Antigone at the table

The ancient Greek meal is organized around sitos (the cereal base: barley cake maza or bread) accompanied by opson (the "what-goes-with-it": vegetables, cheese, fish, sometimes meat). One drinks little while eating; the wine cut with water comes mainly afterward, during the symposion, accompanied by tragemata (dried figs, nuts, cheese, honey). Apart, away from the table of the living, stand the offerings: the choai, libations poured for the gods and the dead — at the heart of Antigone's story.

Sweet pillar of Greek cuisine, honey sweetens, preserves, and sanctifies. It sweetens the maza, binds the tragemata, and above all it flows in the funerary choai poured on tombs — the very gesture by which Antigone honors her brother Polyneices. For Thebes in Boeotia, one imagines a dark honey perfumed with wild thyme.