A CAMWS teaser: “Tell Me About the Bakeshops”

I have hemmed here before about how I consider this space adjacent to, but not properly part of my academic persona, so while a number of posts butt up against my teaching and research about the ancient world, I don’t often dedicate entire posts to my scholarship.

I want to change that a little bit, so, taking a page from a blogger of ancient history I respect, Bill Caraher, I’ve decided to share the introduction to an upcoming conference presentation. Later this week I will attend the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS) in Lincoln, NE, and presenting on what I hope will become a future research project that combines scholarly interests with my bread-baking hobby. This paper, “Tell Me About the Bake Shops: Toward a Social History of Public Bread Baking in Ancient Greece,” examines the evidence for bakers in the public foodscape of the Greek city.

I. The Pate Fermteé

Bread was the dietary staple in ancient Greece. In turn, this meant that grain was the lifeblood of the ancient city. Its ubiquity manifests in a number of ways. There is mundane evidence for bread’s importance––Clazomenae’s government requisitioned its oil production to import grain in times of sitodeia ([Arist.] Oec. 1348B 17–23), honors for ship captains delivering grain, and Athenian regulations regarding its import and sale, including making it a capital crime to interfere with the trade––and there are outlandish sayings, such as when Herodotus includes a story about how “Periander threw his loaves in a cold oven” (ἐπὶ ψυχρὸν τὸν ἰπνὸν Περίανδρος τοὺς ἄρτους ἐπέβαλε, 5.92) as a euphemism for necrophilia.

It is of little surprise that scholars have written extensively on the mechanisms of the grain trade. And yet, despite the general acknowledgement that bread was important, contemporary scholarship includes an interpretive lacuna between the resilience of the Greek domestic ideal and the public face of bread baking. While there has been brilliant work on public feasting in the Greek city, including a paper at this conference in Williamsburg on the Bomolochos–– a fool who crashes parties for a bit of BBQ––and Flint Dibble’s recent Twitter thread describing Homeric feasts as ancient Food Porn, and unlike studies of bread in the Roman world where institutions like the Cura Annonnae and bake shops at Pompeii and Ostia are accepted features of the public sphere, little of the same can be said for bread in ancient Greece.

In this paper I ask a simple question: in the physical and imaginary foodscapes of the Greek city alongside fresh-pressed oil, crackling fat of cooking meat, and potentially homicidal fishmongers (if Lynceus of Samos an be believed), where do bread and bread baking fit? Far from being just a boring domestic staple, I believe it was a fundamental part of the public foodscape, as well as a point of interaction between citizens and non-citizens.