The cabbage came from grief.
The myth that gives the cabbage its particular character in the ancient Greek botanical and theological tradition is the myth of Lycurgus, the Thracian king who refused Dionysus and lost everything to that refusal. The story is preserved in Apollodorus and in fragments of the older Homeric tradition: Lycurgus encountered the god whose retinue was moving through his kingdom and attempted to drive them out. He drove the god’s nurses into the sea. He chased Dionysus himself until the god took refuge in the salt water beneath the waves. He imprisoned the maenads and the votaries and attempted to restore the order of the Thracian kingdom that the Dionysian procession had disrupted.
The gods do not forget this kind of refusal. Zeus struck Lycurgus blind for the offense. Then the madness arrived.
The madness of Lycurgus was not the madness that Dionysus gave to those who embraced him: the ecstatic dissolution of the self whose theology the Bacchae article in this collection develops as the god’s actual domain. It was the madness that comes from the refusal of the Dionysian dissolution, the madness of the person who has tried to maintain the ordered boundaries of the organized world against the force that the organized world cannot contain, and who in that maintenance has lost the capacity to distinguish the real from the apparent.
In the grip of this madness, Lycurgus mistook his son for a grapevine and cut him down with an axe. When the madness cleared and the king understood what he had done, he wept. The Thracian earth received those tears, and from them the first cabbages grew.
The Theological Content of the Origin
The myth encodes the relationship between two plants as the conflict between the two principles those plants represent.
The grapevine was Dionysus’s plant: the fermentation of its fruit into the substance that produced the temporary dissolution of the self was the most precisely appropriate material expression of the divine domain. The vine was the plant of the force that exceeded the organized world’s capacity to contain it.
The cabbage was the anti-vine. Its origin in the tears of the king who had tried to maintain the organized world against Dionysus gave it the character of the plant born from the grief of the failed resistance: not the triumphant earth rising to defeat the god but the suffering earth absorbing the consequences of the defeat of the god’s opponent. The cabbage was not the victor over Dionysus. It was the residue of the defeat of the person who had tried to defeat Dionysus.
This origin gave the cabbage its particular position in the ancient Greek botanical theology: not the plant of celebration or divine ecstasy but the plant of the morning after, the plant of the sober ground that remained when the Dionysian intoxication had passed, the plant of the grief and the clarity that followed the encounter with the force that Lycurgus had tried and failed to contain.
The ancient Greeks were precise observers of the natural world whose qualities they understood as material expressions of the theological realities the mythological tradition had named. The quality of the cabbage the tradition most consistently noted was the cooling, sulfurous character that stood in the most direct material contrast to the warmth and fermentation of the grape. The biological enmity between the two plants was the material expression of the theological enmity between the two principles that the Lycurgus myth had encoded.
What Theophrastus Observed
Theophrastus, the student of Aristotle whose botanical tradition the pharmakeia article in this collection develops as the most systematic ancient Greek engagement with the properties of the plants of the Greek landscape, documented the observable antagonism between the grapevine and the cabbage with the patience of the botanical observer whose method was the careful, sustained attention to the behavior of plants in the conditions of their environment.
The vine turns its tendrils away from the cabbage. The grapevine, whose tendrils seek the support of whatever structure is closest to the growing tip, consistently avoided the cabbage when both were present in the same garden space, directing its growth toward any other available support rather than toward the cabbage whose proximity the vine registered as the obstacle to avoid.
The modern botanical tradition explains this through allelopathy: the glucosinolates the cabbage releases into the soil inhibit the growth of the grapevine in the zone of its chemical influence. The same compounds give the cabbage its sulfurous character when cooked and produce the cooling bite of the raw leaf.
Theophrastus did not have the vocabulary of allelopathy. He had the vocabulary of the philosophical tradition that the botanical observation was made within, and the vine’s avoidance of the cabbage was understood as the material expression of the theological enmity whose mythological encoding was the Lycurgus tradition. The plant encoded the story. The story explained the plant. The ancient Greek tradition did not separate these two registers of understanding.
Aristotle, the Symposion, and the Cabbage Before the Wine
The most practically developed application of the cabbage-vine enmity in the ancient Greek tradition was the practice of eating cabbage before drinking wine at the symposion.
Aristotle documented the physiological mechanism as the tradition understood it: the cabbage possessed a cooling quality whose application to the heated condition that wine produced in the body created the moderation of the Dionysian intoxication that the organized civic tradition of the symposion required. The symposion was not the abandonment of the organized world to the Dionysian force but the controlled encounter with the Dionysian force within the framework of the civic gathering: the social institution that the Platonic and Xenophontic symposion traditions developed as the occasion of the philosophical conversation that required both the loosening of the self that the wine provided and the maintenance of the capacity for argument that the wine threatened to dissolve.
The cabbage before the wine was the practical implementation of the theological insight the Lycurgus tradition had encoded: the earth produces the plant that modifies the vine’s force. The cooling quality of the Lycurgus-plant tempered the heating quality of the Dionysus-plant. The grief of the failed resistance to Dionysus had produced the instrument of the controlled engagement with the Dionysian force within the organized civic space.
The practice was simple: eat the cabbage raw, or eat its seeds, before the wine is poured. The cooling sulfurous quality of the raw cabbage, whose biological mechanism the modern tradition explains through the glucosinolates’ effects on gastric mucosa and the rate of alcohol absorption, produces the moderation of the wine’s effect that the combination of philosophical conversation and convivial drinking at the symposion required.
The Lycurgus myth named the relationship. The Aristotelian tradition gave it its practical application. The symposion institutionalized the application as the dietary preparation for the controlled Dionysian encounter.
Diogenes and the Autarkeia of the Cabbage
The Diogenes article in this collection develops the philosophical content of the Cynic tradition through the figure of the person who had identified the minimum requirement for the human life and organized their existence around the provision of that minimum and nothing more.
The story that connects the Diogenes tradition to the cabbage tradition is consistent across its versions: Diogenes was eating cabbage when a representative of the Macedonian court attempted to persuade him that if he would only learn to flatter the king he would not need to eat cabbage. Diogenes replied that if the courtier had only learned to eat cabbage he would not need to flatter the king.
The philosophical content of this exchange is the autarkeia argument: the person whose requirements are the minimum that the earth provides without the organization of the social world has the freedom from the social obligations that the person whose requirements exceed that minimum must discharge. The cabbage was not the symbol of poverty in the Cynic tradition. It was the symbol of freedom. The person who could subsist on cabbage had no need of the court, the patron, the institution, or the organized social world whose benefits required the performance of the social obligations whose maintenance constrained the freedom that the Cynic tradition identified as the highest available form of the human life.
Diogenes ate cabbage not because it was all he could afford but because it was all he required. The requirement defined the freedom.
The Lahanosalata and the Winter Table
The lahanosalata, the shredded raw cabbage salad dressed with lemon and olive oil, is the winter salad that the Greek table has maintained in the most continuous available form across the transition from the ancient tradition through the Byzantine period to the contemporary kitchen. It is the food whose preparation most directly preserves the theological tradition of the cabbage as the anti-vine.
Raw. The Aristotelian tradition identified the raw preparation as the instrument of the moderation of wine: the cooling sulfurous quality is at its maximum in the raw cabbage and is substantially reduced by heat. The lahanosalata is eaten raw because the raw preparation preserves the quality that the tradition identified as the cabbage’s excellence.
Lemon. The acidity of the lemon adds the brightness that lifts the earthiness of the cabbage into the freshness the winter table requires. The lemon has been used in the Greek culinary tradition since its Mediterranean introduction as the brightening element of the winter kitchen, the counterpoint to the heavy earthiness of the root and brassica tradition.
Olive oil. Athena’s gift. Its use as the dressing of the raw salad connects the lahanosalata to the longest continuous tradition in the Greek culinary heritage.
The lahanosalata is on every winter table in Greece. It is on the table because it is good and because it is simple and because the winter cabbage is at its best in December and January. It is also on the table because the tradition whose content is the Lycurgus myth and the Aristotelian dietary practice and the Diogenes autarkeia argument has been deposited in the culinary habit of the population in the form of the winter salad whose character is those traditions expressed in the most available and most persistent material form.
The tradition is in the salad. The salad does not know this. It does not need to.
The Thracian Earth and the Living Continuity
Thrace was the region most consistently associated in the ancient Greek geographical imagination with the Dionysian tradition: the region from which Orpheus came and to which the Dionysian tradition arrived from its eastern origins, the borderland between the organized world of the Hellenic tradition and the wildness of the Thracian interior whose combination of forest and mountain and extreme northern cold gave it the particular quality of the place where the encounter between the organized world and the forces that exceeded it was most directly available.
The cabbage of Lycurgus came from this region. The tears of the king who had tried to maintain the organized world against the Dionysian force fell on the Thracian earth and produced the plant whose character was the character of the grief of the failed resistance. The plant carried that character from the Thracian earth into the gardens of the entire ancient Greek world and from those gardens into the winter markets of Athens and Thessaloniki and the village squares of the Peloponnese.
The plant on every Greek winter table is the plant that came from the tears of the king who tried to drive Dionysus into the sea. The vine that produces the wine on every Greek table is the plant of the god that Lycurgus tried to drive away. The two plants are still on the same table. The enmity that Theophrastus observed in the garden is still in the food. The Aristotelian practice of the cabbage before the wine has not disappeared from the Greek culinary tradition. It has simply become the salad that arrives before the wine is poured.
The cabbage came from grief. The vine came from celebration. They are still on the same table. They have been on the same table for three thousand years.
At Olympus Estate, Food and Seasonal Life traces the culinary traditions of the Greek world from the ancient harvest through the Byzantine kitchen to the contemporary table. The cabbage came from grief. Lycurgus drove Dionysus into the sea and imprisoned his followers and in the madness that followed killed his own son mistaken for a grapevine. His tears produced the first cabbages. Theophrastus observed that the vine turns its tendrils away from the cabbage in the garden. Aristotle documented that eating cabbage before the wine moderated the wine’s force: the cabbage was the instrument of the controlled engagement with the Dionysian at the symposion. Diogenes ate cabbage because the person who could subsist on cabbage had no need of the court. The lahanosalata is raw because the raw preparation preserves the cooling quality at its maximum. The vine and the cabbage are still on the same Greek table. They have been on the same table for three thousand years.
