Peter Jones
An Ancient Stew
Around the Roman Table
By Patrick Faas, Shaun Whiteside (trans.)
Macmillan 371pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
WE CLASSICISTS SPEND a lot of our time taking things on trust, without quite knowing how they can be true. The use of olive oil provides a good example. Every book on the 'Amazing Ancients' reports that olive oil was a multi-purpose product, used for lighting, cooking and cleaning and for making perfumes, cosmetics and medicines. Until now it has always been the last use that has had me baffled, but Patrick Faas explains all, and embarrassingly obvious it is too.
As today, olive oil came in different qualities in ancient Rome. First, there were the late-harvested olives that were turning black. These produced viridum ('green'), in three pressing, the last pressing being the low-grade oil used for cooling and lighting. (One litre of oil produces about 134 hours of light
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Tickets are now on sale for @Poetry_London's 100th issue launch @natpoetrylib as part of the #LondonLitFest on 23 Oct. Hear live readings from an array of brilliant poets in an event that draws on the 33-year history of the magazine.
https://southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/literature-poetry/npl-presents-poetry-londons-100th-issue?eventId=882035
You only have a week left to take advantage of our 500th-issue subscription offer.
Get 5 issues for £5 now.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/lr545/
Joanna Kavenna reviews Maggie Nelson's ‘On Freedom’, ‘a very serious and beautiful book about why “freedom” has become such a vexed term, deployed so often in scenarios where it really means the opposite’.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/in-defence-of-ambivalence