LAUSR

Itmight seem that our era of expensive restaurants, celebrity chefs and exotic edibles is novel. O’Connor’s delightful book examineswhat similar practices looked like in the past, considering texts and archaeological evidence from ancient Europe and Asia. The result is both historically rich and remarkably contemporary in its concerns. O’Connor asks us to consider ancient drinking vessels and cooking wares, such as those now housed as ‘art’ in the British Museum, as ‘the remains of countless ghostly feasts’ (p. 2) brimming with life, politics and conflict. Ancient literature was obsessed with feasting, and O’Connor skillfully weaves together such narrative texts with archaeological finds and material culture to produce an interdisciplinary ethno-archaeological account of feasting in antiquity. O’Connor critiques the idea that banqueting is an inherently commensal act, a perspective she sees as grounded in contemporary experience. She presents ancient feasts as competitive, tense, stressful affairs where status was on display for all to see, exclusion made painfully public, and eating part of the serious business of politics and conquest. Food and alcohol are both essential to banquets, but O’Connor separates them, showing how alcohol sometimes complemented, but more often contrasted with, banquet food. She argues that ‘the consumption of alcohol produces a kind of embodied magic in which the experience of reality is transformed’ (p. 206). On the one hand it brought humans into closer contact with the divine, but it also served as a release from the formal, competitive nature of feasting itself. Thus alcohol often recreated commensality by breaking the boundaries of hierarchy formed through banquets and reincorporating those people whom feasts excluded or marginalized. O’Connor takes a bird’s-eye view, highlighting continuities of how food and drink have been used cross culturally. Although this approach occasionally requires glossing over particular temporal or geographical moments, it does not preclude detailed analysis. This book is full of delicious historical tidbits: the most elaborate feast in history, where Ashurnasirpal II fêted almost 70,000 people for 10 days in the ninth century bc (p. 57); the fourth-century bc Greek drinking game of kottabos, vaguely reminiscent to modern eyes of beer pong (p. 105); the election of Guyuk Khan, an event attended by 4000 envoys from China to Georgia to Baghdad (p. 135); the imperial cat banquet hosted by Emperor Teishi of Japan in 999 ad (p. 195). O’Connor focuses each chapter on a separate ancient civilization, adopting an ‘emerging perspective in which Europe is seen as Western