For modern readers Roman prose literature begins, about 175 bc, with the Farming Manual of the statesman Cato, which includes recipes for cakes, for preserves, and for flavoured wines suitable for farmhouse production. Later the personal, sometimes satirical poetry of the Augustan period is full of information on food and dining among the élite. The largest surviving fragment of the Satyricon by Petronius (probably Nero’s courtier, died ad
66) is the famous ‘Dinner of Trimalchio’, a vigorous satire on the luxurious lifestyle of the newly rich. The series of biographies of emperors by the imperial archivist Suetonius (The Twelve Caesars, written about 115) opens a window into palace lifestyles, in which feasts might indeed turn into Roman orgies. Lives of poorer people are depicted in the fictional Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) of Apuleius (born 125), and in some saints’ lives. The encyclopedic work by pliny (died 79 ad), Natural History, devotes books 12–19 to a survey of plants and their products, with close attention to fruits, vegetables, and wines, and is in Latin. Meanwhile medical, scientific, and scholarly texts were usually written in Greek, the second language of the Empire: examples are a dietary manual, On the Properties of Foods, by the famous physician galen (129–99), and the Deipnosophists of athenaeus (c.ad 200), a miscellany of literary research on food, wine, and entertainment. The only recipe book that survives from the ancient world is, however, in Latin. This is apicius, compiled perhaps in the 4th century ad.
