Chrysippus of Tyana on Cheesecakes
From Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, Book XIV

Chrysippus of Tyana, a learned writer on the art of cookery, or more properly speaking, on the art of making bread or sweetmeats, is called by Athenaeus sophos pemmatologos, and seems to have been little known before the time of the latter author. One of his works treated specially of the art of bread-making, and was entitled Artokopikos. (Athenaeus. iii. p. 113, xiv. pp. 647, c., 648, a. c.)

Oxford Dictionary of Sweets: Athenaeus
by S. Douglas Olson

Sometime around 200 CE, Athenaeus of Naucratis (a Greek city in Egypt) produced his massive Deipnosophists or Learned Banqueters, in 15 Books. Nominally an account of the food and wine consumed and the topics discussed at a series of elaborate dinner-parties in Rome, the work is in fact an antiquarian history of luxury, and is among the most important sources for ancient banqueting and culinary practices, as well as for otherwise lost Greek literary material of every sort. The gross structure of the Learned Banqueters imitates that of an individual dinner (deipnon) and the drinking-party (symposion) that followed it. Baked bread (artos) and unbaked barley cakes (maza), which were consumed as part of the main meal, are accordingly discussed early on (3.108f – 116a), while cakes and specialty sweets are treated toward the end of the work (14.643a – 648c).

Culinary history was already a topic of academic discussion by the mid-3rd century BCE, and Athenaeus (14.643a) reports that at least four now-lost treatises on cake-making (by Aegimus, Hegesippus, Metrobius, and Phaestus) were included in Callimachus' catalogue of the holdings of the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria. Athenaeus himself appears to have had at least second-hand access to other, similar works, including Chrysippus of Tyana's Breadmaking, Heracleides of Syracuse's Art of Cooking, and Iatrocles' On Cakes, of all of which he preserves scattered, brief quotations. In addition, Athenaeus draws on various lexicographers, local historians, and the like, who cited rare terms (including names of cakes) and preserved literary passages — many from otherwise vanished lyric poems and comedies — in which they occurred.

Some of the cakes described in Book 14 or in passing in Book 3 are ritual offerings, often with their own local names and shapes, such as the mulloi formed out of sesame-seeds and honey to resemble female genitalia that were carried in processions in honor of Demeter and Kore in Sicily (14.647a). Most of the others are tragêmata ('snacks'), which were served on the so-called 'second tables' as something approaching a dessert course after the main meal was over and the drinking had begun, along with e.g. boiled eggs, almonds, hare-meat, and roasted birds. Some of these cakes are fried in olive oil, such as the Syracusan staititas ('Moist spelt-flour dough is poured out into a frying pan, and honey, sesame-seeds, and cheese are added on top of it, according to Iatrocles'; 14.646b), but others appear simply to be kneaded together and served cold.

The most common 'extra ingredients' in the descriptions offered by Athenaeus are honey (also poured over fried items), cheese, sesame-seeds, milk, grape-must, and wine. In the early and most emphatically Greek cakes, neither herbs and seasonings (such as anise, cardamon, and garlic) nor fruit (including raisins) plays a role. Some of the handful of Roman-era recipes offered by Chrysippus of Tyana are more elaborate, as for example that for a Cretan gastris ('glutton-cake'): Gastris can be translated as 'delicacy.'

'Thasian nuts, Pontic nuts, and almonds, along with some poppy-seed; toast them, keeping a close eye on them as you do, and mash them fine in a clean mortar; mix the fruit in and work it smooth along with some reduced honey; add a considerable amount of pepper; and work it smooth. It turns out black because of the poppy-seed. Flatten it out into a square. Next, grate white sesame-seed; work it into a paste with reduced honey; press it into two sheets, putting one on the bottom, and the other on top of it, so that the black mixture can go in the middle; and assemble it nicely' (14.647f–648a).

Original text
κάρυα Θάσια καὶ Ποντικὰ καὶ ἀμύγδαλα, ἔτι δὲ μήκων, ἃ φρύξας θεράπευσον καλῶς καὶ εἰς θυίαν καθαρὰν τρῖψον ἐπιμελῶς: συμμίξας τε τὴν ὀπώραν μάλαξον μέλιτι ἡψημένῳ, προσβαλὼν πέπερι πλέον καὶ μάλαξον γίνεται δὲ μέλαν διὰ τὴν μήκωνα. διαπλατύνας ποίησον τετράγωνον. εἶτα σήσαμον λευκὸν τρίψας μάλαξον μέλιτι ἡψημένῳ καὶ ἕλκυσον λαγάνια δύο καὶ ἓν θὲς ὑποκάτω καὶ τὸ ἄλλο ἐπάνω, ἵνα τὸ μέλαν εἰς μέσον γένηται, εὖ ῥύθμισόν τε αὐτό.

Excerpt from Athenaeus:

"But Chrysippus of Tyana, in his book called the Art of Making Bread, enumerates the following species and genera of cheesecakes: —“The terentinum, the crassianum, the tutianum, the sabellicum, the clustron, the julianum, the apicia-num, the canopicum, the pelucidum, the cappadocium, the hedybium, the maryptum, the plicium, the guttatum, the montianum. This last,” he says, "you will soften with sour wine, and if you have a little cheese you may mash the montianum up half with wine and half with cheese, and so it will be more palatable. Then there is the clustrum curia-num, the clustrum tuttatum, and the clustrum tabonianum. There are also mustacia made with mead, mustacia made with sesame, crustum purium, gosgloanium, and paulianum.

“The following cakes resembling cheesecakes,” he says, “are really made with cheese:—the enchytus, the scriblites, the subityllus. There is also another kind of subityllus made of groats. Then there is the spira; this, too, is made with cheese. There are, too, the lucuntli, the argyrotryphema, the libos, the [p. 1035] cercus, the æxaphas, the clustroplacous. There is also,” says Chrysippus, "a cheesecake made of rye. The phthois is made thus:—Take some cheese and pound it, then put it into a brazen sieve and strain it; then put in honey and a hemina(1) of flour made from spring wheat, and beat the whole together into one mass.

"There is another cake, which is called by the Romans catillus ornatus, and which is made thus:—Wash some lettuces and scrape them; then put some wine into a mortar and pound the lettuces in it; then, squeezing out the juice, mix up some flour from spring wheat in it, and allowing it to settle, after a little while pound it again, adding a little pig's fat and pepper; then pound it again, draw it out into a cake, smoothe it, and cut it again, and cut it into shape, and boil it in hot oil, putting all the fragments which you have cut off into a strainer.

"Other kinds of cheesecakes are the following:—the ostra-cites, the attanites, the amylum, the tyrocoscinnm. Make this last thus:—Pound some cheese (τῦρον) carefully, and put it into a vessel; then place above it a brazen sieve (κόσκινον) and strain the cheese through it. And when you are going to serve it up, then put in above it a sufficient quantity of honey. The cheesecakes called ὑποτυρίδες are made thus:—Put some honey into some milk, pound them, and put them into a vessel, and let them coagulate; then, if you have some little sieves at hand, put what is in the vessel into them, and let the whey run off; and when it appears to you to have coagulated thoroughly, then take up the vessel in which it is, and transfer it to a silver dish, and the coat, or crust, will be uppermost. But if you have no such sieves; then use some new fans, such as those which are used to blow the fire; for they will serve the same purpose.

Then there is the coptoplacous. And also," says he, “in Crete they make a kind of cheesecake which they call gastris. And it is made thus:—Take some Thasian and Pontic nuts and some almonds, and also a poppy. Roast this last with great care, and then take the seed and pound it in a clean mortar; then, adding the fruits which I have mentioned above, beat them up with boiled honey, putting in plenty of pepper, and make the whole into a soft mass, (but it will be of a black colour because of the poppy;) flatten it and make it into a square [p. 1036] shape; then, having pounded some white sesame, soften that too with boiled honey, and draw it out into two cakes, placing one beneath and the other above, so as to have the black surface in the middle, and make it into a neat shape.”These are the recipes of that clever writer on confectionary, Chrysippus."

1 The ἡμίνα was equal to a κοτύλη, and held about half a pint.