The Golden Age was the great age of theater in Greece, the comedies of Aristophanes and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that are still performed today. The Golden Age was also the beginning of a wealthy class and a split in the culture between rich and poor, which was reflected in Greek cuisine. The poor continued to subsist on barley heated up to remove the chaff and ground into cakes called maza, wheat pastes or unleavened bread, some sheep or goat cheese, and olive oil.19 The wealthy had more elaborate meals, with more variety in diet.

They consumed legumes like chickpeas, lentils, and vetch, and seeds from flax, sesame, and poppies. They also ate the meat of domesticated animals, including dogs, after observing sacrificial rituals. The forests provided large and small game: boar, deer, hare, and fox. The vegetables commonly eaten were turnips, leeks, watercress, onions, garlic, and purslane.20 The new profession of bee-keeping made honey more available.21 The rise in urbanization, wealth, and trade produced a need for more than the free guest-host hospitality of earlier times. City-run inns provided professional hospitality for traveling merchants and businessmen throughout the Greek world, often in waterfront areas.22 All of these people needed food; cooking became a profession in Greece. In addition to being able to afford chefs, the wealthy could afford to buy imported wines. They also drank much more wine than the poor. Cuisine was not as elaborate as it later became in Rome, but some of the chefs became known.

One, Archestratus, from Sicily-either Syracuse or Gela-wrote much about food but it wasn’t a cookbook. He wrote food poetry, parodies that made fun of the epic poems like The Iliad or The Odyssey, that were recited-sung to a lyre, a kind of harp-as entertainment at a symposium. Guests expecting a song about heroic deeds must have been surprised when instead they got verses about fish. Only fragments survive, partly because Greek philosophers like Plato didn’t think cooking was an art, or food writing was worth preserving in libraries.

Greece’s Golden Age ended when it went to war with Sparta. Starting in 431 B.C., Athens and Sparta waged a twenty-seven year war for control of the Greek peninsula. Much of Sparta’s strategy was to cut Athens off from its food supply. Knowing this, Athens tried to invade Sicily in 415 B.C. to turn it into a grain-producing colony. Two disastrous years later, the Sicilians emerged victorious after destroying Athens’s navy and onethird of its total military force.23 The war finally ended in 404 B.C. when Sparta blocked Athens’s sea route to its grain supply. Without food, Athens was forced to surrender. The Golden Age of Greek civilization was over.