New Statesman: Food: after a light lunch, Ovid made love to his girlfriend all afternoon

I first came upon Pliny's Letters when slogging through Latin O-level. The ancient world sprang alive with the discovery that Pliny the Younger had given banquets at his country villa, served porridge and enjoyed the performances of Spanish dancing girls. For a long time, none the less, I retained a Carry On Up the Vomitorium misapprehension of Roman palates and habits. Mark Grant's excellent Roman Cookery: ancient recipes for modern kitchens (Serif, reprinted 2002) corrected that. It introduces a host of food writers. Who could resist a sauce, by one Athenaeus, enticingly entitled "The Partying Professors"?

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Grant's book points out that ordinary Romans were as passionate about eating well as the rich, even if they had to work in the blackened, smoky kitchens that Martial and Horace moan about. Lots of people ate out: "fast-food establishments called popinae served fried fish, ham and sausages ... and Catullus mentions the pages of an unfortunate historian as being so useless as to be fit only for wrapping up mackerel, so a takeaway service was also available". Bars supplied wine, pastries, cakes and the space for conversation with friends, and might double as restaurants, gambling dens and brothels. In law, Grant instructs us, a barmaid was considered a prostitute, "even if reality might have been otherwise". Some graffiti from Pompeii chronicle a bar advert, "not unlike the calling cards in a modern telephone box", for "the oral services of a girl called Fortunata". She charged "two bronze asses, the price of half a litre of olive oil or two litres of ordinary wine".

Grant's recipes are arranged to cover breakfast, lunch, bar snacks and dinner. Here are the fruit-and-veg progenitors of the modern Healthy Mediterranean Diet. Various herb purees seem early versions of pesto. They are all delicious. The foundation is a pounded mixture of mint, lettuce, rocket, coriander, parsley, savory, rue, thyme and pennyroyal. This can subsequently be flavoured with cheese, or walnuts, or sesame seeds, or pine nuts. Recipes for pastries and cakes include one for miniature pyramids. First conquer the country, then eat its monuments. A lot use honey, just as modern Greek and Turkish versions do.

Many Romans enjoyed a light lunch followed by a short siesta. Horace pottered about the house after eating "not greedily". Ovid took his girlfriend Corinna into his shaded room and made love all afternoon. Catullus hoped for even more with his "sweet Ipsitilla", for as he rested on his bed, enjoying a digestive pause, he fantasised about nouem continuas fututiones or "nine consecutive fucks" at her house--the Latin vernacular, as Grant neatly puts it, "perhaps lending a note of desperation to his predicament ... Aristotle recommended a large lunch and a light dinner if the fututiones were to be in the evening."