The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week’s lecture into a few minutes and hands the room to the discussion task. The fuller notes that follow are for setting the task up.
This week’s lecture began from a single meal in Hesiod and spent the rest of its length taking that meal apart. Its claim was that food is never only food: the grain, wine, and oil on which Greek life rested were at once calories and the substance of economy, status, religion, and power, and that to understand the Greeks we have to follow the chain from the field and the storeroom out to the festival, the assembly, and the fleet.
We followed that chain backwards as much as forwards, because the Greek food-world was inherited almost whole from somewhere older and further east — and we found, more than once, that the familiar order of things is reversed. Bread and beer turn out to be older than farming; the feast may have helped to call agriculture into being rather than waiting upon it; the move to farming left shorter and harder lives in the bones rather than easier ones; and a whole wild world ran alongside the cultivated triad throughout — the hunted deer, the real lions whose cut-marked bones now turn up across Greek sites, the dog that had joined us before any field was cleared, and the honey gathered from the high rocks.
That is where the discussion begins, reaching forward rather than back, to that wild world running alongside the cultivated triad throughout the lecture: the lions whose cut-marked bones now turn up across some forty Greek sites, and the honey gathered from the high rocks long before anyone kept a hive. The discussion document sets that material beside an argument of its own about climate and the olive, and beside the companion document on Greek geography — asking, in each case, how far the land set the limits of what was possible without ever deciding what people actually did.
Hold one larger question in view throughout, because the discussion closes on it: how does any of this reach Greece at all? Techniques, species, and resources do not cross seven thousand years and two thousand kilometres unchanged, and a lion bone from Tiryns is not a lion bone from Nineveh. What survives the journey, and in what transformed shape? That question carries us out of this lecture and into the next, Mountains and the Sea — by way of the two foods Hesiod’s farmer does not grow: the fish that takes us to the sea, and the honey that takes us to the mountains.
≈ 320 words
Setting up the discussion task
Only part of the task below was signalled in the lecture directly. The notes here draw the line between what the lecture said and what the discussion document adds to extend it.
Task ALions, Olives, and the Limits of the Possible
The lecture’s own Wild World section supplies two of this task’s three strands directly. For most of the last century the lions of Mycenaean art were taken to be borrowed images, copied by a people assumed never to have seen the animal; more than a hundred excavated lion bones from some forty sites — a good many cut-marked — have overturned that view, and the Nemean lion of the Herakles myth now has a footing in the Argolid’s own fauna. The same section of the lecture treats honey as the wild world’s other resource: gathered from rock-clefts long before anyone kept a hive, and eventually managed in Old Kingdom Egypt, in Hittite law, and in the Linear B tablets as me-ri. The discussion document adds a third strand of its own, beyond anything the lecture states directly: an argument about Athenian rainfall and the drought-resistant olive, and Sparta’s decision, during the Peloponnesian War, to destroy the Attic olive groves rather than the grain fields.
Groups are asked to weigh all three together — lion, honey, and olive — as resources the cultivated triad itself could not supply, and to ask whether that makes the triad a self-sufficient system or a partial one propped up by land it could not use. The task’s last question makes the forward link to next week explicit: it asks groups to set this document’s account against the companion Geography document’s treatment of terrain, sea, and fragmentation, and to mark where environment constrains outright and where a community chooses among paths environment left open — Sparta’s choice of target among them. It is the same question on which the next lecture, Mountains and the Sea, opens.
One note for the groups: the Thomas (2014) study of the Aegean lion bones, cited in the document, is not currently accessible through the library; a copy is posted on academia.edu.