Archestratus was a Sicilian Greek of the 4th century BC who ‘circumnavigated the world to satisfy his hunger’ (Athenaeus), or, more accurately, who travelled widely and gathered his knowledge of the middle Mediterranean into a poem, Hedypatheia, thus becoming the world’s first known food writer. For a while his work was well known: in the century after it first appeared Archestratus, unfairly, was a byword among moralists for having encouraged gluttony. The complete poem is now lost, and it would be quite unknown today had not Athenaeus in the Deipnosophists cited it extensively. These surviving extracts are collected and translated by Douglas Olson and Alexander Sens (2000).
