ABSTRACT
From Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19) – Food and Wine in Byzantium. Copyright © 2007 by the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd,
In his work on the sociological aspects of food and meals the French scholar Roland Barthes has shown convincingly that food and dining habits are worthy of study.1 According to Barthes, how and what people eat and drink in a society can be understood as a form of communication or, in his words, as ‘a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behaviour’.2 In this paper I will try to follow this perspective in my attempt to concentrate on the ‘how’ of dining practices in the Byzantine world (the ‘what’ is left for others elsewhere, including other chapters in this volume).
