Eating the Tables: Virgil's Bread Platters and the Roman Pizza Myth

At the end of years of wandering, a band of Trojan refugees sits down to eat on a riverbank in Italy. The food runs out, so they eat the flat wheat cakes they had been using as plates. A boy makes a joke, his father hears a prophecy come true, and the long search for a new home is over.

That small scene from the seventh book of Virgil’s Aeneid has had a second life online as the “first pizza.” The temptation is easy to see: a round, flat bread, with food laid on top, eaten in Italy. But the passage is far more interesting for what it says about Roman ritual, Roman bread, and the way a founding legend worked than for anything it says about a Neapolitan dish that appears in the record many centuries later.

A joke on the banks of the Tiber

Virgil sets the scene with care. Aeneas, his captains, and his son Iulus stretch out under a tall tree and lay out a meal. Beneath the food they set adorea liba, cakes of meal (in Fairclough’s translation, “Jove himself inspired them”), and they crown this “wheaten base” with fruits of the field.^{1 2} When the rest is gone, hunger drives them to bite into the “fateful circles of crust” and spare not the “broad loaves” (patulis quadris), the scored segments of the cakes.² Then Iulus speaks: “Heus! etiam mensas consumimus,” in Fairclough’s Loeb version “we eat our tables too!” said “jesting; this and no more.”^{1 2}

Aeneas seizes on the words. He hails the land “destined as my due” and recalls a secret of fate left to him by his father Anchises: when hunger on an unknown shore forced his son to eat his tables, there he should hope for a home and build his first dwellings.² In the Latin the prophecy runs from line 124 to 127, and Aeneas concludes that this was the hunger foretold, the last trial before an end to exile.¹

Dryden, translating in the 1690s, made the joke English. His Ascanius (Iulus’s other name) says “See, we devour the plates on which we fed,” and Anchises’ prophecy speaks of being forced to eat “your trenchers.”³ The choice of “trenchers” quietly translates the scene into the vocabulary of older English tables.

The nineteenth-century commentator John Conington noted that the propriety of putting this pleasantry into the mouth of Ascanius had often been remarked on.⁴ The prophecy is grim; its fulfillment is a child’s quip at a picnic. The humor is the point. A terrifying oracle turns out to have a harmless meaning.

One prophecy, several prophets

Readers who know the Aeneid well spot a puzzle. In Book 7 Aeneas credits the prophecy to Anchises. In Book 3 it comes from somewhere much darker. On the Strophades islands the Trojans slaughter cattle that belong to the Harpies, and the Harpy Celaeno, calling herself the eldest of the Furies, passes on a message from Jupiter through Apollo: the Trojans will reach Italy, but they will not wall their promised city until “dread hunger” forces them to “gnaw with your teeth and devour your very tables.”^{1 5} The Latin, ambesas subigat malis absumere mensas, makes the threat physical: tables chewed around the edges with the jaws.¹ Later in the same book the seer Helenus tells Aeneas not to dread the coming “gnawing of tables” (mensarum morsus), because the Fates will find a way.^{1 5}

Fairclough flagged the discrepancy in a footnote to Book 7: in Book 3 “the prophecy is uttered by Celaeno, not by Anchises.”² Whatever its cause, it shows that Virgil was working with a story that already existed and could be told in more than one way.

The Greek tradition confirms this. The Alexandra, a dense prophetic poem attributed to Lycophron, puts the future of Aeneas in the mouth of the Trojan princess Cassandra. In A. W. Mair’s Loeb translation, Aeneas “shall find full of eatables a table which is afterwards devoured by his attendants and shall be reminded of an ancient prophecy.”⁶ The Greek here (by our count, lines 1250 to 1252) has a “table full of food” (trapezan eidaton plere), so the motif was already in circulation in Greek poetry before Virgil wrote.⁶

The fullest prose version comes from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian who says he arrived in Italy just as Augustus ended the civil wars and had lived in Rome for twenty-two years when he wrote his Roman Antiquities.⁷ In his account (1.55) the Trojans land at Laurentum and eat on the ground. Some, he says, spread parsley under their food as a table; others say they used “wheaten cakes, in order to keep their victuals clean.” When the food was gone they ate the parsley or the cakes, and “one of Aeneas’ sons, as the story goes, or some other of his messmates” exclaimed, “Look you, at last we have eaten even the table.”⁷ Dionysius reports two different sources for the oracle, Dodona or a Sibyl at Erythrae, “a place on Mount Ida” (his translator notes that the reading is uncertain), and its second half: a four-footed beast would then guide them to the site of their city. That beast turns out to be the sow that breaks away from the sacrifice.⁷ Cary’s note adds that, according to Servius, the Roman scholar Varro placed the oracle at Dodona.⁷

So the prophecy has at least four sources in the ancient record (Celaeno, Anchises, Dodona, the Sibyl) and two candidate “tables” (cakes or parsley). Virgil chose the cakes and the cleverest speaker.

What the Trojans were eating

The word Virgil uses, adorea, is a deliberate antique. Conington points out that the grammarian Festus called ador a kind of far (emmer wheat) and that Pliny says the ancients called far by the name adoreum. He concludes that Virgil chose “an antiquarian and sacrificial word,” since liba were properly sacrificial cakes.⁴ The meal on the riverbank is dressed in the language of offering, which suits a scene that ends in prayers and libations.

What did such cakes look like? Fairclough’s footnote compares them to “our hot cross-buns”: round cakes “scored by cross lines into four quarters (quadrae).”² Conington links Virgil’s quadrae to a line of the Moretum, a short poem about a peasant’s breakfast once ascribed to Virgil but not included in the ancient lists of his works.^{2 4} There the farmer Simylus grinds his grain, kneads the dough with water and salt, then “with open palms broadens it into its rounded form, and marks it in four parts, stamped in equal divisions,” before baking it on the hearth under tiles.²

Cato’s farming manual, written in the second century BCE, gives a working sense of the range. His plain kneaded bread is baked “under a crock,” and his libum is a richer cake of pounded cheese, wheat flour, and egg, patted into a loaf and baked on leaves.⁸ Archaeology supplies the shape. In a Pompeii bakery, excavators found an oven full of carbonized loaves of the bread called panis quadratus, named for indentations that let the loaf be broken into portions.⁹

Putting this together: the Trojans’ “tables” were round cakes of coarse wheat, probably scored into segments, used as a base for fruit and other food. They were edible plates, and in a pinch, food.

How a picnic became a pizza

The jump from this scene to pizza is easy to make, and not only on social media. When archaeologists at Pompeii announced a newly uncovered still-life fresco in June 2023, the park’s own press release began: “Whilst it looks like a pizza, this image from a Pompeian painting from 2000 years ago obviously can’t be, since some of the most characteristic ingredients are missing, namely tomatoes and mozzarella.” The archaeologists suggested the painting shows a flat focaccia serving as a support for fruits, possibly “a distant ancestor of the modern dish,” and they explicitly connected it to the Aeneid’s scene of breads used as tables.¹⁰

Some food writing goes further. An article on pizza in Brazilian Italian studies opens by declaring that pizza has three thousand years of history and lines up flat breads from Egypt, Greece, and Rome as its forerunners. It also reports La Cecla, in a 1998 book on pasta and pizza, linking the focaccia of Virgil’s peasants with the medieval word “piza.”¹¹ This is the logic behind “Aeneas invented pizza”: any round flat bread with something on it counts as an early pizza.

The trouble is that by that standard pizza was invented everywhere wheat or barley was baked, and the label stops meaning anything. Food historians tend to ask narrower questions: when does the word appear, when does the dish people recognize appear, and where?

What the food record shows

The word is medieval. In a lease drawn up at Gaeta, on the coast between Rome and Naples, in May of a year its nineteenth-century editors date to 997, the tenants of a mill owe the bishop each Christmas “duodecim pizze,” twelve pizze, together with a shoulder and a loin of pork, and another twelve with a pair of chickens at Easter.¹² The document does not say what these pizze were, only that they were countable items of food paid as rent.¹²

The dish associated with Naples is early modern. Carol Helstosky’s Pizza: A Global History describes it, in its publisher’s summary, as “originally a food for the poor in eighteenth-century Naples.”¹³ Even the official specification for “Pizza Napoletana” registered by the European Union, a document that promotes the product, dates its first appearance only to between 1715 and 1725, ties it to the use of tomato as a topping, and names Neapolitan pizzerias of the eighteenth century.¹⁴ The tomato itself is an American plant that reached Europe after 1492 and was at first treated warily in the kitchen.¹¹

By the 1830s, visitors were describing pizza as a fixture of Neapolitan street life. Alexandre Dumas, in Le Corricolo, his account of a stay in Naples in 1835, wrote that the city’s lazzaroni, its street poor, lived largely on pizza in winter and watermelon in summer. His pizza was round, made from the same dough as bread, sold in sizes to suit the purse, and topped with oil, lard, cheese, tomatoes, or little fish. He called it the “thermomètre gastronomique du marché,” since its price rose and fell with the cost of its toppings.¹⁵

Even the most famous origin story inside modern pizza history is under suspicion. The tale of the Margherita and Queen Margherita’s 1889 visit appears in the EU specification, which says the pizza was “presented to” the queen on that visit and dates the recipe itself to 1796 to 1810.¹⁴ The Brazilian study calls the episode a classic case of “invention of tradition,”¹¹ and Zachary Nowak’s 2014 article in Food, Culture & Society takes on the same story under the title “Folklore, Fakelore, History.”¹⁶ If a royal anecdote from 1889 needs that kind of scrutiny, a legendary picnic described by an Augustan poet cannot carry the weight of an origin claim.

What the scene really tells us

Read on its own terms, the table scene is about three things.

First, it is about ritual. Virgil’s vocabulary (adorea, liba, the cakes set out, in Fairclough’s words, as “Jove himself inspired them”) marks the meal as quasi-sacrificial, and it ends with libations to Jupiter and prayers to Anchises.^{1 4} The founding of a new home begins at a sacred meal.

Second, it is about how oracles work in Greek and Roman storytelling. A prophecy that sounds monstrous in the mouth of a Harpy comes true harmlessly, through a pun, at a moment of relief. Lycophron, Dionysius, and Virgil all knew the motif, and each shaped it differently.^{7 6} Virgil gave the decisive words to the boy who would carry the family line forward.

Third, it is a window onto everyday Roman bread. The Trojans eat round, scored wheat cakes of the kind the Moretum’s farmer shapes at dawn and Pompeii’s bakers left in their ovens.^{2 9} Bread used as a plate was ordinary enough that Dionysius could explain it as a way to keep food clean, and Virgil turned it into the hinge of a national epic.⁷

That is a better story than “the Romans invented pizza.” Pizza, as the word and the dish, has its own history, centered on medieval Gaeta and early modern Naples. The Trojans on the riverbank did not invent it. They ate their plates, and Aeneas knew he was home.

Footnotes

1. Virgil, Aeneid 7.107 to 134; 3.250 to 257; 3.394 (Latin, ed. Greenough, Perseus). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. Fairclough, Loeb Virgil II (rev. 1934), Aeneid 7.107 to 134 with notes; Moretum 47 to 51 and Appendix note (p. 530). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

3. Dryden, Aeneid 7 (Perseus, at 7.107). ↩

4. Conington, notes on Aeneid 7.109, 7.115, 7.116. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Fairclough, Loeb Aeneid 3.245 to 257 and 3.394 to 395 (Theoi). ↩ ↩²

6. Lycophron, Alexandra 1250 to 1252, trans. Mair, with note. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.7, 1.55 to 56, with Cary’s note 151. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

8. Cato, On Agriculture 74 to 75. ↩

9. Roth, National Geographic, 2021. ↩ ↩²

10. Archaeological Park of Pompeii, press release, 27 June 2023. ↩

11. Dalla Bona 2010, pp. 141 to 148. ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. Codex Diplomaticus Cajetanus I, pp. 179 to 181. ↩ ↩²

13. Helstosky 2008, publisher’s description. ↩

14. Regulation (EU) No 97/2010, Annex, section 3.8. ↩ ↩²

15. Dumas, Le Corricolo, chapter on the lazzarone. ↩

16. Nowak 2014 (bibliographic record). ↩