary calendar.[[3]]

These prescriptions for food for various purposes show a provoking muddle of practicality and what can only be a willful determination to ignore daily evidence. For example, in Text 3, a list of indigestible foods includes beef, venison, snails, hard-boiled or fried eggs, yoghurt, lobsters, rice, lentils, apples, pears, figs, dates, and water. De Alimentis, in fact, gives thirty-one categories of foods, among which are: Foods that produce phlegm (marrow, mushrooms), Foods that produce black bile (meat from oxen, billy-goats, bulls, hares, tuna, cabbage, wheat bran), Foods that produce bile (carobs, artichokes, honey), Foods that are not windy (skimmed honey, barley bread, hemp seed), Foods that are windy (peas, beans, dates, sweet wines, figs, cold milk), Foods that are least nourishing (fish, almonds, peaches, onion, garlic, oysters, various breads and fruits), Foods that hurt the head (mulberries, dates, yellow wine, milk, plums, saffron, onions, leeks, tarragon). The category of Slimming Foods includes -- readers will be glad -- nuts, olives, wine, and cream. (pp. 141-160)

Other theorists produced prescriptions for monthly diet, baths, sex, exercise, soap and lotions. The recommendation of Text 4 for March concludes with: "Six baths in the course of the month: for three of these, on Tuesdays, anoint with oil but no myrrh or aloes; for the other three, wash with water, on Fridays. Light aromatic wines of the color of olive oil. Moderate sex." (p.164) In June (which governs the hot blood), there should be a moderate use of oregano and no love-making, while August (green bile) permits four baths and warns against black olives. December (salty phlegm) prohibits cabbage and recommends eight baths, rinsing with wine and sodium carbonate, and love-making. In February, which is when this review will appear, one should have no beets and no vegetable soups except leek, celery, dill and garlic. Crustacea and fish with mustard are encouraged, as are four baths, extensive use of skin lotion, and love-making.[[4]]

Chapter 7 presents a number of Byzantine recipes and a few modern recipes for foods where the name is found in Byzantine texts. A recipe for loukanika, smoked sausage -- not the flavorless loukanika found in Greece today -- reads as follows:

Crush pepper, cumin, savory, rue, parsley, mixed herbs, bay berry, fish sauce, and mix in well-beaten meat, rubbing it well into the mixture. Then, adding fish sauce, whole peppercorns, plenty of fat, and pine kernels, stuff into an intestine (pulled as thin as possible) and hang in the smoke.[[5]]

If you do not have a recipe for fish sauce, garos, one is provided here. The five recipes for curing olives are essentially identical to various local olive preferences in Greece now.[[6]] A recipe for a one-pot meal -- monokythron -- makes Nestor's wine with onion, cheese and barley seem almost merciful. It calls for 4 cabbages, salted neck of swordfish, salt sturgeon, 18 eggs, Cretan and Vlach cheese, pepper, garlic, mackerels and wine. A passage from the Byzantine medical writer, Oribasius, gives twelve different recipes for spiced wine.

Perhaps most striking is a recipe for souffle/ cooked on the coals, where one might have thought an oven nearly essential (italics again omitted):

Greek has the name afrutum [aphraton] for what is called spumeum in Latin. You must take a lot of white of egg so that your afrutumbecomes foamy. It should be arranged in a mound on a shallow casserole with a previously prepared sauce, based on fish sauce, underneath. Then the casserole is set over the coals and the afrutum cooked in the steam of the sauce. The casserole is then placed in the middle of a serving tray, and a little wine or honey poured over it. It is eaten with a spoon or a small ladle. We often add fine fish or scallops to this dish, because they are very good and also common at home. [7]

Dalby intentionally restricted his material to literary and historical sources, saints lives, and recipe books.[[8]] While some of these sources are immediately familiar --  Book of Ceremonies,  Book of the Eparch, Choniates' Chronicle, Psellos' Chronographia, Eustathius of Thessalonike -- more of his material comes from fairly specialized material that most Byzantinists probably never see. For this reason, it is disappointing that no Greek texts have been provided for any quotations, or for the "Four Texts" in Chapter 4. This is in part addressed by the splendid 53-page list of terms and their sources provided in Chapter 8, but the reader has no chance to evaluate the translation or vocabulary in context. I assume this omission of Greek texts was partly an economic decision by the publisher, and partly because of the hope for an audience somewhat wider than that of Byzantinists. Second, dates for manuscripts mentioned in the text, whether for originals or recensions, are often difficult to determine. Not allsources quoted are listed with the dates of rulers and manuscripts. Another irritation is that Dalby's list uses the English titles for manuscripts where his text usually refers to their Greek or Latin titles. It is clear from cooking ware survivals that types of foods went in and out of fashion, and new foods were introduced, and it would be useful to have some idea of how the manuscripts might relate to the dates produced in archaeology, or to foreign influences in Constantinople. [9] A final quibble is the use of Latin spelling for Greek names: since the topic does concern Byzantium, Greek does not seem too much to expect.

Notes:

1.   Other Dalby titles: The Classical Cookbook, Food in the Ancient World A-Z, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices, Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece, Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World, and a translation of Cato On Farming.

2.   It is perhaps unfair that this brings to mind the remark, "Puritanical peoples are always fascinated by excrement. It is their only outlet," by Imbrie Buffum (http://www.yale.edu/opa/ybc/v26.n6.news.18.html) , former professor of French literature at Yale.

3.   None of these four texts reproduces the content of a single text. Dalby has pieced each together with sections from three main manuscript selections known as De Cibis ca. 670, De Alimentis, and the 2nd century Peri Trophon Dynameos, considering them as representing the collective knowledge of Byzantine dieticians.

4.   For a lotion recipe (p. 162): Mix 3 lb. aloes, 1 lb. myrrh, 2 egg yolks, and apply to the skin before the bath. After washing this off, rub down with wine and egg yolks mixed with hot rose oil.

5.   p. 176. Recipe from Apicius 2.4 (b. 25 BC) but known in Constantinople.

6.   One of the recipes (p. 179) calls for soaking the olives in sea water. Today in the Argolid, they specify "enough salt in the water to float an egg": this is approximately the salinity of Mediterranean sea water.

7.   p. 176. From Anthimus, Letter on Diet 34.

8.   Dalby suggest two further sources of material which became available after he completed this book: the Dumbarton Oaks collection of monastic typica , John Thomas and Angela Constantinides Hero, eds., and Harry Marks' Byzantine Cuisine which includes a hundred recipes adapted for the modern kitchen.

9.   See Theodora S. MacKay, "Pottery of the Frankish Period: 13th and early 14th century," Corinth: The Centenary, 1896-1996, Charles K. Williams II & Nancy Bookidis, eds., (Athens, 2003), esp. 418-420. While the cooking ware described comes from the period of Frankish rule, there is no indication that non-Franks in Greece and Byzantine territories used different forms, and it suggests a productive direction for the study of Byzantine foods in real life. 

I give here two extracts from the book: the first is Andrew Dalby's introductory chapter and the second is the text of one of his translations of original material relating to food. This is a version of a dietary calendar sometimes attributed to Hierophilus, the Sophist. Because of my incompetence on the computer, I have not here transferred the footnotes or italicisation.

Introduction: The sights and smells of Constantinople

Those who had never seen Constantinople before were enthralled, unable to believe that such a great city could exist in the world. They gazed at its high walls, the great towers with which it was fortified all around, its great houses, its tall churches more numerous than anyone would believe who did not see them for himself; they contemplated the length and breadth of the city that is sovereign over all others. Brave as they might be, every man shivered at the sight.

This vision of the great city comes from a man who was intelligent, clear-sighted, and anything but visionary. Geoffroi de Villehardouin was a major figure in the Fourth Crusade, as well as one of its most engaging historians. He was a hero of the first years of the ‘Latin’ Empire of Constantinople, established on the ruins of the Byzantine Empire in 1204. His nephew and namesake was destined to rule as Prince of the Morea (the mountainous peninsula known to classicists as the Peloponnese) and to establish a French dynasty there. If Geoffroi de Villehardouin says that brave crusaders shivered at their first sight of Constantinople, as they sailed along the shore of the Sea of Marmara under its walls, that is what they really did.

Nineteen hundred years earlier, about 660 BC, a Greek colony had been established at this place, which was then known as Byzantion. Even then it already had a legendary history (and a down-to-earth history as well). The Argonauts had passed this way, in one of the best known of Greek mythological tales, on their way to the land of the Golden Fleece; they had navigated the Bosporus and dodged the Symplegades or ‘Clashing Rocks’. The Clashing Rocks had since ceased to clash and had been renamed Kyaneai ‘Blue Rocks’. As for the down-to-earth history, there was a settlement on the site of Byzantion, as archaeology confirms, as early as the twelfth century BC.

When we come to the colonization itself, the well known story is that the first band of Greeks to seek a site in this neighbourhood had recently settled on the opposite side of the Bosporus, named by them Kalkhedon and known now as Kadikšy. It was not a bad place, but when the Delphic Oracle was next asked by the small city of Megara (west of Athens) to advise on a site for a colony, the response was: ‘found your settlement opposite the blind men’. The Megarians obeyed this ordinance and established a colony at Byzantion, a site so much better than that of Kadikšy that the earlier colonists must, indeed, have been blind to have overlooked it. 

So, if we adopt the terminology used by historians of classical Greece, the Megarians ‘founded’ Byzantion. Whether they ‘founded’ it by agreement with its existing inhabitants, or after expelling or enslaving them, no one knows.

Byzantion, in Greek hands, soon outshone its mother city of Megara. It was a site of spectacular beauty, unmatched in its potential for trade. This was where you began the short, though difficult, journey up the narrow Bosporus. Every ship that travelled from the Mediterranean and the Aegean to the Black Sea must sail under the walls of Byzantion. Every cargo from the Black Sea and its shores must pass this way to reach the wider world. Not only that: Byzantion was rich from its own produce too. Once a year, great shoals of tunny (more precisely, bonito) descend the Bosporus en route for the Mediterranean. The economic significance of this to Byzantion is best explained by the Roman geographer Strabo:

The Horn, which is close to the Byzantians’ city wall, is an inlet extending about 60 stadia towards the west. It resembles a stag’s horn, being split into several inlets, branches as it were. Into these the young tunny stray, and are then easily caught because of their number and the force of the following current and the narrowness of the inlets; they are so tightly confined that they are even caught by hand. These creatures originate in the marshes of Maiotis [Azov], and, getting a little bigger, escape through its mouth [the Straits of Kerch] in shoals, and are swept along the Asian coast to Trapezous and Pharnakeia. That is where the tunny fishery begins, though it is not a major activity, because they have not yet reached full size. As they pass Sinope they are more ready for catching and for salting. When they have reached the Kyaneai and entered the strait, a certain white rock on the Kalkhedonian side so frightens them that they cross to the opposite side, and there the current takes them: and the geography at that point is such as to steer the current towards Byzantion and its Horn, and so they are naturally driven there, providing the Byzantians and the Roman people with a considerable income.

Thus Byzantion prospered for a thousand years on its exports of tuna, mackerel and other Black Sea produce, and on its position as a hub of trade and transport. Its capture by Philip of Macedon in 340 BC, its sacking by Septimius Severus in AD 196 after Byzantion had chosen the wrong side in the Roman civil war of that year, were temporary setbacks, soon consigned to memory.

The emperors at Constantinople

Constantine I, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, was as good at choosing sites for cities as the Greek settlers who had preceded him by a thousand years. In AD 330 he selected Byzantion to be his new eastern capital, the second Rome. ‘Re-founded’ and renamed by him Constantinopolis, the venerable city was destined for eleven hundred years of worldwide fame as capital of the later Roman Empire - usually known nowadays as the ‘Byzantine Empire’, after the original name of its capital.

The table on the following pages shows the emperors who succeeded Constantine (omitting some very ephemeral figures) with the dates at which they reigned. It includes the ‘Latin’ emperors who ruled Constantinople between 1204 and 1261. The third column gives an approximate date to some of the important events mentioned in this book and to many of the writings that are translated and quoted here.

Byzantine historians had no consistent equivalent to the traditional Roman numerals that go with the names of monarchs. Throughout this book I have added these Roman numerals to translated extracts, or in the surrounding text, to make it easier to identify individuals in this table.

At first Constantinople was, to put it at the very highest, Rome’s junior equal. The vast Roman Empire had been administratively divided into two in 286, in an arrangement first put into effect by the reforming emperor Diocletian (284-305), and Constantinople was chosen by Constantine to be the capital of the eastern half. The two halves of the Empire had very different fates. So did the two capital cities.

Rome soon gave way to Milan as western capital, and in 476 the Western Empire was finally extinguished. Rome was fated not to regain its status as capital city for 1,400 years, with the reunification of Italy in the nineteenth century, though all through that period the Popes continued to rule their spiritual realm and an extensive secular domain from the Vatican City just across the Tiber.

Meanwhile the eastern emperors maintained themselves in what was for quite long periods a stable monarchy - albeit interrupted by changes of dynasty, sometimes violent, sometimes peaceful. The emergence of one such new dynasty is thus narrated by the historian Procopius:

When Leo I occupied the imperial throne of Byzantium, three young farmers of Illyrian origin, Zimarchus, Dityvistus, and Justin who came from Vederiana É determined to join the army. They covered the whole distance to Byzantion on foot, carrying on their own shoulders cloaks in which on their arrival they had nothing but twice-baked bread that they had packed at home. 

This young farm boy Justin would eventually become the emperor Justin I, father of the lawgiver and conqueror Justinian I, who was hero of Procopius’ eight books of Wars and villain of the same author’s Secret History.

The second sentence of the extract just quoted above can also be found - abridged, unattributed and omitting the names - in two of the manuscript dictionaries that were compiled in Constantinople in later Byzantine times, several centuries after Procopius. They did not need to mention the names: everyone who was likely to use them would know Procopius’ work and would recall this story of Justin’s youth. But what was the ‘twice-baked bread’ that Justin and his two comrades carried in their knapsacks? Procopius, like many Byzantine authors, did his best to write strictly classical Greek. He knew very well that the everyday word he would have liked to use here was simply unacceptable: it was to be found in no classical author. So he used instead a respectable paraphrase, ‘twice-baked bread’. Zonaras, one of those two later lexicographers, kindly gives us a hint as to Procopius’ meaning. ‘Twice-baked bread is what the Romans call paxamas’, writes Zonaras  (‘Romans’ means the people of the Byzantine Empire). And Zonaras is right. At this crucial moment - the long walk of Justin I - the paximadi emerges into the bright light of history; a thick slice of barley bread, baked till bone-dry and almost bone-hard, that still offers the basis of many a simple Greek meal.

We know a good deal about the wars that Byzantine emperors fought. We know too much about the sectarian controversies in which they engaged with greater or less enthusiasm. We know rather little about what these emperors were like, individually, in everyday life. Byzantine history is fairly well covered by a series of narrative histories written by contemporaries, but these histories seldom strike the personal note. There are just a few texts that seem to give us palace life as it really was. Procopius’ fiercely critical, indeed scurrilous, Secret History is one of them. A few centuries later we can turn to the dry and observant court memoirs of the scholar Michael Psellus, entitled Chronographia. This is how Psellus introduces one of the thirteen emperors under whom he lived:

Constantine VIII was very big in stature, over eight feet tall, and had a fairly strong physique. His stomach was strong, too, and his constitution was well able to deal with whatever he ate. He was a highly skilled mixer of sauces, seasoning his dishes with colours and flavours so as to arouse the appetite of all types of eaters. He was ruled by food and sex. His self-indulgence had brought on a disease of the joints. Both feet, in particular, were so bad that he could not walk, and ever since he became emperor no one knew him to choose to go about on foot; firm in his saddle, he would ride everywhere. 

Constantine VIII was, so far as we now know, the only amateur chef in the whole list of Byzantine emperors (later we shall encounter an empress who was an amateur blender of perfumes). Not long afterwards, with the successful revolt in 1081 by the brothers Alexius and Isaac Comnenus, we are reminded that food can serve as a potent metaphor. The source is Alexius’ daughter Anna, who wrote her father’s life. The first secret moves toward revolution, she tells us, were reported in a coded message sent to a trusted sympathizer: ‘We have prepared an excellent dish, well sauced. If you would like to share the festivity, come as soon as you can to join our meal.’

The last of the great insider narratives of palace life is the History of Nicetas Choniates. This powerful work, written after the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204, is at the same time a private history of the doomed court, a public history of the fall of Empire and a lament over what had been lost. It happens to show us, in the portrait of Alexius’s grandson, Manuel I Comnenus, that this populist emperor used the food metaphor in a completely different way. 

On another occasion Manuel had spent the day at the Palace at Blachernae. Returning from there late in the evening he passed the saleswomen who had street food - ‘snacks’, in everyday speech - out on display. He suddenly felt like drinking the hot soup and taking a bite of cabbage. One of his servants, called Anzas, said that they had better wait and control their hunger: there would be plenty of proper food when they got home. Giving him a sharp glance Manuel said rather crossly that he would do exactly what he pleased. He went straight up to the bowl that the market woman was holding, full of the soup that he fancied. He leaned over, drank it down greedily and had several mouthfuls of greens on the side. Then he took out a bronze stater and handed it to one of his people. ‘Change this for me,’ he said. ‘Give the lady her two oboloi, and make sure you give me back the other two!’

In a sense, Manuel I was the very last Byzantine emperor: he was the last who exercised real and durable power over an extensive realm. Until his time, Byzantine history is a history of long and slow shrinkage, balanced to some degree by the extension of Byzantine cultural influence far beyond the borders of the Byzantine state. After Manuel’s death the decline becomes a collapse from which there is no recovery. The rulers that follow him have neither the time nor the skill to govern. The great city at the sight of which Geoffroi de Villehardouin and his fellow-crusaders shiver in 1203 - only twenty-three years after Manuel’s death - will be a great city no longer when they have done their work. The Empire re-established by Michael Palaeologus in 1261 is a small, weak, almost bankrupt realm, an Empire only by courtesy. Soon it is a mere city-state, tributary to the Turkish Empire, to which it will fall in 1453. Whereupon the Turkish court, most recently established at Adrianople, was immediately moved to Constantinople, which now entered upon its new role as capital of the Ottoman Empire.

And so - to look ahead beyond the time-frame of this book - Byzantion and Constantinopolis were reborn under a third name. This name - the one that the great city still bears - betrays its timeless status as metropolis. What is the origin of Istanbul? It is the medieval Greek peasant’s answer to the typical question posed by a stranger anywhere near Constantinople. ‘Where does this road go? Where can I buy food and wine? Where will I find lodging tonight?’ The answer was is tin boli, ‘to the City, at the City’. This was, without rival, ‘the City’.

Peoples, languages and ‘ethnic foods’ of Constantinople

It is easily forgotten to what extent the Byzantine Empire was a multicultural and multilingual state.

In its origin it was the Greek-speaking half of an Empire founded by Latin speakers. Its founding marks the moment when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Constantine’s mother Helena was Christian and he himself was baptized on his deathbed. All his successors were Christian with the single exception of Julian. Constantinople was thus the capital of a great Christian empire with a magnificent inheritance of pagan literature, art and philosophy.

After the division in 286, Latin, though the mother tongue of only a small proportion of the Eastern Empire’s subjects, remained for some hundreds of years an official language of administration in the East. Latin, or rather the Romance speech of the Balkans, was still the language of command in the Byzantine army. So we are not surprised to find names of foods that seem to have Latin roots. There is boukellaton (Latin bucellatum), the ring-shaped dry loaf typical of the rations for which the auxiliary armies depended on their commanders. There is phouska (Latin posca), the watery, vinegary wine that was typical of soldiers’ drinking in early Byzantine times. There is konditon (Latin conditum), the famous spiced wine aperitif of late Rome and Constantinople. Then there are rodakina, peaches, whose Greek name seems to describe these fruits as ‘rosy’ (Greek rodos ‘rose’) but actually derives from the old Latin variety name duracina ‘clingstone’.

All the peoples of the Empire were naturally represented in the population of Constantinople. Some of its inhabitants had come from much further afield, as observed in about 1096 by a participant in the First Crusade: ‘In this city are Greeks, Bulgarians, Alans, Comans, Pigmaticans, Italians, Venetians, Romanians, Dacians, English, Amalfitans, even Turks; many heathen peoples, Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs and people of all nations come together there.’ 

Russians were naturally well-represented, for Constantinople was the source of their Christian culture. So Ignatius of Smolensk, member of a party of Russian pilgrims, was able to find homely food and familiar company at the monastery of St John the Baptist: ‘On the first of July we went to the Monastery of St John Prodromus, which means ‘the Forerunner’, and worshipped. The Russians who live there entertained us splendidly.’  North Europeans, including English, were also at home in the city, some of them asmercenary troops enrolled in the famous Varangian Guard, others as traders. It was these, we must suppose, who introduced the novel delicacy of rengai ‘herrings’ to late medieval Constantinople. Arabs and other Muslims had a settled community in Constantinople and achieved freedom of worship by treaty in the course of the twelfth century. Arab historians tell of the day on which Islamic worship was first practised publicly in the city.

The ship brought a preacher, a pulpit, several muezzin and Koran reciters. Their entrance into Constantinople was a day noteworthy in the history of the religion ... The preacher mounted the pulpit and pronounced the liturgical prayer in honour of the Abbasid Caliphate, in presence of all the faithful and of the resident merchants.

The delicacies that came ‘from the city of Mosul’ were brought by Arab merchants (actually, they came from far to the east of Mosul, but it was at Mosul that they emerged into Byzantine knowledge); they included ‘the best kind of cinnamon’ according to the eleventh-century dietician Simeon Seth. This may be the earliest reference to the cinnamon of Sri Lanka.

How much blending of local traditions went into the Byzantine culinary melting-pot? There is plenty of evidence that the blending took place. We shall encounter some fine flavours inherited from early Greece, notably the fish (kephalos ‘grey mullet’, labrax ‘bass’ and many others) that were just as important to the gourmets of Constantinople as they had been to those of Athens. We shall find tastes introduced long ago from the early Greek colonies: garos, for example, the fermented fish sauce first encountered as a product of the northern Black Sea coast, later to become ubiquitous in the food repertoire of the Romans, by whom it was more often called liquamen. Some favourite foods indicate by their names that the Romans of the early Empire had brought them into fashion: laktenta ‘sucking pigs’; konditon ‘spiced wine’. A new focus on Asia Minor, natural consequence of the establishment of Constantinople as Imperial capital, leads to important gastronomic discoveries, such as the gazelle, the ‘deer commonly called gazelia’ noted by Simeon Seth (On the Properties of Foods p. 33). For the same reason the Black Sea and its great rivers became the sources of new fish specialities with strange northern names, including the sturgeons mourzoulin and berzitikon and their caviar khabiarin.

The end result was a massive amount of cultural exchange. The paximadia in Justin I’s knapsack were a standby that was well known Empire-wide, to judge by later derivatives of the name: these extend from Venetian pasimata, Croatian peksimet and Romanian pesmet to Turkish beksemad and Arabic bashmat, baqsimat. The lucanica sausages that early Roman soldiers learnt to appreciate while on campaign in Lucania (southern Italy), in due course inherited by Byzantium from the Roman army, were transmitted in their turn to Bulgaria (lukanka), Greece and Cyprus (loukanika), Spain (longaniza) and eventually even Brazil (lingui?a).  Several important foods were introduced from the east after Egypt and Syria became Muslim lands, and these new foods naturally have Arabic names: mazizania ‘aubergines’, nerantzia ‘oranges’, spanaki ‘spinach’. As Arab power expanded, much of Byzantium’s eastern trade came under Arab control; hence the Arabic names of foods, especially spices, became well known in later Constantinople, sometimes supplanting the native name, as did nanakhoua for older ammi ‘ajowan’. Eastern spices and aromatics that were wholly unknown in the earlier Mediterranean include iasmion ‘jasmine’ and koubebe ‘cubebs’.

Greeks and others: some travellers to Byzantium

We will never quite know how ancient Greek cuisine tasted to those to whom it was unfamiliar: all we know of these ancestral flavours is what ancient consumers happen to say about them. We have very little idea how the banquets of the Roman Empire tasted to outsiders, since no Indian or Persian adventurer has left us a record of the grandeur and decline of Rome.

Constantinople marks a new stage in our ability to recreate the past. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed, but its culture still thrived, ever more distinct from that of the east. Egypt and the Levant passed from Byzantine into Arab sway. From both of these regions, culturally independent of and sometimes opposed to the Byzantine Empire, traders, ambassadors and warriors crossed the frontier and visited the city. That is why we know how Constantinople seemed from the outside.

We can draw on several such observations. Among the most lively and opinionated are those of Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, who visited Constantinople, acting as ambassador of Berengarius, regent of Lombardy, in 949. Liutprand returned, this time as emissary of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, in 968-9. His two reports are very different in tone. In 949 he was a young man, not at all a practised diplomat, and he had been deliberately starved of funds by his own monarch. It is clear that he was favourably impressed by the real friendship shown to him by the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos.  Here Liutprand describes one of the entertainments at Christmas dinner at the Palace in 949 (we shall hear more of the same dinner later). 

A man came in carrying on his head, without using his hands, a wooden pole twenty-four feet or more long, which, a foot and a half from the top, had a cross piece three feet wide. Then two boys appeared, naked except for loincloths around their middles, who went up the pole, did various tricks on it, and then came down head first, keeping the pole all the time as steady as though it were rooted in the earth. When one had come down, the other remained on the pole and performed by himself: that filled me with even greater astonishment and admiration. While they were both performing, their feat seemed barely possible; for, wonderful as it was, the evenness of their weights kept the pole up which they climbed balanced. But when one remained at the top and kept his balance so accurately that he could both do his tricks and come down again without mishap, I was so bewildered that the Emperor himself noticed my astonishment. He therefore called an interpreter, and asked me which seemed the more amazing, the boy who had moved so carefully that the pole remained firm, or the man who had so deftly balanced it on his head that neither the boys’ weight nor their performance had disturbed it in the least. I replied that I did not know which I thought thaumastoteron, more amazing; and he burst into a loud laugh and said he was in the same case, he did not know either.

On his second embassy, twenty years later, a maturer and more cynical Liutprand was faced with Nicephorus II Phocas, who had no liking for Liutprand or Otto I, no interest in their aims and no time left for diplomacy. Nicephorus may be forgiven if he was feeling insecure: he was actually about to be butchered by his wife’s lover, who then supplanted him to become John I Tzimisces.

This time, for whatever combination of reasons, Liutprand was treated with mistrust. His report is always critical, often caustic, sometimes bitter, whether he is speaking of Constantinople itself or of a far-off province:

On the sixth of December we came to Leucas, where, as by all the other bishops, we were most unkindly received and treated by the bishop, who is a eunuch. In all Greece - I speak the truth and do not lie - I found no hospitable bishops. They are both poor and rich: rich in gold coins wherewith they gamble recklessly; poor in servants and utensils. They sit by themselves at a bare little table, with a paximacium in front of them, and drink their own bath water, or, rather, they sip it from a tiny glass. They do their own buying and selling; they close and open their front doors themselves; they are their own stewards, their own donkey-men, their own capones - I meant to say caupones, ‘innkeepers’, but I have written capones, ‘eunuchs’, which is all too true and against canon law. And the other is against canon law too. True it is of them:

Of old a lettuce ended the repast:

Today it is the first course and the last.

Ambassadors were not supposed to allow themselves to be overawed by Constantinople. Others, generally, found the city impressive, and this is not surprising. With at least half a million inhabitantsit was the biggest city they would ever see. More than that, they found it magical and fearsome. Stephen of Novgorod, one of the numerous Russian pilgrims who passed through Constantinople, may be allowed to speak for many of them: ‘The entrance to Constantinople is as if you were in a vast forest, and you cannot find your way without a good guide. If you try to find your way cheaply or stingily, you will not be able to see or kiss a single saint, except, perhaps, that you can do so if it is that saint’s feast day.’  The young Liutprand on his first visit allowed himself to give Constantinople a couple of generous superlatives - ‘its inhabitants, as they surpass other peoples in wealth, also surpass them in wisdom’ - but another Western visitor, Odo of Deuil, who passed through Constantinople on the Second Crusade in 1147, gives a pejorative twist to the same observation. ‘Constantinople is a city of extremes. She surpasses other cities in wealth, and she surpasses them in vice.’ 

Not only can we see how Constantinople and its food appeared to outsiders. Occasionally we are told how outsiders and their food appeared to those of the City. The adventurers of the Fourth Crusade, though overawed by their first view of Constantinople as Geoffroi de Villehardouin described it, succeeded in seizing the city and its empire in 1204. This is how the Byzantine historian Nicetas Choniates describes them. ‘They revelled and drank strong wine all day long. Some favoured luxury foods; others recreated their own native dishes, such as an ox rib apiece, or slices of salt pork cooked with beans, and sauces made with garlic or with a combination of other bitter flavours.’ To this meticulous author, filled with bitter hatred for the destroyers of the world he had known, we owe a first precious record of that favourite dish of the wild warriors of southern France, cassoulet.

TEXT 4

A Dietary Calendar

The daily regimen involves not only the choice of foods and drinks but also their quantity and the frequency of meals: it involves exercise, sexual activity, baths, massage, the use and selection of soaps and lotions and other medicaments. All of these will vary depending on the climate and the seasons. It was therefore necessary to develop a general monthly regimen which anyone might follow, and that is the purpose of the fourth and last of these dietary handbooks. The individual Byzantine reader, and most particularly the physician of any well-paying Byzantine patient, would naturally regard this as no more than a general guide, to be adjusted to the individual constitution.

Several versions of this ‘Calendar’ exist, some of them attributed to a certain Hierophilus the Sophist. This is a translation of the version published by Delatte in 1939. Other versions were published by Boissonade, in 1827, and by Ideler, in 1841-2 (see bibliography).

 [i] January

January: sweet phlegm. Take three small doses of fine and very aromatic wine, but not too quickly. Take no food for three hours. Food should be roast lamb served hot, or roast sucking pig, and gravies spiced with pepper, spikenard and cinnamon; seasonings including Eastern caraway, pepper and spices; when roasting pork, baste it with honeyed wine; also eat pigs’ trotters and head, jellied, with vinegar. Among birds, chickens, white and brakata pigeons1 (these are the best kinds) roasted, accompanied by spicy gravy and served hot; also quails and wrens: these if from the wild, being tough, should be well boiled and served hot. Among fish, sar [Diplodus Sargus], fried; also daurade, which like the preceding should be flavoured with spiced sauces. Among vegetables, cabbage and turnips, carrots, leeks, wild asparagus, butcher’s broom, bryony shoots, to be dressed with olive oil and fish sauce; and their cooking liquor, to be drunk flavoured with spices. The cabbage is to be cooked with oil and fish sauce. Garlic suits all constitutions this month, cooked in pure olive oil. Those of robust constitutions may also take a ‘dry soup’,1 with pepper, spikenard, cinnamon, cloves, a little of the best storax, and just enough honey. Among garden herbs eat rocket, leek, celery and little radishes, also rue, mint and lovage. For dips use mustard, aloes, cumin and oinogaron. Among pulses, grass peas and Lathyrus Ochrus: they are to be seasoned with oil and ground cumin. Among fruits, raisins, almonds, pistachios and pine kernels; those of robust constitutions may take quince marmalade and a little lemon; pomegranate, pear, dates, cream blended with honey and spikenard and cinnamon, and durum wheat gruel.

Four baths in the course of the month; soap with sodium carbonate diluted in wine. Make a compound skin lotion by mixing 3 lb. weight  aloes, 1 lb. myrrh, 2 egg yolks; combine these and apply to the skin. This is the quantity per person. Apply it before you enter the bath,2 and have three bucketfuls [of water] poured over you, then sweat, then go into the open air and sponge the ointment off thoroughly. After washing the ointment off, rub down with cooling wine and egg yolks mixed with hot rose oil, then make love.

 [ii] February

During this month no beet and no wild vegetables must be eaten at all, and among fish no corkwings, and no vegetable soups must be drunk except leek, celery, dill and garlic. Sauces and spices and old and aromatic wines should be taken in moderation. Meats may be eaten as in the previous list, also so-called crustacea, including oysters, crabs, lobsters, mussels, scallops and the like. Among fish, groupers, wrasses, sparaillons, parrot-wrasses, stromataioi, gobies; flavour with mustard. Dips and fruits as for January. Garden herbs and vegetables as for January; also baths, ointments and love-making as prescribed above.

 [iii] March

Sweet flavours are advisable in food and drink, but in moderation: all excess is inimical to health, but small quantities are safe. Sour and bitter foods should be avoided. All kinds of fish may be eaten except those without scales; bass and grey mullet may be eaten frequently. Among pulses, emmer groats well boiled, rather watery, flavoured with honey, spikenard and cinnamon, eaten with the most aromatic of wine. Soak broad beans and boil them thoroughly with salt and good green olive oil. Also take fenugreek seed, well boiled, cold, seasoned with honey, spikenard and cinnamon; you should wash the fenugreek, rub it in the hands, then boil it until partly boiled down. If it boils down completely it becomes indigestible, constipating and bad for the bowels, but if it is not fully boiled down the same liquor, with the same bitterness, does not block the bowels. Honey will relieve its bitterness. Grass peas and Lathyrus Ochrus, ground; those with robust constitutions may take black-eyed peas, well boiled, with honey vinegar. Among vegetables eat beet, mallow, orach and all kinds of asparagus and mushroom, but not bryony or butcher’s broom shoots, because these are bitter. Among conserves eat green olives in brine [kolymbades] and olives in honey vinegar, but only from time to time. Sour foods should not be eaten, only sweet. Among fruits those already listed, with dates as wanted. Your sweet wine should be konditon including pepper, cinnamon, spikenard and cloves.

Six baths in the course of the month: for three of these, on Tuesdays, anoint with oil but no myrrh or aloes; for the other three, wash with water, on Fridays. Light, aromatic wines of the colour of olive oil. Moderate sex.

 [iv] April

This month one should avoid radishes, mint, capers, pepper, basil, savory and all bitter flavours. Among meats choose those that are rich and well-fleshed: lambs that are grass-fed, not suckling, but that have been suckled by their mothers, and they may be young males or castrated; suckling kids: lean meat well boiled. With this take gravy moderately spiced with spikenard, green coriander and a little pepper, and the fruit of safflower because it relaxes the bowels. Avoid pork. Among birds, eat hens, male chickens, white pigeons, ducks and geese; lean meat well boiled. With this take gravy moderately [spiced]. Serve sweetened, while still hot. Sweet food and sweet drinks are the rule. Among fish, bass, syakia, daurade, pagre in a little well-spiced sauce; wrasse, perch, gurnard, scad, oblade, and to speak simply all tender-fleshed scaly fish are to be eaten fried, with a little spiced sauce, no excessive quantity. Avoid all dried pulses, but fresh pulses may be eaten with the meats listed above. Among vegetables eat orach, dill and coriander, all green, and lettuce, which requires moderate dressing in squill vinegar.1 Also eat boiled garlic cloves with olive oil and salt, and a little leek. Avoid all dried fruits. Drink highly aromatic, anise-flavoured, and white wines.

Inhale the scents of violets, roses, lilies, wild chamomile and all aromatic flowers, and among ‘dry’ scents those of musk and attar of roses. Moderate love-making. Eight baths in the course of the month; soap with Gallic soap. Apply a skin lotion once in the month, with no aloes; it should contain musk, three egg yolks and rose oil.

 [v] May

May governs the black blood. Avoid anything dry, anything that produces bad humours, anything glutinous like extremities, offal and fibrous parts. Eat the meats prescribed for April. Eat salt and dried fish; avoid the young of the sea, and follow the previous month’s rules for food and bathing. Among vegetables eat asparagus shoots, ‘dry soups’, pulse soups, porridges, watered fish sauce, fenugreek. Avoid everything dry, salty and sour. Take moderately sweet food and sweet drinks, and follow the prescriptions for April.

 [vi] June

June governs the hot blood. [On rising] swallow three small doses of cold water, slowly, and then fast until the third hour. Choose all relatively cold foods, in moderation, and avoid the more bitter and dry flavours such as pepper, cloves, cinnamon and spicy products. Among garden herbs garlic, onion, leeks, radish, rocket, cress, mustard and chopped oregano, mint.1  Savory and butcher’s broom to be avoided. Among meats, rich lamb or kid: prefer the meat of male animals, and do not take any fat. They should be pastured or milk-fed lambs: no spicing is required at all except coriander, spikenard and anise. Take oregano moderately. Avoid drinking any kind of soup. Among birds, eat hens, chickens, young brakata pigeons, roasted and served hot. Take aromatic and anise-flavoured kondita and light wines with hot water, not old or deeply-coloured wines. Among fish, eat all the rich-fleshed ones including wrasse, perch, gurnard, sparaillon, daurade, grouper, gobies and all soft-fleshed fish. Avoid bass, grey mullet, corkwing, red mullet, rascasse, pagre, lobster, crab and all hard-shelled and coarse-fleshed seafood. Dips should be based on honey vinegar. Fish soups should be spiced with spikenard, anise and coriander; fried fish only moderately [spiced]. Lettuce, endive, white celery, dressed with squill vinegar, to be taken moderately: copious amounts of lettuce dim the eyesight. Among fruits eat ‘white’ cherries and cucumbers, moderately. Anything not listed should be avoided this month.

Eight baths in the course of the month: no skin lotion at all this month. Ointment and soap, of the same ingredients, until the 21st of the month. No love-making.

 [vii] July

July governs the yellow bile. This month one should avoid sexual activity, excessive food of all kinds, stress and excessive drinking.1 As prescribed for June, eat, in moderation, rich kid meat from castrated animals, hare, gazelle, deer, turtle doves and wood pigeons; always eat these with some vinegar. Garden herbs as for June. Among fish eat the rich-fleshed kinds such as corkwing, wrasse and all rich-fleshed and moist fish. [Conserves] in honey vinegar and in fish sauce and vinegar. Among fruits choose the moister ones such as melons, green figs eaten with salt, any grapes except the black ones, pear, apple, plum, peach and all that are moist to eat; avoid other fruits. Light wines: eat sparingly but take plenty of wine, also rose wine. Do not take any vegetable soups except carrot, flavoured with honey and spikenard.

Eight baths in the course of the month; wash briskly, using a lotion incorporating Cimolian fullers’ earth. Do not use purges.

 [viii] August

August governs the green bile. During this month avoid glutinous vegetables with thick juices, such as mallow and all wild greens: eat beet, blite and gourd. Among meats take lamb and castrated kid, with hare and gazelle till the 15th of the month; lean meat, served hot with honey vinegar. All hens, chickens and pigeons may be eaten without danger. Among [fresh] fish, flatfish and rich-fleshed kinds should be taken, occasionally with a mustard dip. [Salt and pickled fish, and also dried fruits, should be avoided. Take fresh fruit, including figs, grapes, pears, yellow plums, ripe peaches and the like. Among vegetables, all hot and dry types should be avoided,]1 such as rue, savory, garlic, leeks, cress, radish and mustard.

Four baths in the course of the month.

Among conserves use capers, green olives in brine [kolymbades], olives in honey vinegar, almonds. Black olives must be avoided. Light and aromatic wines and rose wine.

 [ix] September

September governs the black bile. All kinds of bitter foods should be eaten, in particular boiled leeks, fresh leeks, leek soup, boiled garlic, raw garlic and garlic in a spicy sauce. Among meat, lamb; [among] birds, pigeons and geese and quails (chicks and hens), ducks and wood pigeons and turtle doves and partridges; beef, along with deer, gazelle, fallow deer, hare and wild boar should be avoided. Among fish, grey mullet, corkwing and all scaleless fish may be eaten; only salt fish is to be avoided. Among pulses broad beans, lentils and grass peas are to be avoided; others may be eaten. All kinds of asparagus and c?pes de Bordeaux2  may be eaten. Among fruits, white grapes, wild pears as they ripen, sweet apples, green figs, peaches of both kinds (downy peaches and nectarines), pomegranates, dates, quinces may all be eaten. Among dry fruits, pistachioes, walnuts, almonds and pine kernels. Drink white and olive-oil-coloured wines and rose and wormwood wines.

Eight baths, using lotion. Make love.

 [x] October

October governs light [phlegm]. All kinds of bitter foods should be eaten, particularly leeks and spicy leek soups. Avoid all fish, glutinous vegetables, and all salt meat.1

 [xi] November

November governs the watery phlegm. This month there must be no baths or anointing: if necessary, just two baths. Among meats, no deer or goat or wild boar or wild goat. All other meats of animals and birds may be eaten, lean, served hot, boiled and spiced; including sucklings. Among fish eat any except the more watery ones, corkwing and gobies, but do not eat scaleless fish. In using spices prefer the bitter tastes. Leek and mallow are good to eat, and all dry foods. Old, light, aromatic wines. Take fenugreek soup occasionally. Make love.

 [xii] December

December governs the salty phlegm. During this month do not eat cabbage or serizon 1 or skimbron.2 Meats just as for November, similarly with fish, vegetables, pulses, wine and leek soup. Take fenugreek soup in moderate amount, young green olives in brine [kolymbades], olives in honey vinegar.

Eight baths, using an ointment containing aloes and myrrh. Wash off with wine and sodium carbonate. Make love.