ABSTRACT
Ovid’s description of the personification of Hunger as an emaciated woman finds a parallel in the painting of ‘Famine’ in the Temple of Chalkioikos, a pale and starved woman, with hands tied at her back. The differentiation between famine and shortage is important, but it also is an artificial distinction, and there is no clear dividing line between them. As times were hard or kind, the consumption of inferior foods and the threat of death ascended or descended the social ladder, but there is no clear boundary between famine and normality. Until the 1980s, explanations of famines focused on the production side of the food supply, such as weather-induced harvest failures. A study of the famine striking Greece during World War II notes that people mainly resorted to foodstuffs that were eaten under normal conditions as well, although then more rarely and/or by a smaller – poorer – segment of society.
