Food of the Gods: Ambrosia and Nectar in Homer and Pindar

In Greek myth, ambrosia and nectar are the food and drink of the gods — what the Olympians eat and pour at their own table, and what mortals, by the logic of the poems, may not touch. Said plainly, before any of it: these are stories the Greeks told about their gods. They are not statements about what any food does for anybody, then or now, and honey enters this page near the end as philology — a scholar’s argument about two old words — not as a promise about anything in a jar. What the poems say is better than a promise anyway: an island table where a goddess and a man eat different suppers, a theft and its punishment, and a cave in Crete full of bees.

Ambrosia and nectar are the divine pair of Greek poetry — usually ambrosia the food and nectar the drink, though the sources disagree — and at every table where they appear, they mark exactly who is a god and who is not.

Where do ambrosia and nectar appear in Homer?

At mealtimes, mostly — the pair belong to scenes of hospitality. When Hermes arrives on Calypso’s island in Odyssey 5, the nymph receives him as a host should: “she drew a table loaded with ambrosia beside him and mixed him some red nectar” (Homer, Odyssey 5, trans. Samuel Butler). A feast in miniature: ambrosia set out like food, nectar mixed like wine and red like wine — a colour the poem gives it more than once.

The sharper scene comes later in the same book, when the guest is mortal and Calypso sits Odysseus down to supper: “Calypso set meat and drink before him of the food that mortals eat; but her maids brought ambrosia and nectar for herself” (Homer, Odyssey 5, trans. Butler). Two diets at one table. Nothing in Homer draws the line between god and mortal more quietly or more absolutely: what you eat marks what you are. What stood on the mortal side of that line is a page of its own — ancient Greek food.

Plate I · ArtefactRecord

Which is the food and which is the drink?

Usually ambrosia is eaten and nectar is drunk — and “usually” is the honest word. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, summarising the ancient evidence, puts it with care: “usually both in Homer and in later writers nectar is the drink and ambrosia the food”. The poets themselves did not keep to the rule, and the same article records the reversals: “in Alcman nectar is the food, and in Sappho and Anaxandrides ambrosia the drink.”

Alcman and Sappho are serious witnesses. Anaxandrides, a comic playwright, is probably something else: his character claims to eat nectar and drink ambrosia, and the scholar Wright suggested he was using comic inversion — swapping the pair for a laugh. If so, even the joke is evidence: it lands only if the audience knew there was a right way round.

Fig. I · The sources’ own ledgerDiagram

Source	Eaten	Drunk
Homer, Odyssey 5 — Calypso’s table	ambrosia — “a table loaded with ambrosia”	nectar — “mixed him some red nectar”
Most later writers (1911 EB summary)	ambrosia	nectar
Alcman	nectar	—
Sappho	—	ambrosia
Anaxandrides (comic)	nectar	ambrosia — the pair swapped, for the laugh

What do ambrosia and nectar do in the poems?

More than feed the gods — and every one of these uses stays inside the poem it comes from. In Iliad 19, Thetis keeps the body of the dead Patroclus from decay by dropping ambrosia and red nectar over it, “that his body might suffer no change” (Homer, Iliad 19, trans. Butler) — the divine pair as an embalmer’s materials, not a meal. Later in the same book, Achilles refuses to eat while the army dines, grieving for Patroclus, and Zeus sends Athena to put nectar and ambrosia into his breast so that, in the poem’s own terms, hunger will not weaken him: the divine pair standing in for the meal he refuses. Ambrosia is also the gods’ cosmetic: in Iliad 14 Hera cleanses her skin with it, and Homer hands the adjective out freely — ambrosial robes, ambrosial hair, even ambrosial sandals.

All of it happens to gods, to a hero at the edge of the divine, and to the dead. Homer never puts ambrosia in a mortal’s hands — which is what the next story turns on.

What happened when a mortal stole them?

Tantalus. In Pindar’s first Olympian ode he is a man to whom the gods had already given the pair — and who passed them on: “he stole from the gods nectar and ambrosia, with which they had made him immortal, and gave them to his drinking companions” (Pindar, Olympian 1, trans. Diane Arnson Svarlien). The crime happens at table, among drinking companions — the same setting as every scene above. And the sentence, in Pindar’s telling: “for his greed he gained overpowering ruin, which the Father hung over him: a mighty stone.”

The myth polices its own boundary. The food of the gods is, in the poems, the one thing a mortal cannot be given; Calypso’s two-diet table says it quietly, and the stone over Tantalus says it as loudly as Greek poetry can.

Plate II · PaintingRecord

What do the two words actually mean?

Here the poems hand over to the philologists. Scholars derive ambrosia from the Greek ambrotos: the two words trace back to the same reconstructed Indo-European form meaning “un-dying” — a negative prefix sitting on the root “to die”. Nectar is less settled. The Online Etymology Dictionary offers “perhaps an ancient Indo-European poetic compound of nek- ‘death’ + -tar ‘overcoming’” — the “perhaps” is the dictionary’s own, and worth keeping. If the derivations are right, neither word is about taste at all; both are about the one thing the stories say the gods are spared.

The tail of the word’s history is the neatest part. Nectar as the botanists’ word — the sweet liquid in flowers — is recorded only from around 1600. The gods’ drink lent its name to the thing bees actually gather.

Was ambrosia honey?

It is a scholarly hypothesis with a name and a date on it, handled here as one. In 1883 the German mythographer W. H. Roscher published a monograph, Nektar und Ambrosia, arguing that the two were originally forms of a single substance — in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica’s summary, “honey, regarded as a dew, like manna, fallen from heaven, which was used both as food and drink”. The dots he joined are real — bees gather nectar, and Greek poets put honeycomb beside their gods, as the next section shows — but the line between them is Roscher’s, an argument about words and stories from the 1880s. It is reported here, not endorsed, and it says nothing about honey, then or now.

How did the bees of Crete get into the story?

Through the god’s cradle. Greek myth put the infancy of Zeus on Crete, and the island’s tellings stock his nursery with milk and honey. In Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus, from the third century BC, the poet addresses the god directly: “thou didst suck the rich teat of the she-goat Amaltheia, and thereto eat the sweet honey-comb” (Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus, trans. A. W. Mair). The comb has makers, too: on the hills of Ida, the hymn says, “appeared the works of the Panacrian bee”.

Antoninus Liberalis gives the nursery an address: “In Crete there is said to be a sacred cave full of bees. In it, as storytellers say, Rhea gave birth to Zeus” (Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 19, trans. Francis Celoria) — and the sacred bees of that cave are called the nurses of Zeus. The same chapter carries a warning. Four men cased in bronze armour went in to take the honey; the armour split away from their bodies, and because no one may die inside the holy cave, Zeus turned them into birds rather than strike them down. The honey of that cave was not for taking — the Tantalus rule again, in a Cretan accent.

These are myths about the island’s caves and bees, reported here as myths. What honey actually did across the ancient Greek world — kitchen, rite and trade — is at honey in the ancient world, and the real jars of the modern island are at Greek honey. One modern note, since a myth above feeds honeycomb to an infant god: real honey is not suitable for infants under 12 months — NHS guidance is to give none before one year.

Plate III · ArtefactRecord

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 island where the poets put the cradle of Zeus and the bees that kept it. The myths on this page are reported as myths; the modern research record — a different kind of reading altogether — is at evidence. There is no shop yet, and we name no date for one. How we source is at sourcing, and what we will test and publish is at testing.

The rest of the Greek table — what people, rather than gods, actually ate — is at Greek food, beginning with ancient Greek food.