Ancient Greek Food: What People Actually Ate

Grain, olives and wine — barley ahead of wheat, with cheese, pulses, figs and preserved fish beside them, and honey for anything sweet. That is the ancient Greek table as the sources record it, and the word “actually” earns its place in the title: fresh meat, the centrepiece of every feast in epic, was mostly eaten at sacrifices, and the everyday plate was a barley cake with something salty next to it. This page sets out how a Greek meal was put together, what the meals of the day were, who ate what, and where the sweetness came from.

Sitos was the staple — barley or wheat as cake, bread or gruel, and pulses; opson was the relish, everything eaten with it. A Greek meal was the two together.

What were sitos and opson?

A classical meal had two named parts. The sitos was the staple: grains, above all barley and wheat, and pulses such as chickpeas and fava beans. The opson was everything that accompanied it — olives, cheese, vegetables, meat or fish. The pair worked like grammar: the staple gave the meal its bulk, the relish gave it its interest.

Fish stood at the top of the relishes. In classical Athens opson on its own could simply mean fish, the most esteemed kind of relish, and opsophagos — “opson-eater” — was what classical authors called someone fanatical about seafood.

The common relishes were humbler. Olives were an everyday appetiser; goat’s and ewe’s cheese, tyros, was a staple of the ordinary diet; broad beans, chickpeas and lentils were widely grown, and lentils and chickpeas are the pulses classical literature names most often. A farm supplied most of this and bartered for the rest — cheese, honey, fish and shellfish are the foodstuffs farmers are recorded trading for.

What was ancient Greek bread like?

Barley first. Barley flour made maza, a flat cake that the sources describe as the basic Greek dish, and barley gruel and barley-cakes were more common on Greek tables than wheat bread, because wheat grew poorly in much of Greece. Fine wheat bread, artos, was the prestige loaf, associated with the upper classes; the poor ate coarse brown breads.

So “ancient Greek bread” has two answers: the barley cake most people ate most days, and the white wheat loaf that marked money. The same barley meal runs through the rest of this page — dipped in wine at breakfast, stirred into kykeon, baked into the cakes of the sweet table.

Plate I · ArtefactRecord

What were the meals of the day?

Three, in the classical pattern. The day opened at dawn with the akratisma: barley bread dipped in unmixed wine — akratos, which gives the meal its name — sometimes with figs or olives alongside. Around midday came the ariston, a quick meal. The deipnon, taken at nightfall, was the day’s principal meal — the one with company, and in grander houses, with what followed it.

Fig. I · The Greek day in mealsDiagram

What did ordinary people actually eat?

The crops set the answer. Grain, vines for wine and olives for oil were the core crops of the Greek world, and households grew their own fruit — figs, apples, pears, pomegranates, quinces. Add the pulses, the cheese and the olives above, and the everyday plate assembles itself.

Meat is where the popular picture most needs correcting. Fresh meat was mostly eaten at sacrifices; in the city it was expensive, pork excepted. Sausage, by contrast, was eaten across the economic spectrum, and sardines and anchovies were regular fare for the citizens of Athens. The result reads less like the feasting of epic and more like a larder: barley, olive oil, olives, cheese, pulses, small fish, figs — and wine on the table from breakfast onwards.

Plate II · ArtefactRecord

What happened at a symposium?

The drinking party that could follow the deipnon — and the source of most of the famous imagery. The symposium was primarily a pleasure of the aristoi, the highest class of Greek society: men only, reclining, drinking through the evening from a shared cup, the kylix, passed round the room, with music — the lyre especially — storytelling, politics and games. The only women present were the hetairai, courtesans trained in music and dance.

Plate III · ArtefactRecord

It is the symposium, not the family deipnon, that later imaginations reach for. It was the top of society at play — not the way most people ate.

Plate IV · PaintingRecord

What was kykeon?

A barley drink the oldest poems mix in more than one way. In the Iliad, Hecamede prepares one for Nestor and Machaon over Pramnian wine: “she grated goat’s milk cheese into it with a bronze grater, threw in a handful of white barley-meal” (Homer, Iliad 11). On the table beside the cup stood “an onion to give relish to the drink, with honey and cakes of barley-meal” — a Greek meal in miniature: barley for the sitos, an onion for the opson, and honey already in its place. The pairing of honey with cheese, incidentally, never left the Greek table — it has a page of its own.

The other kykeon is austere. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the grieving goddess is offered red wine: “she refused it, for she said it was not lawful for her to drink red wine, but bade them mix meal and water with soft mint and give her to drink” (Homeric Hymn to Demeter 206–210). That drink of barley meal, water and mint is the form taken up in the rite at Eleusis. What the poems set before the gods is a subject of its own: food of the gods.

What did the ancient Greeks eat for dessert?

Honey, in nearly every form the question allows — because the Greek kitchen had no sugar. Sugarcane appears in Greek writing only as a travellers’ marvel: Strabo, passing on the report of Nearchus from India, writes that “He states also concerning the reeds, that they produce honey, although there are no bees” (Strabo, Geography 15.1.20). A reed that made honey was a curiosity from the edge of the map, not a foodstuff. At home, sweet meant honey.

The cake list in Athenaeus shows that sweetness at work. “There are cakes, also, called enkrides. These are cakes boiled in oil, and after that seasoned with honey” (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 14.645) — fried dough finished with honey, and already old when Athenaeus catalogued it, since the poet Stesichorus had named it in the sixth century BC: “Groats and enkrides, / And other cakes, and fresh sweet honey” (Stesichorus, quoted by Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 14.645). The modern descendant of fried honey-dough is still on the Greek table: loukoumades.

Sesame was honey’s steady partner. Athenaeus records the itrion, “a thin cake, made of sesame and honey”, known to Anacreon (Deipnosophistae 14.645), and sesamides, round cakes of honey, roasted sesame and oil. Sesame pressed with honey still has a Greek name today: pasteli.

Fruit filled out the sweet end of the larder — the figs, pears, pomegranates and quinces of the household plot. And one plain note for any page about eating honey: honey is not suitable for infants under 12 months, because it can contain bacteria associated with infant botulism; NHS guidance is to give no honey before one year.

What survives of the ancient larder?

The shelf this page describes — barley, olive oil, olives, cheese, pulses, honey — is still recognisably the Greek larder. Its island version has a page of its own: the Cretan larder, where the barley arrives twice-baked as paximadi and the honey comes off wild thyme. For honey’s older story in the Greek world — the deep past, Crete’s included — start at honey in the ancient world; for the honeys of modern Greece, thyme first among them, see Greek honey.

Where THYMELIA stands

THYMELIA is a UK house of Greek foods working two harvests — raw thyme honey from Chania in western Crete, and early-harvest olive oil from the hills above Kalamata — the honey end of the shelf this page traces. There is no shop yet, and we name no date for one. How we source is at sourcing, what we test and publish is at testing, and what the published research says about honey today is at evidence.

The rest of the Greek table, ancient and modern, is at Greek food.