Introduction

Taste and the Ancient Senses brings together material and literary remains of Graeco-Roman antiquity to explore the sense disparaged here above all others: that of gustatory sensation. The fascination with taste categories goes back to the earliest theoretical analysis of the sense. A key distinction between "ancient" and "modern" views of taste is the degree of multimodal integration they suggest it entails in the mouth. The science of tasting, with its focus on nerve stimulation and the precise differentiation of experiences in the mouth, makes taste a disembodied physical and psychological phenomenon, with explanations that attempt to isolate the taste experience from the body as a whole. Taste is a functional sense, requiring intimate interaction with its objects of perception, which enter the mouth, pass through the gullet and eventually become part of the perceiver. The multivalent relationships between the sense of taste, food and the act of eating are too complex to be considered from any single perspective.