The dangers of cooking in Rome

II. Magic in women’s daily lives

Greco-Roman literature depicts the two great sorceresses Circe and Medea preparing potions, concoctions, balms, and ointments in the performance of their magical practices. The fundamental object of this preparation is the cauldron (see the entry «Medea, sorceress scorned») and the ingredients necessary for cooking, in addition to the correct diction of the recipe or incantation (see the Greek and Roman curse tablets), since a recipe and a curse share the same syntactic and morphological structure: «pour, mix, shake, let stand, leave to macerate, leave to cool at night, etc. » in identical psalmody. This magical scene refers in Rome to a real physical space in the house, the kitchen, usually occupied by women, since only there was the hearth where to put the cauldron to cook. Therefore, it is rightly stated that the kitchen is a space marked by gender, in the sense that it was inhabited by women and rarely accessed by men. The fact is that in the rich houses the kitchen was a territory of sociability between slaves and masters, in which they coincided in the common task of preparing food, but also, and this is very relevant, of making home remedies for the cure of wounds or minor illnesses.

In this context, the Roman historian Livy (VIII, 8) transmits the case of a series of deaths of husbands, brothers, and fathers of the Roman elite by a plague, of which the Roman noblewomen were accused, denounced by a maid. When the aedile in charge of the investigation arrived at the residence of the main accused, he found evident remains of poisoned concoctions, clear proof of her guilt. Although the Roman noblewomen gathered there defended themselves by saying that they were remedies, the denunciation of the maid and the discovery of poison (possibly put there by the maid herself) condemned them to capital punishment. Why these noblewomen were accused of a crime that in all probability they did not commit is a matter of debate, but in times of famine elderly men and women become a social burden (remember the massacre perpetrated in elderly residences during COVID 19).

Rosario López Gregoris