Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 141
ing, happy to see them like horses prancing and neighing before competitions.
For this reason men grew their hair long from adolescence onwards. Especially in
times of danger they took care that it appeared glossy and well-combed, remembering
a certain saying of Lykourgos concerning hair, that it made the handsome
better-looking and the ugly more frightening. (Life of Lykourgos 22.1)
It was Alexander the Great who first made a clean-shaven chin
fashionable and chic. Beardlessness was adopted by the Hellenistic
kings who succeeded him, and no doubt by many ordinary people
as well. Suddenly anyone with a razor could model himself upon
the most powerful man in the world, though older Greek men probably
continued to wear beards.
FOOD AND DRINK
The Greeks did not just eat to live; on the contrary, and from earliest
times, dining had enormous social importance. In The Iliad Book
18, as long as Achilles grieves for his dead comrade Patroklos, he
refuses all offers of food and drink. The hero’s eventual acceptance
of nourishment signals the abatement of that grief. Each day ends
with a description of the warriors dining. Dining fills a bodily need
and provides a necessary interruption to war. In historical times,
the conditions of soldiers were less agreeable. On short campaigns,
Athenian hoplites were required to bring their own provisions with
them, whereas rowers were fed on a sparse diet of barley meal,
onions, and cheese. At home, the whole family probably dined
together. The most lavish dining parties were the symposia, which
are discussed later in this chapter.
The basic diet was both frugal and, by our standards, monotonous.
The Athenians ate two main meals a day—a light lunch,
known as ariston, followed by dinner, known as deipnon, which
was their main meal. The poor subsisted mainly on bread, soup,
porridge, salt fish, eggs, and green vegetables. Well-to-do Greeks
ate much more refined meals, though they were never as extravagant
or as indulgent as the Romans. A sizeable percentage of the
population would have experienced food shortage during their
lifetime, whether as a result of war or crop failure. In Athens, corn
buyers known as sitônai were appointed in times of crisis with the
responsibility of purchasing and distributing corn, either free or
heavily subsidized. Even so, catastrophic failure in cereal production
over extensive areas of the eastern Mediterranean was exceptional,
and we know of only once instance—in 338 b.c.e. —before
the Common Era. The greatest threat to a city’s food supply came