Chicken à la Fronto

Abstract

This article discusses possible eponyms of the dish pullus Frontonianus in the cookbook “De re coquinaria” (Apic. 6, 8, 12). The attribution faces a number of difficulties, such as the authorship and dating of the corpus ascribed to Apicius and the fact that the cognomen Fronto did not belong to one particular nomen gentilicium. The author considers several Frontones: the addressee of Martial’s epigram (I, 55, 2), a rich patron mentioned in Juvenal’s satire (1, 12), and a person who wrote on agriculture and was a contemporary of the emperor Septimius Severus. A special section is dedicated to M. Cornelius, the teacher of Marcus Aurelius and the most famous among Frontones. The article studies both external evidence and the internal logic of the correspondence of M Cornelius Fronto in order to find out his attitude to food and to consider the possibility that the dish was named after him. The author concludes that there are no compelling arguments to attribute pullus Frontonianus with certainty to any of the Frontones discussed.