The Ancient Greek Meals

The commensality in ancient Greece is one of the most significant research fields in socialand cultural history. The thesis attempts to study commensality of ancient Greece, throughstudying and analyzing the food structure and food system in ancient Greece, and intends toexplore the correlation between commensality and ancient Greek city-states so as to reveal thestatus and influence of the food culture. The outline of this paper is organized as follows:The first chapter demonstrates food species and food structure in ancient Greece. From theangle of food and beverage, this paper describes food type and cooking methods of ancient Greeksin order to illustrate the dietary differences and dietary taboos, which reflect culinary culture ofancient Greeks.The second chapter mainly focuses on the symposium for pleasure. It’s divided into two parts:dinner and symposium.The paper demonstrates tableware, dining gesture, drinking rules, andentertainment of symposium, proposes symposium is a expression of commensality, it has closereation with polis.The third chapter analyzes the relationship between commensality and city-states. The paperis not only concern military common meals——Sparta syssition, but public meal granted as anhonour by the polis——Athens public meals, and explore the relationship between food andcity-states, so as to reveal the influence of commensality on the city-state politics.The last part explains the status and effect of food in city-states society. The thesis points outthat the commensality has important value and influence on individual citizen, social groups andcity-state and has a close tie with kinship, class relations, religious, citizenship, etc. Commensalityin ancient Greece is a mirror and reflection of the society and provides a very new angle for us tounderstand Greek civilization.