"Apicius, the most gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts, established the view that the flamingo's tongue has a specially fine flavor." Pliny, Natural History (X.133)
The oldest collection of recipes to survive from antiquity, De Re Coquinaria ("The Art of Cooking") is attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius, the famed epicure who flourished during the reign of Tiberius early in the first century AD. (Renaissance humanists mistakenly ascribed the book to a "Apicius Caelius" from an attempt to reconstruct the letters API and CAE that appear on the damaged title page of one of two ninth-century manuscripts that preserve the document.) The recipes themselves were not compiled until late in the fourth or early in the fifth century and derive from a variety of sources, although about three-fifths are Apicius' own, some of which are quite elaborate. Apicius was said to have discovered how to treat the liver of sows, just as those of geese, stuffing them with dried figs and, then just before the animal was killed, giving it honeyed wine (mulsum) (Pliny, VIII.209, cf. recipe 259).
The ten books are arranged, much like a modern cookbook, by the ingredient to be prepared and include recipes for meats, vegetables, legumes, fowl, meat, seafood, and fish. Almost five hundred are given, presumably to be used by an experienced cook, as there is little indication of the quantity of ingredients, their proportions, or how they should be used. Over four hundred of these recipes include a sauce, invariably made with fermented fish sauce (garum). The preparation of most sauces began with pulverized spices and herbs, usually pepper, which often was combined with cumin, although it sometimes is difficult to determine whether spices or herbs were to be fresh or dried, leaf or seed. After being ground in a mortar, fruits (plums, dates, raisins) and nuts (almonds, pine nuts, walnuts) were added (and often pounded as well) and then liquids, including garum, water, stock, milk, honey, oil, vinegar, and wine, both plain and reduced to increase its sweetness. Thickening usually was by wheat starch but also included the yolks and whites of eggs, pounded dates, and steeped rice or the water in which it had been boiled. Fish sauces tended to be particularly elaborate; boiled murena (likely eel), for example, called for pepper, lovage, dill, celery seed, coriander, dried mint, and rue, as well as pine nuts, honey, vinegar, wine, and oil (451).
Athenaeus (Deipnosophists, I.7) relates that Apicius, "an exceedingly rich voluptuary," once sailed all the way to Libya in search of particularly large prawns. Not finding any to his satisfaction among those that were brought out to his ship, he then returned to Campania without even going ashore. Seneca, too, mentions Apicius, who competed for a huge mullet put up for sale by Tiberius that sold for five thousand sesterces (Moral Epistles, XCV.42). Digesting "the blessings of land and sea, and reviewing the creations of every nation" (On the Happy Life, XI.4), Apicius was the very embodiment of effete prodigality, his cooking school "defiled the age with his teaching." Having squandered a hundred million sesterces and overwhelmed with debt, Apicius was said to have calculated that he had only ten million sesterces left, not nearly enough to satisfy his cravings, and so killed himself in despair (To Helvia on Consolation, X.8-9; also Dio, LVII.19.5, who says he was familiar with Sejanus, whose wife Apicata may have been the daughter of Apicius, Tacitus, Annals, IV.3).
Ultimately, though, after stuffing himself with dainties, it was the gluttony of Apicius that killed his body and soul (Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XX.1.1), an end that would have been applauded by the notorious Elagabalus, who declared that, as a private citizen, his model to be Apicius and, among emperors, the profligate Otho and the glutton Vitellius (Historia Augusta, XVIII.4). It is Elagabalus who "in imitation of Apicius" ate camel heels, cockscombs, the tongues of peacocks and nightingales, the brains of flamingos and thrushes, partridge eggs, the heads of parrots and pheasants, and the beards of mullets (XX.5-7).
The oldest cookbook very well may be by Apicius, but that is not to say that he was the first epicure. That was Archestratus, a Sicilian Greek whose fourth-century BC poem on gastronomy survives only in the sixty or so fragments preserved in the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus. In reading them, one is struck by his emphasis on simplicity and insistence that a delicate fish be sprinkled only with a little salt and basted with olive oil, "for it contains the height of pleasure within itself" (Athenaeus, 321d).
The detail above is from The Romans in the Decadence of the Empire (1847) by Thomas Courture, the one work by which he is best known and now in the Musée d’Orsay (Paris).
Varro has something to say about the proper number of guests at a banquet: they should begin with the Graces and end with the Muses, that is, there should be no fewer than three guests and no more than nine. Nor should they be too talkative or too reticent, or speak of anxious or perplexing affairs. Rather, the conversation should be about the common experiences of life, diverting and cheerful, so that the interest and pleasure conveyed refine the character (Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, XII11).
Stabo XIII.54.
[54] From Scepsis came the Socratic philosophers Erastus and Coriscus and Neleus the son of Coriscus, this last a man who not only was a pupil of Aristotle and Theophrastus, but also inherited the library of Theophrastus, which included that of Aristotle. At any rate, Aristotle bequeathed his own library to Theophrastus, to whom he also left his school; and he is the first man, so far as I know, to have collected books and to have taught the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library. Theophrastus bequeathed it to Neleus; and Neleus took it to Scepsis and bequeathed it to his heirs, ordinary people, who kept the books locked up and not even carefully stored. But when they heard bow zealously the Attalic kings242 to whom the city was subject were searching for books to build up the library in Pergamum, they hid their books underground in a kind of trench. But much later, when the books had been damaged by moisture and moths, their descendants sold them to Apellicon243 of Teos for a large sum of money, both the books of Aristotle and those of Theophrastus. But Apellicon was a bibliophile rather than a philosopher; and therefore, seeking a restoration of the parts that had been eaten through, he made new copies of the text, filling up the gaps incorrectly, and published the books full of errors. The result was that the earlier school of Peripatetics who came after Theophrastus had no books at all, with the exception of only a few, mostly exoteric works, and were therefore able to philosophize about nothing in a practical way, but only to talk bombast about commonplace propositions, whereas the later school, from the time the books in question appeared, though better able to philosophise and Aristotelise, were forced to call most of their statements probabilities, because of the large number of errors.244 Rome also contributed much to this; for, immediately after the death of Apellicon, Sulla, who had captured Athens, carried off Apellicon's library to Rome, where Tyrannion the grammarian, who was fond of Aristotle, got it in his hands by paying court to the librarian, as did also certain booksellers who used bad copyists and would not collate the texts--a thing that also takes place in the case of the other books that are copied for selling, both here245 and at Alexandria. However, this is enough about these men.
Plutarch Sulla XXVI
26 Having put to sea with all his ships from Ephesus, on the third day he came to anchor in Piraeus. He was now initiated into the mysteries, and seized for himself the library of Apellicon the Teian, in which were most of the treatises of Aristotle and Theophrastus, at that time not yet well known to the public. But it is said that after the library was carried to Rome, Tyrannio the grammarian arranged most of the works in it, and that Andronicus the Rhodian was furnished by him with copies of them, and published them, and drew up the lists now current. 2 The old Peripatetics were evidently of themselves accomplished and learned men, but they seem to have had neither a large nor an exact acquaintance with the writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus, because the estate of Neleus of Scepsis, to whom Theophrastus bequeathed his books, came into the hands of careless and illiterate people.
Cf. Strabo, xiii.1.54. Scepsis was a city of the Troad, (p407)and a centre of learning under the Attalid dynasty of Pergamum. The writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus were hidden in an underground cellar by their owners, to keep them from being taken to Pergamum, and came in a damaged condition into the possession of Apellicon.
A bibliographic note: Although Vehling is the first to translate De Re Coquinaria into English, the work is not regarded as accurate. Liquamen, for example, is understood to be any kind of liquid, whether broth, sauce, stock, gravy, or drippings; and garum a name for "fish essences." Indeed, Flower and Rosenbaum consider it "almost useless as a translation." Now, half a century later, the standard text is Apicius: A Critical Edition (2006) by Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger.
References: Seneca: Naturales Quaestiones (1971) translated by Thomas H. Corcoran (Loeb Classical Library); Seneca: Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (1925) translated by Richard M. Gummere; The Roman Cookery Book (1958) translated by Barbara Flower and Elisabeth Rosenbaum; Apicius: Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome (1936) translated by Joseph Dommers Vehling; Archestratos of Gela: Greek Culture and Cuisine in the Fourth Century BCE (2000) edited by S. Douglas Olson and Alexander Sens; Historia Augusta (1924) translated by David Magie (Loeb Classical Library); Athenaeus: The Deipnosophists (1937) translated by Charles Burton Gulick (Loeb Classical Library); "The Apician Sauce: Ius Apicianum" (1995) by Jon Solomon, in Food in Antiquity edited by John Wilkins, David Harvey, and Mike Dobson.
