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ATHENAEUS of Naucratis was an ancient Greek rhetorician and grammarian. Yet, in those rare moments when he wasn’t orating, proclaiming or most definitely not splitting his infinitives, he wrote 15 volumes of Deipnosophistae, or ‘dinner-table philosophers’, an epic tale of an epic banquet where conversation covered everything from cooks and recipes through seasonality and sex, to feasts, frivolities, festivities, morality and wine. The books can, as you might imagine, go on somewhat, but these wordy tomes were food writing in its very earliest form. Albeit with a judicious dash of sophistry.
But, when it comes to the art of cooking, the Greeks have been masters for many a millennia. Food plays a central role in Homer’s , with endless ‘hulking sheep’ and ‘fatted goats’ being. ‘A taste as old as cold water.’