Talk:Apicius

Minor corrections
Apicius does not mean beekeeper. At best the adjective means "liked by bees", whence "dainty"; in any case, as with modern names (e.g., Smith and Fisher), what Apicius "means" is irrelevant.

Though the name Apicius appears once in [http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/tacitus/tac.ann4.shtml#1 Tac. Ann. 4.1], it is with no connection to our cook; the story of Apicius sailing to Africa to look at crabs is not in Tacitus, but in Athenaeus. Bill 11:38, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

Disambiguating utterly?
I'm inclined to sort out the people called Apicius (at least three, apparently) from the book called Apicius, which no ancient source connects with any of the people. The book would get an article of its own. Does anyone object or want to comment? Andrew Dalby 18:28, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * No one objected, so I've gone ahead and done it. For links to all four articles see Apicius (disambiguation). Two biographical articles are new; Marcus Gavius Apicius is completely rewritten: the present article Apicius, on the cookbook, could do with some revision and expansion if anyone's interested. Andrew Dalby 13:11, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Lasagne vandalism
Removed this: it has recently been discoverd that pasta was used in ancient times there is evidence of a type lasagna product.

The sentence contradicts previous information in the article and has spelling errors. Suspected vandalism. If you disagree, please add, correcting spelling and hopefully giving a reference. OliAtlason (talk) 02:49, 9 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The following statement was deleted by an editor who specialises in deletions: "But in the flood of heavy tomes of pagan and Christian antiquity, it was unusual to read a Roman book containing recipes." Seemed like a sensible and literate observation to me, of course. --Wetman (talk) 15:30, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

This Wikipedia page links to a confirmed Malware distributor - http://www.mywot.com/de/scorecard/celtnet.org.uk 188.23.186.57 (talk) 16:55, 19 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I just got a file quarantined by my antivirus program visiting that link. I will remove the link. On another note, I really dislike the translation of "amulo" as "cornflour" in the sample recipe. The recipe is presented as a quotation, so I am hesitant to just change it to "flour", but cornflour is misleading to a US reader (where corn=maize, unavailable to the Romans), and uninformative to a UK reader (where corn=any of several different grains).Plantdrew (talk) 17:38, 20 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Pliny describes the manufacture of amylum in some detail, and it's wheat starch as reflected in the current version. Tarchon (talk) 19:40, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

First paragraph
I made two changes:
 * It's not "1st century AD" but "5th century AD". The article used to say "4th or 5th century", which was correct, but back in 2018 this was changed by 2a02:c7f:1203:e900:4402:f759:2636:147b to "1st century" without source or explanation. We can now correct this to "5th century" because the reliable Bruno Laurioux is already cited in the next paragraph for the "5th century" claim. So I attached the same footnote.
 * Not cited by Pliny the Elder: this claim was added by 2a01:cb15:8068:9b00:6d95:6f4b:ce35:9156 in late 2021. The reference given was wrong, so I checked the index to Pliny. Yes, it's true that Pliny mentions the gastronome Marcus Gavius Apicius (see that article) but Pliny never cites the cookbook Apicius and never suggests that M. Gavius Apicius wrote a cookbook. Andrew Dalby 20:45, 31 March 2022 (UTC)