What Did the Romans Eat? Part 2: Plebs’ Food

Summary

Podcast Summary: Instant Classics

Episode: What Did the Romans Eat? Part 2: Plebs’ Food
Host: Vespucci
Guests: Mary Beard (Classicist), Charlotte Higgins (Guardian chief culture writer)
Release Date: March 12, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores what ordinary (non-elite) Romans—referred to as "plebs"—ate, drawing on literary, artistic, and new archaeological evidence. Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins delve into the realities of Roman working-class food, contrasting it with elite banquets from the previous episode. The discussion highlights how food choices reveal moral attitudes, practical limitations, and deep social dynamics, while new scientific techniques provide fresh insights, sometimes directly from ancient Roman cesspits and fast-food counters.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Morality and Ideology of Plebeian Food

• Fantasy vs. Reality of "Simple Eating"

  • Roman literature celebrates both elite extravagance and the virtues of modest, rural eating.
  • Notions of "honest," "clean" food existed (e.g., humble cabbage, simple picnics), but these images often reflected ideology or fantasy as much as fact.
    • Mary Beard (02:06): "It is quite hard to separate real modesty, real kind of plain food eating from the ideology of plain food eating."

• Cato the Elder's On Agriculture (03:32-05:43):

  • Earliest surviving Roman prose, full of simple, cabbage-based recipes, emphasizing health and rustic virtue.
    • Charlotte Higgins (04:35): "[Cabbage is] sort of simple, morally acceptable in some ways and absolutely cure all."
  • Connection to today’s "wellness" and "clean food" trends.

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Actual Working-Class Roman Food: Literary and Archaeological Clues

• The Maritum Poem (06:00-09:23)

  • Traditionally attributed to Virgil (incorrectly), the poem describes a ploughman's simple cheese, garlic, and herb paste—akin to modern Boursin or pesto.
    • Charlotte Higgins (08:28): "[Maritum is] like Boursin... soft cheese with garlic and herbs in it. We ate it and it was delicious."
  • Chefs in modern Rome have revived these recipes, offering "pleb" food to tourists and foodies.

• Distinction Between "Poor" and "Ordinary" Food (09:34-12:59)

  • The desperately poor likely subsisted on scraps and may have gone hungry.
  • Most ordinary Romans, especially in urban settings, could not cook at home due to lack of facilities (especially in high-rise flats).
    • Mary Beard (11:02): "Basically, if you're living at the top of a high rise and you start to have a little makeshift stove, you're going to have a big conflagration sooner rather than later."
  • Contrary to modern norms, the rich ate at home (with slaves cooking), while ordinary Romans largely relied on street food—essentially the origin of "food to go."

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Fast Food in Ancient Rome: Pompeii and Herculaneum

• Takeaway Bars and Street Food (12:59-16:57)

  • Pompeii provides exceptional evidence: over 100 preserved bars with counters, menus, wall paintings of food (sausages, bowls of fruit), and even scenes of bar life.
    • Charlotte Higgins (12:59): "I think of this as a bit like Gregg's somehow... hot food, tasty, cheap, you have it on the run."
  • Scientific advances can now extract food residues from embedded pots, revealing both dry snacks and wet dishes such as snail stew:
    • Mary Beard (21:54): "One recent analysis has shown that one of these pots... was holding a kind of stew... The main ingredient... was snails with a bit of other kind of meat thrown in."

• Consumables Preserved by Vesuvius (18:44-19:28)

  • Charred loaves of bread left in ovens provide tangible, relatable evidence of daily life, reinforced by good-luck phallic decorations above bakery ovens.
    • Mary Beard (19:28): "Particularly nice when the bread oven has got an erect phallus over it to bring the bread good luck."

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New Archaeological Approaches: What the Lavatories Reveal

• Analysis of Cesspits in Herculaneum (24:31-31:09)

  • Modern scientific analysis of cesspit soil (essentially ancient compost) shows what people actually ate—from grain through vegetables, fruit, eggs, meats, and a huge range of local fish and some imported goods (e.g., pepper, maybe dates).
    • Mary Beard (28:42): "[Analysis yields] a healthy Mediterranean diet... if you had a bit of money... what the local area produced."
  • Sea urchin spikes and broken ceramic lamps found in the waste suggest both food remnants (but not, for example, sea urchin spikes actually eaten whole!) and use as a general waste disposal.

• Diet at the Edges of the Empire: Bearsden Fort, Scotland (31:09-34:30)

  • Analysis of toilets there shows a very different, more locally specific diet—less seafood, more grains (spelt, emmer), legumes, linseed, berries and nuts, some imported fig seeds and olive oil.
    • Charlotte Higgins (33:01): "Celery and turnip, which is about as Scottish as you can get... berries, hazelnuts, olive oil as well, and fish sauce coming in."
  • Food was likely prepared individually, not in large communal kitchens—there's evidence soldiers and their de facto wives cooked in their own quarters.

• Market Forces and Foraging (35:07-38:11)

  • Discussion of Roman forts as "food magnets" for local suppliers, with possible trade relationships alongside individual foraging.

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Reflections on New Scientific Knowledge

• Democratizing the Roman Past (39:23-43:07)
  • Scientific analysis of human waste, teeth, and food remains provides a unique window into the lives of the non-elite.
    • Mary Beard (42:14): "In most ancient history, we know so much more about the rich... here... we actually know an awful lot more in this case about what the, not the poorest, but what the ordinary people... what they ate. We know that for sure for a fact because we've got the traces."
  • Even so, mysteries remain about preparation, procurement, and mealtimes—food provides a rare bridge to the everyday experiences of the silent majority of Romans.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "This is the world of sausages, snail soup and an awful lot of cabbage."
  — Mary Beard (00:40)

• "No ultra processed food in Cato's On Agriculture."
  — Mary Beard (05:43)

• "Eating plebs food, you know, the expensive restaurant now serves the Roman plebs food."
  — Mary Beard (09:23)

• "Contrary to what you might think, the poor ate out because they couldn't cook at home."
  — Mary Beard (11:42, paraphrased)

• "Recently, archaeological scientists have been able to actually analyze... what is soaked into the fabric of these unglazed pots... it was holding a kind of stew... the main ingredient... was snails."
  — Mary Beard (21:54)

• "It's a healthy Mediterranean diet [in Herculaneum]... there's vegetables, there's fruit, there's a huge range of fish... eggs, chicken, pork..."
  — Mary Beard (28:42)

• "You could tell the gladiators were fed on porridge... but the standard factoid comes with a health warning!"
  — Mary Beard (41:34)

• "If you're always wanting to reach the ordinary in the ancient world, actually food is quite a good way of doing it."
  — Mary Beard (42:49)

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Useful Timestamps

• [00:40] – Framing the episode: plebs' food vs. elite banquets
• [03:32] – Cato the Elder’s simple cabbage recipes and wellness parallels
• [06:00] – "Virgil’s" ploughman’s pesto sandwich, maritum poem
• [11:02] – Why ordinary Romans bought food on the go; street food culture
• [12:59] – Pompeii’s preserved "takeaway" bars, advertising, and menus
• [18:44] – The thrill of seeing real Roman bread from Pompeii
• [21:54] – New residue analysis: proof of snail stew in bar counters
• [24:31] – Herculaneum cesspit: new science reveals actual diets
• [31:09] – Analysis of latrines at Bearsden Roman Fort, Scotland; local & imported produce
• [39:23] – How archaeological science is revolutionizing our view of ordinary Romans
• [41:34] – Discussion of gladiator diets and scientific speculation
• [42:49] – Food as a bridge to understanding the Roman "ordinary"

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Takeaway Themes

• The real "pleb" diet was healthy, local, and much closer to a modern Mediterranean diet than stereotypical images of Roman orgies would suggest.
• Scientific breakthroughs—especially through the study of ancient toilets and residues—are illuminating aspects of Roman daily life that would have been impossible to know even recently.
• Food history reveals supply chains, foraging, commerce, and social dynamics that connect us directly to ancient people—often more so than elite literature or monumental art.
• Despite the democratizing power of archaeology, much about ancient preparation, taste, and social ritual around food remains tantalizingly out of reach.
• The conversation’s witty tone, rich examples, and memorable stories make the ancient world relatable—especially in seeing the surprising connections between ancient and modern eating habits.

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For further discussion, suggestions or questions, listeners are invited to contact the hosts at instantclassicspodmail.com or via social media @instantclassicspod.

Transcript

[Charlotte Higgins]

Mary, can I offer you a little bit of stuffed udder?

[Mary Beard]

Just a little, with that nice peacock brain you've got there.

[Charlotte Higgins]

What you'll need with that is some delicious rotten fish sauce, Mary, just to slap it on.

[Mary Beard]

Perhaps with some pike liver, eh? That'd be gorgeous.

[Charlotte Higgins]

No, no, no, no. Hang on, hang on, hang on. I think we're in the wrong episode, Mary. This week we are climbing down several rungs of the social ladder. We're bidding farewell to stuff, to udder. We are looking not at the haute cuisine of the elite Romans, of the posh Romans, but we are looking at what ordinary Romans ate.

[Mary Beard]

It is the world of sausages, snail soup and an awful lot of cabbage. This is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the stories that still shape the modern world now. And I'm Mary Beard.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now, this episode, what the Romans 8 Part 2 plebs food.

[Mary Beard]

Morning decisions. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.

[Charlotte Higgins]

I feel a bit more at home here, Mary.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah, this is more, you know, we are getting down to our kind of stuff, aren't we? That said, that said, we ended up the last episode thinking about morality, the kind of the idea of food being absolutely implicated in how we see the world, how we see our moral values, what you should and shouldn't eat, points about privilege, extravagance, deception, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I think that it's. We shouldn't forget that there are actually quite a lot of descriptions in Roman literature. Absolutely. About modest eating and the morality of modest eatings. They might not have the obvious PR value that we now associate with those stories of extravagance, but we looked a bit at Augustus's claim that he ate ordinary food, that he wasn't. He wasn't living a life of luxury. And there are plenty of bits of Roman poetry where we find the quite well off poet saying, oh, I'm never happier than, you know, with a bit of lettuce and a small picnic. Now, there are elements there of fantasy, too. I think that there is a fantasy. Fantasy of the extravagant and there's a fantasy of the modest. And it is quite hard to separate real modesty, real kind of plain food eating from the ideology of plain food eating.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah. And One of the sort of real exemplars of this, I think is actually the earliest piece of Roman prose to survive. So second century BCE is, it's a treatise, it's a book on agriculture, it's called On Agriculture and it tells you how to keep your small holding going. And it's by somebody called Cato the Elder, not to be confused with his, not to be confused with Cato the Younger. He crops up a couple of centuries later. But this book about agriculture has got quite a few recipes in. It tells you how to make bread, for example, but there's a whole section on cabbage and all the amazing things that you can make from cabbage. And these are very simple and humble recipes based on this wonderful Brassica. But I think one of the fascinating things about it for me is that it's quite close to modern wellness. The idea is that it seems like not only is cabbage somehow because it's so humble and it's so, it's so connected to, you know, this Roman ideal of, you know, that we're the stolid farming types, we're not fancy, we have our small holding, we grow our cabbages and we're very healthy. And the cabbage recipe is, you know, you could sort of bathe your baby in a kind of liquor made of cabbage water and that's got marvelous health giving properties. That cabbage is both, it's both sort of simple, morally acceptable in some ways and absolutely cure all. And you know, that it's kind of clean food, you know, this sort of slightly odd contemporary movement around health giving properties of food. There's a slightly clean food movement aspect to it in some ways.

[Mary Beard]

No ultra processed food in Cato's on agriculture.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Absolutely nothing. Nothing pretending to be other stuff. Thank you very. This is like straight, straightforward, straightforward, honest food. Just cabbage cooked 20 ways.

[Mary Beard]

It is, you know, it ought to be better known, these cabbage recipes. But it's the thing that, in some ways the example that surprises me perhaps even more is a poem which was often, almost certainly wrongly attributed to the great Roman poet Virgil. It was supposed to be an early work, a bit of juvenilia of Virgil and it's called the Maritum. What's being constructed in this poem is not elaborate stuff with flamingo's tongues. It's basically a ploughman's lunch. We've got a hundred and something lines where we see the ploughman making the, what we would call the sandwich that he's going to take out and what he's making and can see the recipe in it. This is all versified by this person who probably isn't Virgil. He is making a kind of cheese and garlic pate. I mean, some people think of it as pesto. He's got, you know, bits of coriander seeds and olive oil and stuff, and he's going to go out to do a solid day's work at the Plough. But he's taking with him all this kind of bigged up in this poem. He's taking his pate, his maritum, his pesto for his midday break.

[Charlotte Higgins]

It's lovely. The first time I ever came across this poem, Mary, was a slightly weird thing. And it feels like a bit of a fever dream now. But my partner and I were on the Via Appia Antica, that is the old Roman road that stretches out of Rome, which you can visit and see lots of wonderful, wonderful monuments and tombs and things along the way. So we were doing a sort of tourist trip, nerdy tourist trip along the Via Appia Antica. And I think we'd messed up the buses and we were walking back and it's a long way. We were hot and we found this restaurant which we've never been able to find again, which makes me feel like it was a fever dream. We went to the restaurant and they on the menu was this Virgil's maritum. So we're like, what? So the waiter explained to us that this was from a poem by Virgil. And we thought we knew because my partner's a classics professor, what poem by Virgil? Where is this cheat? You know, this must surely some mistake. Anyway, we looked it up on our phones and realized that there was this obscure poem attributed, traditionally attributed to Virgil that had this, you know, cheesy, garlicky, herby recipe in it. And we ordered it because there it was on the menu and it was complete, I have to say, completely delicious. To me, it's a little bit like Boursin, you know, that, you know, you can get it, you can get it in America, you can get it in the uk. It's a French, you know, cheese, soft cheese with garlic and herbs in it. To me, it's a little bit. It's like Boursin, but we ate it. We ate it and it was delicious.

[Mary Beard]

Eating plebs food, you know, the expensive restaurant now serves the Roman plebs food.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, it wasn't that expensive.

[Mary Beard]

We've got to get one thing out of the way first because we're going to go on to look at sort of ordinary consumption. And I think ordinary is quite an important word here. Because it's very tempting to say we're looking at food for the Roman poor. Now, probably food for the Roman poor is nothing as nice as this. As soon as you get to the real bottom in Roman society, there are people kind of doing what the real poor do now. They're getting things out of bins they're not having, they're not sitting at home kind of pounding up a nice garlic and cheese pesto for their lunch. We're at the level of simple food below the elite, but we're not at the level of people who are probably going hungry most days. Right. So it is nevertheless a completely different kind of diet and consumption from what we've seen in the reality or the fantasy of Roman elite menus and elite cooking. And that's partly inevitably, I think, because the ordinary Romans are eating and cooking within a completely different set of pressures, in a completely different context. I mean, you know, the bottom line is that particularly when they're living above the shop or when they're living in high rises or whatever, they really don't have any cooking facilities at home, or only the most rudimentary. And basically, if you're living at the top of a high rise and you start to kind of have a little makeshift stove, you're going to have a big conflagration sooner rather than later. So they're mostly not cooking at home. And it means that what the ordinary Romans from the middling poor, a bit up from that, is what they're doing is they're getting food out. Right. And I think that's one big difference, at least in terms of our image of eating. I mean, we think that it is the rich who repeatedly go out to dinner and the poor make do at home. In Rome, it was completely the other way around, that if you were rich, you could eat at home and you're not doing the cooking yourself, you could your slave cook doing it for you. The people who are forced out are those who can't cook at home. And so we're into the world of people picking up things at the local takeaway. They're going in, they might decide to take it home, they might have have it to go, or they might go into the bar and eat it there. But they're not going to be lying down in a kind of Roman banqueting fashion. They're going to be sitting at tables and consuming pretty much, you know, quickly, basic stuff on the run.

[Charlotte Higgins]

I think of this as a bit like Gregg's somehow, which is a popular UK bakery chain. You know, it's like hot food, tasty, cheap, you have it on the run. One of the great things about Pompeii, Mary, isn't it, Is that we do actually have. We have these bar. I mean, we have very well preserved takeaway bars and little kind of eating food establishments. Absolutely pretty well preserved. I mean, how far can we tell exactly what they were serving? And they presume they had wall paintings with. With certain kinds of food displayed, or

[Mary Beard]

they certainly go in for a bit of advertising decoration in these bars. It's the one thing that people notice when they walk around Pompeii. There's really. There's, you know, more than a hundred in this small town of these places that they're clearly serving drink and food with a counter along the street, but the inside rooms and where the decoration is preserved. What's interesting is that they do give you a bit of an idea of what sort of thing, at least you would imagine was being eaten and served there. There are some lovely ones where you've got bowls of fruit, but they're also wall paintings of life in the bar. Wall paintings in the bar, of life in the bar. And there are things like kind of sausages hanging up. And it looks as if it's very much telling you the fast food image is being created here. Now, again, I think that we have to be a bit careful because yet again, is the fast food image what the fast food really, really was like if you actually went and bought there. We've got some inscribed or graffitoed menus which, you know, suggest that you might be getting. Well, as well as the wine and drink, you might be getting some sort of dips that the ploughman is having there for lunch. They kind of tapas. But what's interesting is, and this is where we can go a bit beyond what we could do with the rich, because it's interesting that you can actually still find some traces. This is particularly. But not only in Pompeii and Herculaneum, you can actually find traces of the food itself. You know, there's. You can look for flamingos tongues as long as you like, you're not going to find one. But if you go to Pompeii and some other places in the Roman world, you've not just got the paintings, you've not just got the literary descriptions, you have got some of the food itself. Now, very famously, people are always pointing to the bread that was left in the oven when Pompeii was destroyed by Vesuvius. The baker had gone down in the morning, put the bread in the oven but didn't live or ran away before he could take the bread out. And so we have that kind of survival. But what you've also got is you've got some more detailed material, traces of what is being served in these bars and what people, ordinary people, are bringing home to eat. And that's what we'll look at after the break.

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[Mary Beard]

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[Mary Beard]

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[Charlotte Higgins]

We would love you to join our book club which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.

[Mary Beard]

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[Charlotte Higgins]

by the way on that Brad Mary, I do think that is one of the thrills of looking at stuff from Pompeii that when you see the bread, the sort of blackened bread that has actually survived, it is a, I think it's an absolute thrill to see that. Yes, amazingly enough it looks exactly like bread. Just a little bit over, a little bit over baked, a little bit blackened. But, but it, it's one of those moments where you think this is like, this is the real thing. We've come very close to what Bloggs was gonna have for lunch before, you know, all hell broke loose.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah. And it's particularly nice when the bread oven has got an erect phallus over it to bring the bread good luck. Whatever was cooking inside it was a good rise.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Do you think?

[Mary Beard]

I agree with you. But what has happened recently, and this is thanks to a whole load of new archaeological, scientific, archaeological techniques, is that we've been able to get closer to some of the more surprising traces of the food that these people were eating. Now, one of the mysteries until recently about these fast food joints in Pompeii and Herculaneum, apart from the pictures they've been showing, is what were they actually serving? Particularly what were they actually serving from what you commonly find in these bars, which is unglazed ceramic pots set into the counter. And you kind of get very clearly the sense that you must have gone up to the counter, there must have been stuff in these pots, and you would have had your portion to take away or eat in. But the problem has been, what's the stuff? What was the stuff that was in them? And it was often, almost universally actually, and very reasonably said that these are unglazed pots. They couldn't have had liquid in them. They couldn't have had oily things in

[Charlotte Higgins]

them because it would have leaked through if it had been unglazed pottery, and

[Mary Beard]

it would have been unhealthy, and it would have gone rancid. It must have been things like nuts that kind of. It must have been dry. Dry nibbles is what it must have been. Now, I'm sure that some of it was dry nibbles, but recently, archaeological scientists have been able to actually analyze

[Charlotte Higgins]

the

[Mary Beard]

fabric and what is soaked into the fabric of these unglazed pots. And they have found that it isn't always dry food, and it's based on tiny, tiny samples. But one recent analysis has shown that one of these pots in one bar was holding a kind of stew in it. And the main ingredient of the stew was snails with a bit of other kind of meat thrown in. Now, you dread to think about the kind of hygiene arrangements here. You can't get. The pots are set into the counter. You can't get them out to scrub them, put them in the dishwasher. I mean, maybe you can scrub them in situ. I don't know. But there is the sense, now that we know that some of these people were going and getting. Let's Say, their evening meal from a bar, which would presumably have been, if not hot, then warm. Warm snail stew.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Right, yeah. I mean, I could maybe, yes.

[Mary Beard]

It doesn't sound very appetizing to me, but it's. It, you know, it's. It's great to be able. It's a bit like the bread. It's great to be able to say, I know what was served out of that pot. And we're just beginning to do that with these bars in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Amazing. And there's a long way to go on that, I take it, like.

[Mary Beard]

More.

[Charlotte Higgins]

More will undoubtedly come.

[Mary Beard]

Yes, yeah. And it's, you know, it's great, isn't it? It's because it's archaeological. It's archaeological science really on the move and, you know, when people say, oh, we've excavated it, there's nothing more to do. Actually, there's new techniques all the time that are letting us squeeze different sorts of information. And here, particularly about diet, about Roman diet and Roman diet of the ordinary. The ordinary, you had a bit of cash in hand to be able to buy the stew. So not the destitute, but those are probably aren't cooking at home.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And you mentioned earlier, Mary, that talking of new scientific techniques, you did tease us at the very beginning of these two episodes about the Roman labs and what they might, as it were, bring

[Mary Beard]

up again, an amazing set of new scientific and analytical discoveries comes actually from Herculaneum, the neighbouring town of Pompeii. The discovery is underneath, not a very high rise block of flats, but one of the few blocks of flats that there are in these towns around the Bay of Naples, a few stories high, some of them posher than others. We're still on the kind of ordinary spectrum, but from the port, reasonably comfortable, this block, and underneath, there is a surviving cesspit. Now, what that is, is that it is where the stuff that went down the lavatories on the floors above in the different flats all collected. It didn't flow away to any sewer, it just went into the cesspit underneath, underneath the flats. And presumably was pretty stinky for a bit, but it gradually disintegrated. So basically what we've got is the contents, or the contents of the lavatrice going down the chute into the cesspit and remaining there for thousands of years, 2,000 years. It's long been recognized what that is. Now, I have to say, it looks like very, very nice, fine soil. I went to see it and you would not know that it had come out of a lavatory, right. But it is all decomposed into really good garden compost.

[Charlotte Higgins]

I was going to say it must be very fertile, all that Roman poo.

[Mary Beard]

And now with new microscopic techniques, people can look at what the composition of this is. And what they're looking at is actually what passed through the digestive tracts of the people who did their business in the loo above, the many loos above. Now there's a lot of it. There are bags and bags and bags of this stuff. I mean, it must have been collecting, you know, over decades, right? And it was, at least a good sample of it was taken off to Oxford to be analyzed. Right. So actually, this is. Opens up the potential of analyzing what went through these guys, stomachs and intestines, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I have to say it is a little bit more complicated than it might seem because, like now I think people also used their lavatories on the upper floors as waste disposal units. So you also get, you know, bits of broken Roman lamps amongst all the degraded shit. And I don't think we believe that the Romans ate lamps. But the broken lamp had gone down the loo with a lot of other things. When I first saw it, I was amazed at the number of sea urchin spikes that were in this kind of compost stuff. And I first of all thought, wow, that must have been really, really painful. Imagine, you know, excreting the sea urchin spikes. I then realized that probably the sea urchin spikes had been cut off first and had been washed down the loo. It wasn't that they were eaten and then went down the lake.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Let's just take away, takeaway sea urchin prepared at home, maybe fling the spikes down the ledge.

[Mary Beard]

What is extraordinary is not that it's a surprise what you can find when you actually analyze the excreta, it's that it's in some ways exactly what you'd expect if you were living more or less off local produce in the Bay of Naples. It's, you know, and I'm afraid, horribly it, you know, minus all the new imports like tomatoes. It's a healthy Mediterranean diet. There are some spices, there are. There's pepper. It's not all from roundabout, but there's vegetables, there's fruit, there's a huge range of fish, dozens and dozens of different types of fish which presumably have come out of the sea just, you know, just outside Herculaneum. There's eggs, chicken, pork. It's a snapshot of what you could acquire if you Had a bit of money. Not huge, but if you had a bit of money, what you could acquire to eat in or out at Herculaneum, a few imports like the pepper. Dates may be import too, because they're dates, but otherwise it's what the local area produced. You don't get much, you get grain. An awful lot of the standard grains would have come in the form of bread, so you wouldn't find them as grain seeds here. But it is a good varied diet, you know, not eating like trimalchio with all these extremely rich and exotic things, but eating what's just roundabout, honestly.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah. No peacock gizzards.

[Mary Beard]

No peacock. And, you know, sea urchins. I mean, minus the spikes. I've got over my worry about the spikes. You know, it's what comes out of the sea. These are coastal towns and they eat from the sea. And it is literally. I mean, what's exciting about it is it is literally what they excreted.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Well, it's not so different that. There was a lot of analysis done, Mary, on a fort at the opposite, at the extreme edge of the Roman Empire, that is in Scotland. So this is Bears Den, Roman fort, which is a fort on the Antonine Wall. The Antonine Wall was built on the 140s CE. It's a little bit north of Hadrian's Wall. It was built a little bit later than Hadrian's Wall. It runs between the narrowest part of Britain, the Forth and the Clyde, a very narrow sort of neck of Britain in the central belt of Scotland. And it wasn't. It wasn't occupied for that long. But there is this sort of sizable Roman fort at Bear's Den, which is. Which is on the wall. And it's now, these days, a suburb, but quite a nice suburb of Glasgow. And it's very visitable and an interesting place to go. Anyway, they did analysis on the Lewes at Bear's Den. Now, you know, you might expect something very, very different at Bear's Den than you would at Herculaneum. And I think you'd be absolutely right, because there isn't this sort of wonderful abundance of seafood and there's no sea urchins, right. But what they did find was, again, a sort of quite interesting combination of locally available produce and some imports. So there were grains which I think could easily have been used for making bread, I don't know, but there was spelt and Emma grains, which are old, ancient forms of wheat. They found lots of things like barley and lentil and linseed. Things that feel like they, well, must have come from afar, like fig seeds. So dried figs presumably made their way all the way up to the central belt of Scotland from the Mediterranean. But lots of local food like celery and turnip, which is about as Scottish as you can get radishes, mallow, which is a sort of wild flower and plant, actually comes up quite a lot in Apicius, but I think you use it for greens and then berries, the kind of berries you can find in Scotland, delicious berries. Bilberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries. Can still pick all those things right today. And things like hazelnuts, so that would have been locally forageable, and then. But olive oil as well, and fish sauce coming in. But I suppose one of the other interesting things is another sort of world of how people prepared this food. I mean, I don't know if this accords with what, you know about the way these things were organized in military forts. Mary. But the. But there's no sense that there's a kind of big mess kitchen. There are little bits of pottery in the individual barracks rooms that suggested that blokes were sort of, perhaps with their enslaved helpers. I don't know. So they're cooking. They're quote, wives.

[Mary Beard]

I mean, they're de facto wives because we know that they're.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Well, they were doing it in their own quarters under, you know, simple cookery and much less meat than one perhaps might imagine from a load of, you know, macho soldiers on the fringe of empire. Quite, you know, quite a vegetable based. In other words, that's quite. That's always a feature of humble, ordinary food, is there's. There's. There's less meat than there is vegetables. But some of those ingredients I. I've found were rather. I could. I could imagine perfectly well being in the modern bears den. Waitrose online shop.

[Mary Beard]

It is interesting, though, isn't it? Because you start here to think about supply. I mean, when we were talking about the really rich, we were thinking of the possibility of the elite bringing in from Parthia these exotic ingredients and then boasting about it and in a sense, parading the empire on their table is really what they're doing here. You wonder how some of it's organized. I mean, some of it presumably is army organized, that there are not individual bits of importation of olive oil. They've got a boatload come up from the port of London, presumably, and being brought up. But, you know, I wonder about. I mean, I have two pictures with these. All these nice bilberries. And strawberries and blackberries and raspberries, you know, which these toff Roman squatties are consuming

[Charlotte Higgins]

salad.

[Mary Beard]

Now, I wonder, I mean, you talked about foraging and one of my pictures is that, you know, these tough squadies are saying, I'm going out to pick a few strawberries now, mate, bring them back for supper. And so it is they, they are providing themselves with this food on this military base or whether there's actually. The locals have seen a good market here. And what you've got is you've got locals picking as many damn strawberries as they can because they know there's a, you know, they can take them to Bears den fort and get a good price for them because that, you know, they're, they're wanting this food. And I tend to think that it's the latter, that we've got a, that the fort is a magnet for people's foraging activities or also, you know, it's a incentive to plant some raspberry plants in your garden, you know, a couple of miles away from bears den because you know that you can pick them and take them to the fort and get a good price for them. The consequences of needing to eat, of supply, the tentacles go into different parts of the communities. I mean, my colleagues who work on food often say they work on food and food ways because it's in a sense, supply chains. Who's doing it, who's getting the money out of it and what are they wanting to grow, to sell, flog and buy? And I mean, it's great. I mean, I think in some ways what's great about it is that it is so sort of predictable that it's kind of not a surprise.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And I kind of feel like there is so much we don't know about what it would be like to live on this Roman fort in the far that, you know, the extreme, the absolute extreme edge of the Roman Empire. Indeed. There's so much we don't know about life for any Roman living anywhere. And yet when you've got this kind of detailed analysis of the toilet, something as incredibly earthy and bodily and straightforward and low in all senses as the lavs, you suddenly get this sort of absolute closeness. We know what they ate, okay? We don't know. We don't know how they prepare. There are lots of still hundreds of questions like, as you say, how did they procure it? Who cooked it? Where? What time of day did they eat? What did the preparations look like? What were the recipes? Okay, that's tons of stuff we don't know, but we know. But even so, there's this sort of moment of, oh, that. Exactly this.

[Mary Beard]

Yes. And that's archaeological science, which is opening that up in a way that Even, I suppose, 30 years ago wouldn't have been remotely possible. And I mean, the labs is the great. You know, that's the great Aladdin's cave of Roman diet. Now, what, you know, get to the labs and you'll find out what they were eating. But there's also stuff done on human remains and trying to think from all kinds of things like the state of their teeth, what they're eating. I mean, because one of the things that, you know, we always used to be told was that it's only modern people who are addicted to cane sugar who get dental decay. You know, you don't have to have seen many ordinary Roman skeletons to see that whatever they were eating, presumably honey, was doing terrible things to their teeth, too. People are always, and I am more skeptical about this, people are always trying to look if they think they have found, and that's a very big if, if they think they found, say, a gladiator skeleton to try to work out what the gladiator diet has been on the basis of. On the basis of. I don't know what really. But the standard factoid which I'm throwing out without, you know, with a health warning is that gladiators were fed on porridge. You could tell this somehow from the skeletons. But it is, I suppose it's a kind of set of. It's a whole range of knowledge that has changed dramatically in my lifetime of being a classicist and looking at this that we used to speculate. And there are bits of. You know, it's not that there aren't bits of written evidence. You know, we can see some of the supplies going into Vindolanda, for example, from the Vindolanda tablets on Neo Hadrian's Wall. But it's, as you say, it's getting to the absolute nitty gritty of the biology of the person that really has made a difference. And I think what's striking about it, and in some ways, this is a kind of democratic bit of ancient history. I mean, in most ancient history, we know so much more about the rich. You know, we've got their voices,

[Charlotte Higgins]

et

[Mary Beard]

cetera, et cetera, you know, and that we're seeing the ancient world through their point of view. Now, to some extent, we are here, but we're seeing it through this slight moralizing fantasy haze of these extraordinary ingredients. And we actually know an awful lot more in this case about what the, not the poorest, but what the ordinary people, the soldiers, the ordinary people at Herculaneum, what they ate. We know that for sure for a fact because we've got the traces. And that is kind of, you know, if, if you're always wanting to reach the ordinary in the ancient world, you know, actually food is quite a good way of doing it. If you see through, you know, the, the lamprey semen and you get down to the lavs, you, you, you're right there with them.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Brilliant.

[Mary Beard]

Right, off to serve up the whatever we're going to have for our lunch, Charlotte.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Well, actually there's some pretty okay lentil soup recipes in the Picius which I might avail myself of rather than, rather than roast womb. On this occasion I'm going to spare

[Mary Beard]

you the roast womb. Don't worry, don't worry, we'll have the lentil seed.

[Charlotte Higgins]

As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions and so if you have them, please do send them to [e-mail] or on our social media @instantclassicspod.

[Mary Beard]

Bye bye. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

[Charlotte Higgins]

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[Mary Beard]

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[Mary Beard]

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