What did ancient Greeks eat?

The poet Homer called human beings “bread eaters”. Grain was the most important food. The most common grain was barley, the κριθή, because it grows well in dry, stony land where wheat does badly. Barley is not good for making soft bread, so people mixed barley flour with water or milk and made flat cakes called μᾶζα. Bread made from wheat, the ἄρτος, cost more, and rich families ate it more often.

The second key food was the olive, the ἐλαία. Greeks ate olives and used olive oil for cooking, for salads and even for lamps. The third was wine, the οἶνος. People drank it every day, but almost never pure. They mixed it with water in a big bowl, so that people could drink at a meal and still talk sensibly.

Many historians call these three foods, grain, olive oil and wine, the base of the Greek diet. They still grow all over Greece today.

Breakfast was small. Often it was just a piece of bread dipped in wine, with a few figs or olives. Lunch was a quick meal around midday. The main meal, the δεῖπνον, came in the evening, after dark, when the work of the day was done.

The bread or barley cake was the main part of every meal. Everything eaten with it had a special name: the ὄψον. This could be cheese, the τυρός, made from the milk of goats and sheep. It could be onions, garlic, cabbage or wild greens from the hills. It could be beans, chickpeas or lentils, the φακῆ, cooked slowly into a thick soup.

Lentils were cheap and filling, so they were a typical food of poor families. People in Greece had been eating them for thousands of years: burnt lentils found in the Franchthi Cave, in the Peloponnese, are about 13,000 years old.

Greece has a long coast, so fish, the ἰχθύς, was an important food. In cities by the sea people ate fresh tuna, swordfish, red mullet, octopus and shellfish. Far from the sea, fresh fish was a treat, so people ate small fish such as sardines and anchovies preserved in salt.

Meat was different. Most families did not eat it every day. Fresh meat was eaten mainly at a sacrifice, when an animal was offered to a god at a festival and the meat was then shared among the people. Pork and beef were the most common. In the cities pork was the cheapest meat, and sausages were eaten by rich and poor alike.

For something sweet there was no sugar. Greeks used honey, the μέλι, and ate fresh and dried fruit such as figs and grapes, and nuts. About 2,500 years ago they were already eating pancakes with honey and sesame seeds.

An ancient Greek could not make today’s Greek salad. Tomatoes, potatoes and peppers come from the Americas and reached Europe only after 1492. Lemons, rice and sugar had not yet arrived in Greece either. But olives, cheese, onions and olive oil were all there.

Many food words survived, but some changed. Honey is still μέλι, exactly as in Homer. Other words became new, shorter forms:

• Fish is now ψάρι, from ὀψάριον, “a little ὄψον”, the food eaten with bread.
• Wine is now κρασί, from κρᾶσις, “mixing”, because wine was mixed with water.
• Bread is now ψωμί, from ψωμίον, “a little mouthful”. The old word ἄρτος is still used in church.
• Cheese is now τυρί, a “little” form of τυρός.

So when a Greek child asks for ψάρι today, the word still remembers the ancient meal of bread and something tasty on the side.