ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a detailed chronology of fish sauces in ancient society from a literary and archaeological perspective. It takes the reader through 1,000 years of social history in terms of one basic commodity and cites all the relevant evidence for fish sauce and salted fish production and consumption derived from 5th century drama in Athens, from the Hellenistic cuisine that arrived in Rome in the 2nd century BC through to the excesses to be found in Julio-Claudian Rome and on into the much more restrained years of the Roman empire in the 5th century AD. The chronology is divided into short periods in which the literary and then archaeological evidence is provided side by side. Many long-held assumptions about the nature of the various kinds of sauce and when and where they were first developed are exposed as potentially flawed.
