Plato at the table

The classic Greek meal revolves around sitos, the staple cereal-based food (barley flatbread or wheat bread), accompanied by opson — everything that "enhances" the bread: fish, vegetables, olives, cheese. The main meal (deipnon) is taken at the end of the day; it is often followed, during a men's banquet, by the symposion, where wine mixed with water is drunk while nibbling on tragemata (figs, nuts, honey). For Plato, a friend of moderation, opson remains modest: to love it too much, they said, is to be an opsophágos, a glutton who forgets that the belly serves the soul and not the other way around.

Ground barley (alphita) and olive oil are the two pillars of the sober Athenian table that Plato advocated: neither heavy feasting nor Sicilian luxury, but the clear frugality that leaves the mind free. Attic olive oil, poured raw, binds and flavors almost every dish.