ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the themes of hospitality, conviviality, and the impact of unsociability which recur as tropes throughout key ancient texts, from Greek Homer's Iliad and Odyssey through to Roman Virgil's Aeneid, and on to Petronius's Satyricon, a range of over nine centuries. The selection for Greek and Roman literature to be discussed is arranged chronologically in order of each author's life or works, which also connect thematically with the main concerns of food as fable, ritual, feast, and fast in the Archaic and Classical periods. In the later periods, the Classical and Hellenistic, food imagery occurs in the conventions of love poetry, and this was taken up with alacrity by the Renaissance poets and other writers, almost a millennium later. The Hellenistic Period falls between the empires of Alexander the Great and Augustus, the first emperor of Rome.
