THE EDIBLE PAST: PULS IN ROMAN MEMORY CULTURE

Abstract

This thesis is an exploratory study in the surprisingly neglected sub-field of food in Roman memory culture. It proposes that the mnemonic practice of textual representation plays an important role in linking food with cultural memories of the distant past. In order to illustrate the aforementioned methodological claim, this thesis undertakes a mnemohistory of puls (emmer porridge). As of now, scholars have tended to assume that puls was a purportedly’ traditional’ Roman staple dish which preserved and transmitted cultural memories of the early Roman diet since time memorial. Such a view, as I argue in this thesis, has little evidential basis. More often than not, even as late as the second century BC, representations of puls in the comedies by Plautus associated the dish with people outside the Roman “memory community” such as the Carthaginians and rustic Italic provincials. A similar mnemonic disinterest in puls can be observed in the literary record during this time period. It was only in the first century BC, during the late republican period, that a concerted effort to link puls with Roman memory culture at large can be observed in the literary record. Shaken by the series of socio-political upheavals happening all around them; members of the Roman elite attempted to balance this uncertainty by constructing an idealized early Roman past. Owing to its pre-existing association with the small-holder mode of agricultural production, puls was culturally reimagined as a dish central to the early Roman diet.