“Steak à la Hun: Food, Drink, and Dietary Habits in Ammianus Marcellinus” ― Paul Tuffin and Meaghan McEvoy (2017)

Excerpts relevant to the Huns. Footnotes are reset, and hence starts at 1.

Paul Tuffin and Meaghan McEvoy, “Steak à la Hun: Food, Drink, and Dietary Habits in Ammianus Marcellinus,” in Fast or Famine―Food and Drink in Byzantium, Mayer and Trzcionka eds., 2017.

… [T]he link… between excess in the consumption of food and drink and beast-like lack of the control of reason immediately brings to mind descriptions (presented in the next section of this paper) of barbarian behaviour.[1]

[1] The European Alans (and others), the Huns, and the Asiatic Alans are all compared to beasts (respectively, 22.8.42, 31.2.11, and 31.2.18). On Ammianus’ use of bestial comparisons in general to emphasise negatively lack of rationality and control, see e.g. Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus, 258; T.D. Barnes, Ammianus and the Representation of Historical Reality (Ithaca and London 1998), 109–110. Wiedeman makes a thorough analysis of Ammianus’ use of comparisons with animals and concludes, inter alia: “Animal metaphors are applied to any person or group falling short of the standards of civilized human behaviour...” (T.E.J. Wiedeman, “Between Men and Beasts: Barbarians in Ammianus Marcellinus,” in I.S. Moxton, J.D. Smart and A.J. Woodman [eds], Past Perspectives: Studies in Greek and Roman historical writing [Cambridge 1986: 189–201], 201).

Dietary habits as a sign of savage versus civilised behaviour

This aspect of Ammianus’ concern with the consumption of food and alcohol is one that is revealed almost exclusively in his accounts of different regions and their inhabitants...

The existence of the tradition naturally begs the question of veracity in the accounts we are considering: is Ammianus simply drawing on the tradition or is he bringing more reliable knowledge to bear (witnesses’ reports, his own autopsy) — or is he doing both?...

A later excursus is devoted to the Huns, Alans and other nations of Asiatic Scythia (31.2). The Huns “are quite abnormally savage” (31.2.1) and

... their way of life is so rough that they have no use for fire or seasoned food, but live on the roots of wild plants and the half-raw flesh of any sort of animal, which they warm a little by placing it between their thighs and the backs of their horses (31.2.3).

The Huns too are nomadic and plant no grain:

None of them ploughs or ever touches a plough handle. They have no fixed abode, no home or law or settled manner of life but wander like refugees with the wagons in which they live (31.2.10).

like “unreasoning beasts... entirely at the mercy of the maddest impulses” and “totally ignorant of the distinction between right and wrong,” (31.2.11) they are indeed a “wild race” (31.2.12).

The characteristics of being nomadic, non-agricultural, eating wild meat and plants have already been referred to Herodotos.[2] Here, we can add that Herodotos’ account of the Androphagoi (at 4.106) includes these words: (“neither practising justice nor living under any law”).

[2] On the Saracens: The Saracens (in an excursus on more of their customs), rapacious as kites and “desirable neither as friends or enemies” (14.4.1), never plough or till the land but are constantly on the move (14.4.3). They feed off the land (plants, game, birds they are able to catch), “drink an abundance of milk, which is their main sustenance,” and Ammianus has seen some who “were wholly unacquainted with grain and wine” (14.4.6).

On the question of veracity, we might begin with the question of the ‘steak à la Hun.’ It has been the subject of comment and explanation by various scholars,[3] and the attempt at humour in our title is, of course, based on Ammianus’ suggestion that the meat was being warmed for consumption as opposed to being used to heal wounds or soothe chaffing as such scholars have suggested. A recent study by King comments that “Ammianus had heard about the meat on the horses’ backs, but did not have the knowledge of Hunnic culture to explain why it was there.”[4] The study goes on to point out the inaccuracy of Ammianus’ assertions that the Huns lacked fire, ate raw food, and never farmed;[5] it suggests also, in case we might be wondering why Ammianus presents the Huns as he does, that

[3] E.g. Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus, 337–338; J.O. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in their history and culture, M. Knight (ed.) (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1973), 14–15, as part of the author’s overall assessment of Ammianus’ account of the Huns, where he suggests a heavy reliance on the Augustan historian, Pompeius Trogus, 9–15.

[4] King, “The Veracity of Ammianus,” 80.

[5] Ibid.

portraying the Huns as subhuman and bestial works well with Ammianus’ overall image of the Huns as savages so terrifying that even the Goths that defeated the Romans at Adrianople could not face them.[6]

[6] King, “The Veracity of Ammianus,” 82. In relation to King’s point, however, it should be noted that Ammianus shows the Goths as being frightened (in the company of some Huns and Alans) also by a Saracen. The occasion is the Gothic attempt on Constantinople, narrated towards the end of the Res Gestae: “One of [the Saracens], a man with long hair wearing nothing but a loincloth, drew his dagger and hurled himself with blood-curdling yells into the midst of the Gothic host. He cut a man’s throat, then put his lips to the wound and sucked the streaming blood. This appalling sight terrified the barbarians (31.16.6).

In the same excursus on the Huns, Alans and others, we meet the Anthropophagi of Asiatic Scythia. These are nomads “who live on human flesh” (31.2.15) — both characteristics of the already-mentioned Androphagoi, described by Herodotos at 4.106.

The Asiatic Alans are made up of various peoples who share similar traits, including being nomadic and “their wild way of life” (31.2.17).

they have no huts and make no use of the plough, but live upon meat and plenty of milk. They use wagons...and move in these over the endless desert. And when they come to a grassy place, they arrange their carts in a circle and feed like wild animals... (31.2.18)

In introducing the Asiatic Alans Ammianus notes that they “are the ancient Massagetae” (31.2.12), leading us back once again to Herodotos and his description of these neighbours of the Scythians (1.216) who sow nothing, live on beasts and fish, and are milk-drinkers. To these characteristics of their dietary habits Ammianus has added that they “feed like wild animals” (31.2.18) — reminding us of his earlier description of the European Alans (and others) at 22.8.42.[7]

[7] The Latin expressions are quite close: “ferarum taetro ritu uescuntur” (22.8.42); “ferino ritu uescuntur” (31.2.18).

The Alans, however, do keep cattle as the above passage suggests,[8] and this is perhaps one reason why Ammianus comments that, although nimble and active warriors “and in every way a match for the Huns,” they “are less savage in their habits and way of life” (31.2.21).[9] …

[8] See also 31.2.19.

[9] King, however, asks the question: “Were the Huns really like the Alans, or does Ammianus link them because Herodotus linked the Scythians and the Massagetae?”; the issue is discussed further in a note (King, “The Veracity of Ammianus”, 85 and n. 40).

It is clear from the passages cited above that dietary habits are an important characteristic for Ammianus in describing different tribes and nations. This is not in itself surprising — as Wiedeman writes: “Dietary habits are among the more obvious ways in which one group of people can differentiate itself from another.[10] On the other hand it is also clear that, with the exception of his treatment of the Gauls and Persians, Ammianus is using characteristics that are drawn from the tradition of descriptions of barbarians that goes back to Herodotos, and that his use of these across the range of groups gives us little hope for their veracity.[11] How is this to be explained? It seems probable in fact that (a) they are not being used for the purposes of descriptive ethnography so much as for the purposes of moral evaluation, in order to and as part of defining the ‘otherness’ of these ethnic groups in contrast to the civilised Romans; and (b) they also reflect Ammianus’ desire to conform to the traditional requirements of his genre by including these traditional descriptors of savagery within his digressions on such groups.[12] It is in any event evident that these dietary practices are for Ammianus, as for those predecessors he is drawing upon, amongst the key defining characteristics of the uncivilised versus the civilised...

[10] Wiedeman, “Between Men and Beasts,” 189.

[11] In general on the use by Ammianus of ethnic equations, identifications of peoples of his own time with those he read about in earlier literature, see King, “The Veracity of Ammianus,” 83–85.

[12] These points are well argued by Wiedemann in his “Between Men and Beasts.” See also D. Rohrbacher, The Historians of Late Antiquity (London and New York 2002), 27-28. On (a) only, see similarly O. Longo, “The Food of Others,” in Food: A culinary history from antiquity to the present, under the direction of J.-L. Flandrin and M. Montanari, English edn. by A. Sonnenfeld, trans. by C. Botsford (New York 1999: 153–162), 155.

Concluding remarks

It turns out, then, that the consumption of food and drink is treated by Ammianus in quite deliberate and significant ways. For, although in the military-political context he may present in this regard more or less what the reader might expect (yet even here introduces value judgements on foresight and indeed its absence), habits of eating and drinking are revealed also as an intrinsic aspect of his value system and a regular means of judging the moral worth not only of individuals and groups or sections of society but also of tribes and nations as a whole — and in both of these categories, even though the first covers only Romans, the link exists to a broader judgement: that which is to be made between the savage and the civilised.