James Davidson

COURTESANS & FISHCAKES
THE CONSUMING PASSIONS OF
CLASSICAL ATHENS

Copyright

William Collins

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Fontana Press 1998

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

Copyright © James Davidson 1997

James Davidson asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

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Praise

‘James Davidson shows in this stylish, persuasive, scholarly book how classical Athens relished eating, drinking and copulating … It is a serious work, though always seasoned with wit, not only because it puts forward new ideas about big issues in social and cultural history, but also because it has a message for our times, a message unobtrusively but insistently registered.’

OLIVER TAPLIN, Observer

‘Commendably sceptical, Courtesans and Fishcakes is a significant contribution to Classical studies and marks an impressive debut. We will hear more from Mr Davidson.’

CHRISTOPHER STACE, Daily Telegraph

‘“Model democracy,” or model for sensualists everywhere? Ancient Athens – or at least its ruling class – took pleasure very seriously, and this highly enjoyable study concentrates on the important things in life: food, drink and sex. There are fascinating details here about both prostitution and the hetaeras; some of Davidson’s most amusing passages tell of the faux-respectable interpretations put, by prudish scholars, on frankly pornographic vase paintings and verses … For all its entertainment value, this is a serious contribution to classical studies.’

Independent on Sunday

‘A splendid story … Davidson’s canvas is vast.’

PETER JONES, Sunday Telegraph

‘A relaxed interpretation of sensual life in the time of Pericles, Socrates and Plato. Courtesans and Fishcakes is about sex, food and drink and the part all three played in developing Athenian identity. Where others have found exploitation and outrage, Davidson is more likely to have found fun. He spars with Foucault and Freud, biographers and bishops, with open glee.’

PETER STOTHARD, The Times

‘James Davidson with skill teases out deeper meanings from ancient literature to provide an absorbing look at society and politics in the world’s first democracy. If classical history had been like this at school I might have tasted its joys long before now … This book is itself a feast.’

DAVID STAFFORD, Scotland on Sunday

‘It is fashionable for classicists to lament the passing of their light. They have largely themselves to blame. Obsessed with arid language they continued to sell their vision of eternal oranges and sunshine in a land where people ate apples and it rained a lot. So we lost sight of a world that was vibrantly alive. Books like Courtesans and Fishcakes are doing much to turn the tide … Davidson does well with his rich material. He has a fine eye for semantics. It is delightful to learn that the language of purest thought has 33 terms for abusing a tax collector – and 52 for praising a king. Courtesans and Fishcakes [is full of] good academic work, an excellent reinterpretation. But above all, Davidson brings ancient Athens unforgettably to life.’

ROSS LECKIE, The Oldie

‘A worldly study of ancient Hellenic appetites concentrating on eating, drinking, sex and politics – but mostly sex. Whether interpreting erotic images on vases, taking us room by room through a 5th century BC brothel, or explaining the various declensions of Athenian prostitutes, Davidson uses accessible yet scholarly prose.’

ANDREW ROBERTS, Mail on Sunday

‘Excellent, promising, written with biting clarity … to my delight, he blows Nietzsche full of holes and blasts Foucault out of the water. We will watch what he undertakes next with the expectation of delight.’

PETER LEVI, Spectator

‘There’s much fascinating information on the relationships in Ancient Greece between men, women, and boys.’

WILLIAM LEITH, Observer, Summer Reading

‘The motto of the ancient Athenians was “nothing in excess,” but they still knew how to enjoy themselves. James Davidson’s survey of their eating, drinking and sexual habits reveals a more inventively hedonistic society than previous studies of the period. While conspicuous consumption was taboo in the age of Socrates and Plato, the Athenians still drank vast amounts of wine, adopted a myriad of sexual positions and were as keen on exotic fish dishes as any Nineties foodie.’

The Week

‘enjoyable … a splendid debut’

Oxford Mail

‘Eating, drinking and sex were the abiding passions of Classical Athens, but have so far been treated as no more than pleasures indulged in by the wealthy. Now James Davidson puts these pleasures in the context of society and politics and comes up with some startling conclusions. If you thought you knew all about the ancient Greeks, be prepared for some surprises.’

Northern Echo

Dedication

For D. A. D. and G. H. D.

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PART I. FEASTS

I Eating

II Drinking

PART II . DESIRE

III Women and Boys

IV A Purchase on the Hetaera

PART III . THE CITIZEN

V Bodies

VI Economies

PART IV . THE CITY

VII Politics and Society

VIII Politics and Politicians

IX Tyranny and Revolution

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Introduction

IN THE COLLECTION of the Vatican Museums is a mosaic signed by one Heraclitus. Across a white background is an even scattering of debris: a wish-bone, a claw, some fruit, various discarded limbs of sea-creatures, the remains of a fish. It is a copy of a famous mosaic by the artist Sosos of Pergamum, called the Unswept Hall. Sosos, whom the Roman antiquarian Pliny called ‘the most renowned’ of all mosaicists, worked in the first half of the second century BCE. He specialized in illusionistic works, trying to turn the unpromising medium of coloured tiles into something lifelike and real. His most famous and remarkable work depicted doves drinking from a birdbath. You could even see their reflections on the surface of the water, says Pliny. A copy was discovered at Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli. It is indeed a fine example of what ancient artists were capable of, achieving a very real sense of the basin’s three-dimensional form and burnished metallic sheen. What is so remarkable, however, about the Unswept Hall, is not its illusionistic ambition, but its objective humility. It is a floor that depicts a floor, closing the gap between art and life. This is most obvious, perhaps, with the white tiles, which have a perfect identity with the white tiles of an unswept floor. More honest than the sipping doves, on one level it really is what it claims to be; it is a trick-floor, impossible to clean.

But the floor is not really the subject at all. The true theme is an unseen banquet, as we can tell from the strewn litter. And this feast still seems to be going on. There was a pause in Greek banquets between the eating part and the drinking part of the meal, when tables were cleared, floors swept, hands washed and perfumes splashed. Sosos’ banquet has not quite reached that stage. Moreover, some of the debris casts rather strange shadows as if it is hovering half a millimetre above the ground, as if it has a little way still to fall.

The subject of this book is similar to Sosos’ – not the ancient banquet exactly, but the pleasures of the flesh that were indulged there: eating and drinking and sex. These are the consuming passions, three varieties of bodily gratification to which the whole human race, according to Plato, was susceptible from birth. Aristotle described them as animal cravings: hunger, thirst and lust, base and servile urges with their true foundation, contrary to appearances, in the sense of touch. This accounts for the gourmand, he says, who prayed for the throat of a crane so he could enjoy his food for the longest time, as it travelled slowly down. More exactly, this book is about the pleasures of the flesh in classical Athens, because although not all the material I have used falls inside the classical period (479–323 BCE – Before the Common Era) and a little of it is not even pure Athenian, it is Athens and the Athenian democracy that provide the context.

Its material is the scraps that have fallen from the tables of ancient literature, snatches of conversation, anecdotes abruptly curtailed and stories that seem to make no sense: an explorer comes across a savage tribe on the shores of the Persian Gulf who live off bread made from fish and ‘fishcakes’ for special occasions; the philosopher Socrates visits a beautiful woman who lives in luxury with no visible means of support and refers obliquely to ‘her friends’; the guests at a drinking-party imagine they are at sea and throw furniture out of the windows to prevent their boat from capsizing; a politician makes a speech about towers and walls and finds himself accused of prostitution; a tyrant finds a lost ring inside a magnificent fish and thinks he recognizes the work of the gods, but when he tells the King of Egypt he immediately breaks off their friendship; the general Alcibiades drinks wine without water, countless statues of Hermes are vandalized in the night and Athens loses the Peloponnesian War.

One particular table has provided especially rich pickings, Athenaeus’ Dinner-sophists or Banquet of Scholars, composed at the turn of the second century of the Common Era (CE), a long work in the form of a dialogue in the tradition of Plato’s Symposium. Instead of discussing the meaning of life or the nature of love, however, Athenaeus’ guests talk only of the banquet itself, of different kinds of food and wine, of famous courtesans and boastful chefs, of cups and riddles, of a league-table of luxurious nations. They are hardly interested in their own period, concentrating on the world before the Romans arrived, particularly the world of classical Athens which had succumbed to an army of Macedonians five hundred years before. Most importantly, the guests are astonishing pedants, bolstering the most trivial comments with a formidable array of quotations from ancient literature, literature which has now almost entirely disappeared.

Very few scholars are interested in Athenaeus himself and his pernickety banquet, but the scraps from his table provide a unique resource for historians of pleasure. Ancient historians often find themselves relying on only one author for matters of the greatest importance. Thanks to Athenaeus, however, those who wish to know what the Greeks thought of crustaceans, or of various courtesans, or of the proper way to drink wine, can draw on a huge number of authors and a wide range of genres. Of course Athenaeus has his own clear predilections and his selection must not be seen as a representative cross-section of Athenian culture or Athenian literature in general. He draws especially on the comic poets and it is Attic comedy, produced each year at festivals of Dionysus, that provides the basis for much of what we know of Athenian life. Unlike the tragedies which gave up on the present early in the classical period, comedy was very much about the contemporary world and contemporary issues. It often named contemporary politicians and public figures or featured them in its plots, resorting to the world of myths and heroes only in order to parody tragic rivals or to set up incongruous juxtapositions between then and now.

Comedy is not the only source, however, for Athenian pleasures. We also have a large number of speeches covering the period from the late fifth century to the late fourth in the corpus of the ‘Attic Orators’, the top ten classical rhetoricians, selected by later critics as suitable models for emulation and preservation – plus a few others who managed to slip incognito through the canon’s net. Most of these speeches are forensic, attacking enemies in the law-courts or trying to provide a feasible defence. Some are deliberative, speeches on public policy delivered in the Assembly. A few are epideictic, demonstration pieces, designed to show off the speaker’s skill. Because of their context they present a very different perspective on pleasure from the festive comedies, emphasizing the dangers that appetite presents to the household and the city and to fellow-citizens; not their own appetites of course, but those of their enemies.

Apart from these sources, there are a large number of miscellaneous works preserved in Athenaeus or independently; treatises and pamphlets on various themes, including one very famous manual of sex and seduction by Philaenis, a classical Kama Sutra, of which, sadly, only the barest scraps survive. There are also a large number of anecdotal works by the likes of Lynceus of Samos and Machon, who collected the witticisms of courtesans and put them in verse. Chief among these anecdotal works, perhaps, is Xenophon’s Memoirs, in which the philosopher Socrates discourses on various issues of everyday life, advising the author against kissing a handsome boy, and engaging the mysterious beauty, Theodote, in conversation.

It might be thought that such an interesting subject, fundamental as well as sensational, with such a wealth of material to work with, must have been thoroughly investigated long ago, but this is far from being the case. Even now there is considerable resistance to an area of ancient studies which is seen as no more than light relief between papers on more important topics. It is true that this kind of antiquarian/philological research into customs and lifestyles has a rather longer pedigree than other branches of ancient history. Isaac Casaubon, whose notes on Athenaeus first appeared in 1600, can still be useful to modern researchers. On the other hand, since the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially since the Second World War, there has been an astonishing decline in interest in the subject among professional historians. In part their attention has been absorbed by archaeology and inscriptions, which often have a more straightforward relationship to the ‘Real World’ than fantastical authors such as Aristophanes or unreliable gossips such as Lynceus, and which often carry with them the kudos of new discoveries. Material objects, documents and ‘solid facts’ carry a kind of mystical objectivity for many historians, constituting what some refer to as the ‘meat and potatoes’ part of history. In fact, some historians are so distrustful of airy-fairy texts and soufflés like Athenaeus, they would rather not use them at all, trusting only to silent stones, ground-plans and artefacts when conducting their research – as well as large doses of their own (objective) intuition. Ancient history, however, is not so rich in resources that it can afford to ignore any of them. A neglected or misused text is as much a lost artefact as something buried several feet underground.

While scholarly attention has been distracted elsewhere, some extraordinary gaps have been allowed to open up in our knowledge of ancient culture and society. The lack of work on Greek hetero-sexuality and (until recently and outside France) ancient food are particularly striking. I can only think that prostitutes and courtesans are not considered worthy of women’s history or that they have been overlooked in the belief that Greek homosexuality was more significant or important. Even at the end of this research I am left not with a sense of satisfaction that the material is exhausted, but with the realization that much is still preliminary and an anxiety about how much remains to be done. Anyone with time on their hands and a desire to make a substantial contribution to human knowledge will find few more promising areas of investigation than Greek bring-your-own ‘contribution-dinners’, Attic cakes, the ‘second’ dessert table, the consumption of game, gambling, perfumes, flower wreaths, hairstyles, horse-racing, pet birds and all the various entertainments of the symposium, including slapstick, stand-up comedy and acrobatics. The only necessary qualification would be a willingness to take these subjects seriously (not too seriously), since they are worth much more than a superficial survey. With the comic fragments recently edited and judiciously annotated by Rudolf Kassel and Colin Austin, there is no longer any excuse.

I mention the general neglect of this area of ancient studies in part to correct a common and rather bizarre misapprehension that sex and other indulgences have received more than their fair share of scholarly attention in recent years and to crave the reader’s indulgence for my notes. It has occasionally been necessary to spend time and space establishing some very basic facts which have to be argued for and supported with citations from ancient texts, before going on to the more interesting task of drawing out their implications, suggesting solutions and putting them in context, the main role of the second half of the book. However, those who get impatient with the spade-work can comfort themselves with the thought that they are at the cutting edge of this soft subject.

To be fair, one problem with this kind of research has always been that the evidence is rather slippery and difficult to handle. Historians of the ancient world prefer to work with honest-seeming, authoritative sources, such as Thucydides or Polybius who seem to have done their homework properly. Greek comedy, on the other hand, though it was clearly dealing with the real world, was far from straightforwardly realistic, as anyone will know who has attended a performance of one of Aristophanes’ plays. This means we have to approach comic fragments with caution to see whether they are referring to an everyday situation or some fantastic scenario. If a comic poet talks of a law to stop fishmongers drenching their fish with water to make them look fresher than they really are, do we imagine there really was a law at Athens to that effect, or rather that a law has been passed in the play because of some imaginary crisis (the Clouds boycotting Athens, Zeus on strike, or the goddess Truth taking over the city)? On the other hand, it is often in the most extravagant images that the most powerful insights into Athenian society are found. Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, for instance, a satire on women seizing power, opens with the ringleader addressing a lamp, the trusty confidante of women’s secrets and witness to their adulteries, whose silence alone they trust. Few would consider Athenian women ever seriously contemplated a revolution or that they ever spoke to their lamps. Nor is it likely that they were engaged in endless bouts of sex with forbidden lovers. On the other hand, the address to the lamp throws light on various aspects of Athenian life and culture that can be confirmed from elsewhere: that the sexes were often segregated, that men looked on women as rather mysterious creatures, that the segregation carried an erotic charge, that women had to be extremely careful if they broke the sexual rules, that sexual insubordination and political insubordination could be linked in the imagination and on stage.

Speeches too have their pitfalls. Standards of proof were rather low in Athenian courts and truth was not necessarily placed at a premium. Modern scholars are extremely doubtful that the events are as the orators describe. They suspect orators of inventing laws, lying about their opponents’ families and status, lying about their age. One prosecutor positively boasts that he has no evidence for his accusations apart from rumour, whose testimony he praises to the skies. On the other hand, we know that the defendant against whom rumour testified was convicted and although the orators are unreliable witnesses of what went on in Athens, they are excellent witnesses of what was thought convincing. We may not really believe that a man could ‘spend an entire estate on affairs with boys’ or that the largest fortune in Greece could evaporate because of expensive parties and women, but the Athenians certainly did believe these things and that is interesting in itself.

It will be clear from this that ultimately the subject of this book is not so much the pleasures of the flesh themselves, but what the Greeks, and especially the Athenians, said about them, the way they represented them, the consequences they ascribed to them, the way they thought they worked. Instead of looking at the ancient sources as windows on a world, we can see them as artefacts of that world in their own right. We know that the Unswept Hall is not an accurate representation of the floor of a banquet. The randomly scattered rubbish is in fact not random at all, but evenly spaced, and contains a bit of everything without the repetitions and haphazard accumulations we would expect. But even though the picture is ‘wrong’, it might tell us a lot about the importance of banquets in the ancient world, the nature of realism, the notion of extravagance, of randomness; the artist’s ‘error’ might even give insights into why the lottery was made the linchpin of Athenian democracy. If, to take another example, a particular poet describes a courtesan as whorish, greedy and deceitful, it is rather difficult to decide now whether his assessment was accurate. On the other hand, we know for sure that it is very good evidence for the way courtesans were represented on stage. Alexander the Great may or may not have died from taking a massive swig of wine, but many Greeks said he did, and their ideas about the effects of wine are what concern us.

This kind of investigation is known as the study of discourse, a term popularized by the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Discourse is more or less the same thing as ‘attitudes’, if we allow that term its full balletic implications of posturing and plurality. In Greece, above all, where the sophists had made praising gnats, playing devil’s advocate and arguing black was white a national sport, it would be dangerous to take our sources as good evidence even for their own views, but what is interesting about Foucault’s work is the realization that misrepresentations are just as interesting as representations, and even more useful, when you can identify them, are outrageous lies.

Critias, for instance, a right-wing philosopher and a leader in the oppressive regime imposed on Athens after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, is almost certainly lying when he says the Spartans drank only water from their mug-like cups. If this was no more than a personal idiosyncrasy we could not draw any broader conclusions, but his little lie is part of a pattern we find in other authors who spend time and effort defending Spartan institutions, their effeminate long hair, their fancy cloaks dyed Tyrian purple. A whole host of other sources, moreover, seem to contradict Critias directly, representing Spartan cups as the kind of cups used for the most degenerate kind of drinking: strong wine, greedy swigs, drinking solely to get drunk as quickly as possible. Critias is clearly participating in a debate defending the Spartan reputation for asceticism in the face of the quite different reputation acquired in Athens by their cups.

These debates over Sparta and over the right way to drink, carried on by many different authors over a long period of time, are like super-discourses, a kind of generalized conversation carried on within Athenian culture, of which Critias’ extraordinary defence of Spartan cups is merely a particular exemplar. These ideal and repetitive debates are, for some cultural historians, the real object of historical investigation, and individual texts mere instances.

Historians not only use texts as windows, sometimes they assume that is their purpose too, as if the Greeks wanted to give us a view on the ancient world, to let posterity see what they were like, as if the real audience is not the audience sitting in the law-courts or the theatre, but us. Very occasionally, this view is fair enough. Thucydides wanted to put down the most accurate record of the war he lived through and intended his history to be a ‘possession for all time’ which includes us, even though he may not have been thinking quite so far ahead. People produce images and texts for all kinds of reasons, for beauty, for art itself, to make a living, to commemorate, to amuse, to create an atmosphere, as therapy and so on. It seems fair to say, however, that in Critias’ case it is the debate about Sparta that causes him to put pen to paper. He is intervening in a controversy. He is a propagandist, a pamphleteer. The debate, the problematization of Sparta, or of Spartan cups, comes first. The texts are symptoms of that controversy. This way of looking at our sources leads to some strange conclusions: the more people talk about something, the more contentious that subject was, the less of a consensus there was about it. Far from reflecting the way the Greeks normally spoke, texts are often arguing uphill, insisting on a point of view that few of their contemporaries would share. The text is produced to change minds. By the same argument, the most obvious and unquestioned things may never make it into texts at all. We hear very little, for instance, of how the Greeks ate their food, because it involved a set of banal practices that no one considered worthy of remark. In the case of appetites, we hear much more about dangerous activities than about everyday consumption.

Often, then, what looks like the most promising evidence, addressing a question directly, turns out to be the least trustworthy. When an orator stops in mid-speech to tell his audience the difference between wives, concubines and courtesans, we should be immediately on our guard. When a philosopher provides us with a useful definition of what a gourmand really is, we should resist the temptation to copy it into our dictionaries. Foucault himself seems to have forgotten this useful principle in his own study of sexuality, which is overwhelmingly dependent on philosophical and prescriptive texts which set out to tell him the answers. He seems to have thought that even if these sources were unreliable witnesses of what went on, they were good representatives of Greek concerns with sexuality. They were not. Foucault’s study of Greek sexuality has very little on women at all and gives the impression the Greeks were much more interested in boys. Any examination of comic fragments, vase-paintings and Attic oratory, however, shows this impression is quite false, a Platonic mirage. Philosophers are often useful, devoting more space to pleasure and working towards a deeper analysis, but they feature rather less in this book than in other studies of Greek attitudes and when they do appear, some context is sought to measure the angle and spin on what these tricksters are saying.

The shift from using texts as windows to using texts as artefacts in their own right has rescued the study of ancient pleasure from endless arguments about reliability and the ‘rhetorical topos’ or cliché. Private life has by its nature fewer witnesses than battles and political debates and there are fewer checks on lies and misrepresentations. The discourse of private life on the other hand is eminently public. Much of our evidence comes from central areas of debate, the theatres and law-courts, from the hill of the Pnyx itself where the Athenian Assembly met. The audiences it was supposed to amuse and persuade were numbered in their thousands. Moreover, in this context, statements gain meaning instead of losing it when they are found repeated elsewhere by other authors. Instead of dismissing such things as mere commonplaces that mean nothing apart from the speaker’s hostility, admiration or contempt, we can put them together, making connections, working out their mechanisms, illuminating patterns of debate. We can even construct little narratives of pleasure with their own implied beginnings and their own augured ends. We can try to see if our author is relating a casual consensus or casually trying to defend a sticky wicket and, thanks to Athenaeus, the conclusions we draw about what Athenians talked about and wrote about will be more reliable, since the statements have come from many different authors and have been exposed to a wide audience. We know next to nothing about Plato’s audience, by contrast, and he may be, and sometimes clearly is, a testament only to his own (very interesting) self.

We can, however, sometimes go too far with discourse and start fetishizing it as a new reality. Foucault and his followers often run into trouble on three counts especially. Although he is interested in ancient debates and not some single ‘ancient view’, the debate is often conceived too narrowly and rigidly. What the Greeks said about pleasure is much messier and much more varied than what you would expect from Foucault. Secondly, on the basis of this narrow and rigid idea of discourse, human history has been divided into discrete ages (often making sense only in France) or epistemes separated by world-shattering intellectual revolutions that open up great chasms in time. Each of these epistemes is viewed as a crystal that must be shattered before a new episteme is crystallized again in a quite new age. Originally the theory was applied only to the category of knowledge and used to account for a culture’s peculiar blind-spots and fantasies. In his later work on sexuality, however, and in the work of his followers, it was applied more generally. Greek civilization, according to this interpretation, is an irretrievably alien culture, constituting a separate sealed world with its own peculiar possibilities for experience. Finally, in fetishizing a culture’s representations of the world in this way, Foucault and his followers sometimes seem to forget about the world itself, which is still waving through the window, as if what a culture says is, is, on some important level, as if the Greeks walked around in a virtual reality they had constructed for themselves from discourse.

One very popular theory about the Greeks, for instance, showing the influence of Freud and de Beauvoir as well as Foucault, claims that the Greeks divided the world up into two parts, Them and Us. Us being the adult male citizens who wrote all the texts, Them being the others or Other, slaves, women, barbarians and so on who didn’t. Foucault unfortunately incorporated this Manichaean view into his history of sexuality. With Us cast as the penetrators, Them the penetrated. This absurd oversimplification predictably produces very banal self-fulfilling results. That slaves are like women, that women are like slaves, that slaves have automatically lost their phalluses, and are all always metaphorically penetrated by their masters, that everything is whatever the adult male citizen says it is. While it is true that the Greeks often talked about the world in binary terms as polarized extremes, this was simply a way of talking and thinking about things (and not the only way), while the terms of the opposition might change all the time. Sometimes they talk about Greeks versus Persians, sometimes about Persians versus Scythians, and the representation of what the Persians are will be transformed accordingly. Likewise, sometimes they talk about women in terms of an opposition between common prostitutes and wives. In the next sentence, however, the terms of the polarity might have changed. The distinction is now between flute-girls and courtesans, or concubines and hetaeras. This Black and White way of arguing does not reflect a Manichaean view of the world.

There are two main dangers in approaching the Greeks. The first is to think of them as our cousins and to interpret everything in our own terms. We are entering a very different world, very strange and very foreign, a world inconceivably long ago, centuries before Christ or Christianity, a century or so before the first Chinese emperor’s model army, a world indeed without our centuries, or weeks or minutes or markings of time. And yet these Greeks will sometimes seem very familiar, very lively, warm and affable. Occasionally we might even get their jokes. We must be careful, however, that we are not being deceived by false friends. Often what seems most familiar, most obvious, most easy to understand is in fact the most peculiar thing of all. On the other hand, we must resist the temptation to push the Greeks further into outer space than is necessary. They are not our cousins, but neither are they our opposites. They are just different, just trying to be themselves.

PART I FEASTS

I EATING

THERE WAS A BANQUET and people wereb talking and, as so often in accounts of banquets at this period, Socrates was there. The topic was language: the origin of words and their true meanings, their relationships with other words. In particular, according to Xenophon, who describes the scene in his Memoirs of Socrates, they were talking about the labels applied to people according to their behaviour.¹ This was not in itself an uninteresting subject, but failed nevertheless to absorb Socrates’ complete attention. What distracted him was the table-manners of another guest, a young man who was taking no part in the discussion, too much engrossed in the food in front of him. Something about the way the boy was eating fascinated Socrates. He decided to shift the debate in a new direction: ‘And can we say, my friends,’ he began, ‘for what kind of behaviour a man is called an opsophagos?’

FISH

If Plutarch had been present (and Plutarch would have given anything to be present had five centuries not intervened) the question might have been a non-starter. For Plutarch is quite categorical: ‘and in fact, we don’t say that those, like Hercules, who love beef are opsophagoi… nor those who, like Plato, love figs, or, like Arcesilaus, grapes, but those who peel back their ears for the market-bell and spring up on each occasion around the fish-mongers.’² An opsophagos, according to this ancient authority at any rate, was someone with a distinct predilection for fish.

‘But if you go to the prosperous land of Ambracia and happen to see the boar-fish, buy it! Even if it costs its weight in gold, don’t leave without it, lest the dread vengeance of the deathless ones breathe down on you; for this fish is the flower of nectar.’ The Greeks were fond of fish. Fondness, on second thoughts, is rather too moderate a word for such a passion. What the literature of pleasure manifests, time and time again, is something rather more intense, a craving, a maddening addiction, an indecent obsession. The flavour of this yearning is easily sampled in the work of Archestratus of Gela in Sicily, from whom the eulogy of the boar-fish is taken. Another passage from the same work advises readers on what to do if they come across a Rhodian dog-fish (émissole?): ‘It could mean your death, but if they won’t sell it to you, take it by force … afterwards you can submit patiently to your fate.’³ Archestratus acquired a certain amount of notoriety for his mock-heroic hexameters rhapsodizing food, but his work, variously known as Gastronomy, Dinnerology or The Life of Luxury, was by no means untypical of the discourse of gourmandise. What should be noted is not so much the extravagance of the language used to describe the fish, as the fact that in a work about the pleasures of eating in general, reference is made to almost nothing else. The Greeks, to be sure, recognized as delicacies some foods which had nothing to do with the sea: some birds and other game (especially thrushes and hares), various sausages and offal (sow’s womb was particularly revered), some Lydian meat stews and various kinds of cake, but these were exceptions. The edible creatures of the sea seem to have established a dominance over the realm of fine food in classical Greece that scarcely fell short of a monopoly.

It is hard to say who it was who first put the marine into cuisine. The invention of the sumptuous ‘modern’ style of cookery was usually traced back to the Sicilians or their neighbours across the straits, the people of Sybaris on the instep of Southern Italy. The latter were defeated by their neighbours in 510 and their city was razed to the ground, but stories of their fabulous riches were still being told at Athenian dinner-parties one hundred years later. One historian recorded a Sybaritic law that gave inventors of new dishes a year’s copyright (perhaps, says one modern commentator, the earliest patent known). Moreover, he claimed there was a special dispensation that eel-sellers and eel-fishers should pay no tax. In about 572, Smindyrides, distinguished even among the Sybarites for his decadence, had made a great impression when he came over to mainland Greece to seek the hand of the daughter of Cleisthenes the ruler of Sicyon near Corinth. Fearing that the motherland might not be up to his standards, he brought with him one thousand attendants, consisting of fishermen, cooks and fowlers.⁴

Fish also seems to have been very prominent in the culinary culture of Sicily. According to one source they called the sea itself ‘sweet’ because they so enjoyed the food that came out of it. Athenaeus tells us of a fish-loving painter from Cyzicus, Androcydes, who painted the sweet fare of these sweet waters in enthusiastic and luxurious detail when depicting a scene of the multiheaded monster Scylla in the early fourth century; we should, perhaps, view the numerous ancient mosaics of marine life with the same perspective we now bring to Dutch flower-paintings, not as cerebral studies in realism, but as loving reproductions of desirable and expensive commodities. The comic poet Epicharmus, who worked in Syracuse, the island’s greatest and richest city, at the beginning of the fifth century, seems to have been preoccupied with sea-food, judging from the surviving fragments, although later writers were not always sure what he was referring to: ‘According to Nicander another kind of crab, the colyb-daena, is mentioned by Epicharmus … under the name “sea-phallus”. Heracleides of Syracuse, however, in his Art of Cookery claims that what Epicharmus is referring to is, in fact, a shrimp.’ In one play, Earth and Sea, Epicharmus seems to have included a debate between farmers and fishermen, arguing over which element produced the best fare.

Sicily also produced the first cookbooks. Among the earliest of these treatises was one by Mithaecus of Sicily, a famous chef mentioned by Plato and described by one writer as the Pheidias of the kitchen. His fragments are very few, but do nothing to contradict the impression that fish already predominated by this time: ‘Mithaecus mentions wrasse’; Mithaecus advises, ‘Cut off the head of the ribbon fish. Wash it and cut into slices. Pour cheese and oil over it’ – one of the earliest surviving published recipes.⁵

No cookery books or treatises on gastronomy survive from Athens, and the Athenians’ own contribution to the history of gourmandize was confined to their cakes, but Attic comedy, especially the so-called Middle and New Comedy of the fourth and early third centuries, provides plenty of evidence that the preoccupations of the gourmands of Sicily and Southern Italy were fully shared by the citizens of this, the largest and richest classical city. Anyone who picks up a collection of fragments of fourth-century comedy is likely to be struck immediately by the large number of references to the consumption of fish. Characters regularly turn aside to enunciate long and metrically elaborate shopping-lists for fish, menus of fish and recipes for fish-dishes, with the ingredients and method of preparation graphically described. One comic chef, for example, in Philemon’s Soldier, describes a simple recipe in the following rodomontade:

For a yearning stole up on me to go forth and tell the world, and not only the world but the heavens too, how I prepared the dish – By Athena, how sweet it is to get it right every time – What a fish it was I had tender before me! What a dish I made of it! Not drugged senseless with cheeses, nor window-boxed with dandifying herbs, it emerged from the oven as naked as the day it was born. So tender, so soft was the fire I invested in the cooking of it. You wouldn’t believe the result. It was just like when a chicken gets hold of something bigger than she can swallow and runs around in a circle, unable to let it out of her sight, determined to get it down, while the other chickens chase after her. It was just the same: the first man among them to discover the delights of the dish leapt up and fled taking the platter with him for a lap of the circuit, the others hot on his heels. I allowed myself a shriek of joy, as some snatched at something, some snatched at everything and others snatched at nothing at all. And yet I had merely taken into my care some mud-eating river-fish. If I had got hold of something more exceptional, a ‘little grey’ from Attica, say, or a boar-fish from [Amphilochian] Argos, or from dear old Sicyon the fish that Poseidon carries to the gods in heaven, a conger-eel, then everyone would have attained to a state of divinity. I have discovered the secret of eternal life; men already dead I make to walk again, once they but smell it in their nostrils.

Outside comedy, references to fish-consumption are somewhat fewer in number, but often present even more direct and striking testimony to the citizens’ obsessions. Demosthenes notes in disgust that when Philocrates betrayed his city to the Macedonians for the price of a bribe he spent his ill-gotten gains on whores and fish. Aeschines attacking his opponent Timarchus with the aim of depriving him of his rights as a citizen recalls the many occasions he was seen hanging around the fish-stall with his ‘friend’ Hegesander.⁶

The Greeks were not so blinded by love as to ignore the responsibilities of connoisseurship. Within the exalted ranks of the piscifauna, distinct hierarchies were recognized, if not always with universal agreement. The preserved fish or tarichos, for instance, was generally looked down on and the phrase ‘cheaper than salt-fish’ is used by Aristophanes to mean ‘ten a penny’. Certain varieties did have their supporters; tuna bottled at the right season in steaks or chunks received much praise, and Archestratus had some nice things to say about salted mackerel. Euthydemus, a writer on diet of the Hellenistic period, even wrote a treatise on the subject although the encomium of salt-fish, which he ascribed to Hesiod and quoted in support of his cause, was strongly suspected of being a forgery.⁷

Among the fresh fish, the bottom rung was occupied by various small species and immature specimens, not always easily translatable into the taxonomies of modern biology. A fragment of Timocles’ comedy, Epichairekakos (He Who Enjoys Other Men’s Difficulties), follows the gate-crasher known as Lark in the, for him, rather novel exercise of shopping. He comes to the eels, the tuna, the electric rays, the crayfish, and asks the price of each in turn. They are all far beyond the range of the four bronze coins he is carrying. Finally realizing he is outclassed he scuttles off in the direction of the membradas, the anchovies or sprats. Another parasite in Alexis’ Principal Dancer complains of the hard work involved in cadging an invitation to a fancy dinner; he would prefer to share a plate of sprats with someone who can talk in plain Attic. Other passages confirm that in Athens, at least, these little fish were considered food fit only for beggars, freedmen, and peasants who didn’t know any better, attitudes that the sprats-seller in Aristophanes’ Wasps attacks vigorously, accusing those who disdain her wares of elitism.⁸

At the other end of the scale we find the great delicacies, among them the tuna, the sea-perch or grouper, the conger-eel, grey mullet, red mullet, gilt-head, sea-bass, an unidentified creature known as the ‘grey-fish’, or glaukos, and the crustacean known as the karabos, a heavy-handed crayfish lying somewhere along the line between langouste and langoustine. Certain parts were especially prized: of the tuna, the belly and the ‘keys’ taken from the shoulder or neck area, and of sea bass, grey-fish and conger-eels, the head. Towering effortlessly above all challengers, however, the undisputed master of the fishmonger’s stall was the eel. Archestratus thought the best were those caught opposite the straits of Messina:

There you have the advantage over all the rest of us mortals, citizen of Messina, as you put such fare to your lips. The eels of the Strymon river, on the other hand, and those of lake Copais have a formidable reputation for excellence thanks to their large size and wondrous girth. All in all I think the eel rules over everything else at the feast and commands the field of pleasure, despite being the only fish with no backbone.

It was widely believed that the Egyptians offered the eel worship, handing more than one comic author the opportunity for resonant cultural comparisons: ‘I would never be able to make an alliance with you; there is no common ground for our manners and customs to share, and great differences to separate them. You bow down before the cow, I sacrifice her to the gods. The eel you consider the greatest divinity, and we the very greatest dish.’ Another thought the Egyptians had got it just about right: ‘They say the Egyptians are clever, not least because they recognize that the eel is equal to the gods; in fact she has a much higher value than gods, since to gain access to them we just have to pray, whereas to get within sniffing distance of eels we have to pay at least a dozen drachmas, maybe more, so absolutely sacred a creature is she.’⁹

Reading these fragments we can get some idea of the extraordinary power their passion for fish exercised over the Athenians. Fish are treated as quite irresistible, lusted after with a desire that comes close to a sexual one. The strength of this Athenian appetite is demonstrated most graphically by passages in which fish are involved in a literal or metaphorical seduction. Anaxandrides’ play Odysseus, for instance, contains the following eulogy of the fisherman’s art:

What other craft gets youthful lips burning, gets their fingers fumbling, has their lungs gasping for air, in their haste to swallow? And isn’t it only when it’s well-supplied with fish that the agora brings about liaisons? For what mortal gets a dinner-date if all he finds for sale when he gets to the counter are fish-fingers, crow-fish, or a picarel? And when it comes to seducing a real beauty, with what magic words, with what chat-up lines would you overcome his defences if you take away the fisherman’s art? For his is the craft that conquers with stargazy pie’s overwhelming eyes, that draws up lunch’s (arsenal?) to undermine the defences corporal(?), his, the expertise that gets the free-loader to recline, unable to decline to pay his way.

The anecdotalist Lynceus of Samos even suggested, a little mischievously, that it was for the sake of a fish from Rhodes (the famous dogfish, of course) that the Athenian hero Theseus yielded his favours to Tlepolemus, the island’s mythical founding father. In a later period there is evidence that the influence exercised by fish in the processes of seduction was thought to reveal some occult power. Apuleius, author of the Golden Ass, had to defend himself from a charge of casting a love-spell over his rich and aged wife with the magical assistance of fish purchased in the market. There is little evidence for this supernatural connection in the classical period, although because of her triple-sounding name, the red-mullet, or trigle, was associated with the triple-faced patron of witches and guardian of road junctions, Hecate. On the other hand, fish are sometimes found used as love-gifts in Attic vase-painting. One depicts a young man and his attendant approaching a hetaera spinning wool, with gifts of an octopus and two birds. Another vase, once in Leningrad, now lost, had a boy seated and wrapped in a cloak being offered a hoop and a large fish by a winged Cupid.¹⁰

It is not just their tastiness that connects fish to seduction, but also the way they look. The two sisters popularly known as the ‘anchovies’ mentioned in a speech of Hyperides were apparently so named because of their ‘pale complexions, slender figures and large eyes’. And so, by way of a startling metaphorical transition from appetizement to seduction, fish come to be represented themselves as coquettish flirts and paramours. The conflation of images is found fully developed in a fragment of Diphilus’ comedy The Merchant. The speaker complains about the high price asked for the fish: ‘nevertheless, if one of them ever smiled at me, I would pay, albeit with a groan, all that the fishmonger asked of me.’ This representation, which sounds so extraordinary to our ears, of fish as seductive bodies comparable in some way to the beautiful boys and hetaeras they helped to seduce, is what lies behind the common trope in which the eel, typically ‘appareled’ in beet (perhaps, most feasibly, beet-leaves), is compared to a nubile woman or a gorgeous goddess. When Dicaeopolis, the hero of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, learns that the Boeotian smuggler has fifty ‘Copaic maidens’ in his sack, he goes into raptures: ‘O my sweetest, my long-awaited desire.’ In the Peace, someone imagines the reaction of Melanthius, a certain fish-loving tragedian, arriving at the fish-stalls too late for the eels: ‘Woe is me, woe is me,’ he cries, launching into a spoof soliloquy excerpted from a climactic scene of his own Medea, ‘bereaved of my darling in beet-bed confined.’ It could be suggested that such extraordinary metaphors are only to be expected in comic discourse, with its fondness for startling and jarring images, but the practice of comparing women to mouth-watering fish and fish to women seems to have been rather more general in Athenian society. Apart from the anchovy sisters mentioned above, we find flute-girls and hetaeras given nicknames like ‘Sand-smelt’, ‘Red Mullet’ and ‘Cuttlefish’, a practice exploited to full comic effect by the poet Antiphanes in his play She Goes Fishing, where he plays on this double-meaning of the names of fish, so that it is hard to know at any one time whether he is satirizing his victims for their love of fish or for their excessive devotion to hetaeras and boys.¹¹

Fish seduces and conquers. It functions like the forces of persuasion, or the allure of a hetaera, or the magical power of charms. Comic authors made use of this notion of piscine irresistibility to create spoof imprecations and oaths. In Aristophanes’ Knights the Sausage-seller curses the Paphlagonian (a thinly disguised caricature of the demagogue Cleon), his rival for the favours of old Demos (i.e. the people), in the following terms:

I will not make threats, but I do offer the following prayer: May your sizzling skillet of squid be standing by. And may you be about to make a speech on the Milesian business and turn a talent in bribes if you get the job done. And may you hurry to get the calamary down in time for going to the Assembly. And may the man come for you before you have time to eat. And, in your eagerness to get the talent, may you choke to death with your mouth full.

In his Acharnians a similar malediction is invoked against a rival playwright; this time the longed-for squid is pictured sailing slowly and tantalizingly towards the accursed and putting ashore on the table beside him only to be snatched away at the last minute by a dog. Antiphanes even uses the irresistibility of fish to a fish-lover in an oath: ‘I’d as soon give up my purpose as Callimedon would give up the head of a grey-fish’, says one character in resolute defiance. It is perhaps not surprising that the Stoic Chrysippus, writing in the following century, preferred to refer to such people as opsomanes instead of opsophagos, meaning ‘fish-mad’, and comparing the man so afflicted to the gunaikomanes, mad about girls.¹²

THE FISH MISSING FROM HOMER

Historians are sometimes criticized for taking in earnest what their sources clearly meant in joke. Others are accused of deliberately exaggerating, without explaining, a period’s idiosyncrasies in order to exoticize a culture for the reader’s amusement. Any study of the phenomenon of ancient fish-madness is in danger of committing both these errors at the same time. These writers are being ironic. The extraordinary celebrations of fish penned by Archestratus or put by Aristophanes into the mouth of Melanthius are manifestly tongue-in-cheek. Demosthenes was sending up Philocrates and his treacherous purchases, Aristophanes was sending up the tragic fish-lover, and Archestratus, with his epic hexameters and mock epithets was sending up himself. Any amusement we might feel at the ancients’ excitement at the prospect of fish for dinner is forestalled by the irony and bathos which is already a distinctive feature of the Greek evidence. It’s almost as if they catch the amused eye of posterity in the rear-view mirror and play to it, as if they know how peculiar they are going to look to future generations.

It is true that the Greeks considered self-knowledge one of the very highest virtues, but that kind of foresight was beyond even them. So why is fish as strange and amusing for them as it is for us? This is more than a marginal question. Their ironic tone holds a clue to unravelling the mystery of fish-madness. What made fish funny for the Greeks goes some way towards explaining what made them so good to eat.

The first thing to notice is that fish never found its way into the rituals that surrounded the consumption of beef, mutton and pork. With one or two exceptions, fish was not considered a suitable animal for sacrifice. The origins of this exclusion are open to debate. Some believe it was because Greek sacrifice was essentially a blood sacrifice, or a sacrifice of large animals that must be eaten communally. The tuna, one of the few fish that could be sacrificed (to Poseidon, of course) is noted both for its exceptional bloodiness, and for the fact that these large fish are usually trapped and killed in large numbers, providing a single huge catch for the community to consume. Others emphasize that the Greeks sacrificed only domestic animals, and that fish are to be counted among the animals of the chase, wild game that could be killed willy-nilly, outside the symbolic rigours of formal sacrifice. However, the rationale behind the exclusion does not really concern us. What is important is that the omission of fish helped to construct an opposition between the meat of pigs, sheep and cattle, all of which had to be sacrificed before it could be eaten, and fish, which was quite free of such structures, an item for private, secular consumption, as and when desired. In an important sense, fish-consumption was simply not taken as seriously as other kinds of carnivorousness.

Fish were also absent from another important scene, noted by a character in a comedy of Eubulus: ‘Where has Homer ever spoken of any Achaean eating fish?’ Fish were not present at the banquets of the Iliad, something the fish-mad Greeks of the classical period were not slow to pick up on. A contemporary of Eubulus, the philosopher Plato, thought the missing fish very significant. In a discussion of the regime appropriate for the warrior athletes of his Republic he takes Homer as his reference:

‘You know that when his heroes are campaigning he doesn’t give them fish to feast on, even though they are by the sea in the Hellespont, nor boiled meat either. Instead he gives them only roasted meat, which is the kind most easily available to soldiers, for it’s easier nearly everywhere to use fire alone than to carry pots and pans … [The philosopher goes on to make other connections:] Nor, I believe, does Homer mention sauces anywhere. Indeed, aren’t even the other athletes aware that if one’s body is to be kept in good condition, one must abstain from all such things?’

‘Yes and they do well to be aware of it and to abstain from them.’

‘If you think that,’ Socrates continues, ‘then it seems you don’t approve of Syracusan cuisine, or Sicilian-style dishes.’

‘I do not.’

‘Then you also object to Corinthian girls for men who are to be in good physical condition … and Attic pastries … I believe that we would be right to compare this diet … to the kinds of lyric odes and songs that are composed in all sorts of modes and rhythms.’¹³

The modern banquet with its cakes and hetaeras is contrasted with the heroic feasts of the Iliad. The conspicuous absence of fish from these antique scenes and from sacrifice as well is perhaps connected, inasmuch as the sacrificial rituals of the classical period were often self-consciously based on the Homeric model. Put together, the structures of exclusion carve out a space for fish as something peculiarly secular and distinctively, decadently ‘modern’.

It is this absence of heroic gravity that produces the bathetic humour and mock epic irony of the classical period. The caricature and self-parody which seems to infect descriptions of fish-lovers and fish-loving has an eye not on our future, but on their past, looking back across the gap that yawns between the Homeric age and the classical present. The eulogies of fish in epic language and hexameter rhythms, which are such a feature of Middle Comedy and writers such as Archestratus and Matro, get their sense of bathos from a clash of tone between the heroic form and the fishy content.¹⁴ The very names of fish were unheroic and their presence in these inappropriate contexts was unavoidably ironic. The effect must have been in some respects like a recitation of modern brand-names, Daz and Persil, for instance, or Weetabix and Coca-Cola in the language and rhythms of Shakespeare. In particular, comic poets seem to have kept in mind the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy in the dramatic festivals, the one placed firmly in the modern world, the other confining itself to the age of myth. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that fourth-century comedy is characterized both by its spoofs of mythological tales and its preoccupation with fish. By parodying tragic forms, by setting up a heroic context and then infiltrating it with incongruous and anachronistic images from the modern city, comic poets gave resonance to their representation of the present, a greater consciousness of being contemporary. It is not too much to say that fish in these comedies and parodies contributes significantly to one of the earliest manifestations of the idea of the modern, the contemporary, in Western intellectual history, an appropriate achievement perhaps for a food that in hot countries scarcely lasts a day.

The rule that excludes fish from sacrificial offerings to the gods is often transgressed for comic effect in a very similar way. One play has a chef whose conger-eel is described as cooked fit for the gods, the poet fully aware that no deity was likely to get near such a delicacy. Another talks of ‘the belly-piece of a tunny, or the head of a sea-bass, or a conger-eel, or cuttle-fishes, which I fancy not even the gods despise.’ These passages exalt the fish they refer to, but also denaturalize sacrifice, reinventing the gods as gourmands and connoisseurs in the modern style. An early play of Menander’s discusses the consequences of exclusion quite explicitly:

Well then, our fortunes correspond, don’t they, to the sacrifices we are prepared to perform? At any rate, for the gods, on the one hand, I bring an offering of a little sheep I was happy to pay ten drachmas for. For flute-girls, however, and perfume and girls who play the harp, for wines of Mende and Thasos, for eels, cheese and honey, the cost scarcely falls short of a talent; you see, you get out what you put in, and that means ten drachmas’ worth of benefit for the sheep, if, that is, the sacrifice is auspicious, and you set off against the girls and wine and everything, a talent’s worth of damages … At any rate if I were a god, I would never have allowed anyone to put the entrails on the altar unless he sacrificed the eel at the same time.

Here the eel represents ‘real’ food, some fish for pleasure’s sake, instead of a wretched and perfunctory sheep for ritual’s sake. Forget all of that smoking essence of cow and goat, the gods would much rather tuck into a plate of sea-food.¹⁵

The fact that fish was not sacrificed had more than symbolic repercussions. Ritual made a very real difference to the way animals were made into food. A crucial element in the sacrifice was the sharing out of the victim among the participants. The division had to be conspicuously fair, and to this end, after the animal had been disembowelled, and the gods and the priest had received their prerogatives, the animal was simply divided into portions of more or less equal size. This marks a substantial divergence from the way animals are butchered today, with very careful differentiation of the cuts according to relative tenderness, sliced along or against the grain. In terms of quality, therefore, the ancient portions of meat were both uneven and unequal, some mostly fat and bone, some largely fillet and rump, and had to be distributed among the sacrificing community by drawing lots to ensure everyone at least got an equal chance at a good piece. It seems probable that, as in many Middle Eastern cultures, all beef, pork and mutton available was the product of this ritualized process. Even the meat sold in the market, it seems, had been cut from animals that had been killed ritually. As a student of ancient butchery puts it: ‘The perpetuation of a method of butchering that maintained a careless disregard for the animal’s different joints meant for the eventual purchaser the possibility of making only one choice, meat (to kreas), or offal: we never get to see in our sources people presenting themselves at the market and asking for a gigot or a cutlet.’¹⁶ The ideology of sacrifice, therefore, and the isometric butchery which resulted, meant that the very form these animals assumed as items of food was dominated by their positioning within symbolic ritual, a positioning that tended to exclude concerns of taste or tenderness in favour of a theatre of participation, where equality took precedence over quality. Fish, on the other hand, along with game and offal, fell outside the rituals of sharing. It was free to be appreciated according to the excellence of its own flavours. Pleasure alone sorted out the most highly regarded species, the finest specimens, the most succulent parts, selected on their own terms according to the opsophagos’ taste. With other meat protected from gourmandise by religious rituals, it was the taxonomy, the biology and the body of fish that became subject to the exacting discourse of connoisseurship. Other meat had to be shared out. Fish you were free to fall in love with, grabbing the best bits for yourself. Here in this very small section of the Athenian economy in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, we have what looks like a fully-fledged system of consumer objects.

In the Hellenistic period some Homeric scholars, the so-called ‘separators’, noted that although fish were indeed off the menu at the Iliad’s banquets, there were some occasions when they were eaten in the Odyssey. This seemed decisive proof that the two epics had different authors. Against this view, the scholar Aristarchus observed that, though he may have banned fishing and fish-eating from Troy, the author of the Iliad was not unaware of the existence of fishermen, or of the technologies of fishing, and used the imagery of angling and trawling in similes and metaphors.¹⁷ This meant on the one hand that the two poems could indeed have a single author and, on the other hand, that there must be some reason other than ignorance for the exclusion of fishing from the Iliad, namely that the poet wanted to avoid to mikroprepes, what was demeaning – the same reason he remained silent about vegetables.

But in that case how to explain the fact that fishing and fish-eating did occur in the Odyssey? This, argued Aristarchus, was only to be found in exceptional circumstances, when the heroes were suffering from extreme hunger, for instance. The episode when Odysseus and his companions disembark on the island where the Sun-god kept his cattle, having just survived the ordeal of Scylla and Charybdis, provided just such circumstances: ‘all the food in the ship was gone and they were forced instead to go roaming in search of prey, using bent hooks to catch fish and birds, anything that might come to hand, because hunger gnawed their bellies.’ From passages such as these it seems clear that in the Homeric world, as in medieval and early modern Europe, fish could be considered a poor man’s food, a food for Lent and Friday fasting.¹⁸ It was clearly not fitting for heroes of the calibre of Achilles and Diomedes to be seen eating such poor fare, unless the poet wanted to show them pushed to extremes of deprivation. Greeks of later generations, however, whose view of fish was, as we have seen, much more exalted, misunderstood the significance and saw the absence in quite different terms. Athenaeus, for instance, thought Homer was protecting his heroes not from the diet of paupers, but from luxury: the poet is silent about the eating of vegetables, fish and birds because that is a mark of gourmandise [lichneia].’

When Plato discusses the absence of fish in Homer, therefore, he probably gets it quite wrong, placing the omission in the context of the exclusion of hetaeras, fancy cakes and Sicilian cuisine, the decadent and debilitating accoutrements of the classical dinner-party. In fact, we could say that fish would have been rather an appropriate source of protein for the inhabitants of the simple proto-city outlined by Socrates, a providential food, as in the Odyssey, found in rivers and along shorelines to go with the collard greens and acorns he allows them. Between Homer and Plato a huge shift had occurred in perceptions of what a diet of fish represented. It had shifted from the country to the city, from something scavenged to something bought.

The feasts of the Homeric world take place in an economy without money, an economy based on the exchange of gifts and its attendant systems of patronage. Sacrifice is also decidedly part of this giving economy, and sacrificial meat is often conceived as a gift of the city or of the private citizen on whose behalf the sacrifice is made, a gift designed to extract favours from the gods, and to unite the participants in the act of eating together. Reciprocity meant an obligation to sacrifice, which few could ignore. Even the Pythagoreans, who were famous for their vegetarianism, felt the need to participate in sacrifice occasionally to avoid a charge of disrespect. Eating meat was a religious duty, and ultimately indispensable. Fish on the other hand was an extra, something that could not be justified on grounds other than a sheer love of pleasure. Ancient vegetarians in this respect display a striking contrast with their modern counterparts who are often more ready to eat fish than any other animal. In both cases it is perhaps the relative bloodlessness of the piscifauna that is the deciding factor.¹⁹

Meat did find its way occasionally from the altar to the market but it is only represented there on very rare occasions. Its potential as a consumer item was heavily limited, as we have seen, by the isometric techniques of butchery demanded by ritual. Fish, on the other hand, is the quintessential commodity. The agora is its element. It is even on occasion compared to money. The silver that comes to Athens from its allies is described in one image of Aristophanes as a shoal of tuna spied swimming from far out at sea. In comedies, jokes are made comparing fish-scales with the small change that Athenians carried in their mouths. As a corollary, fishermen, who are often represented as stereotypes of extreme poverty in the ancient world, are, with a few exceptions, quite invisible in the Athenian discourse of fish-madness, victims of the extraordinary fetishization of their products. Instead the focus is consistently and repetitively on the market-place and on the processes of buying and selling. A particular feature of this concern is the caricaturing of greedy fishmongers, often foreigners, and their attempts to trick the citizen-consumer. A typical example is from Antiphanes’ play the Pro-Theban: ‘Is it not strange, that if someone happens to be selling fish recently deceased, he addresses us with a devilish scowl and knotted brow, but if they are quite past their sell-by date, he laughs and jokes? It should be the other way round. In the first case the seller should laugh, and in the second go to the devil.’ Another fragment from Xenarchus’ Porphura (Mauve or The Purple-fish) includes a character praising fishmongers as more imaginative even than poets when it comes to inventing ways to get round a (probably fictional) law:

For since they are no longer at liberty to anoint their wares with water (this is forbidden by the law), one of these chaps, not exactly loved by the gods, when he saw his fish dehydrating, quite deliberately started a fair old scrap among the traders. Punches were thrown and one seemed to have mortally wounded him. Down he goes, gasping what seems to be his last gasp, lying prone amongst his fish. Someone shouts ‘Water! Water! Straightaway, another of his fellow-traders grabs a jug and empties it, missing him almost completely, but managing to drench the fish. You would say they had just been caught.

Such were the perils of shopping that the early Hellenistic writer Lynceus of Samos actually wrote a treatise on how to do it properly, addressed to one of his friends who was a market failure. He advises taking along a copy of Archestratus to intimidate the traders:

One thing you will find useful, when standing at the fish-stalls face to face with the unblinking ones, the unyielding-on-price ones, is abuse. Call Archestratus to the stand, the author of the Life of Luxury, or another one of the poets and read out a line, ‘the shore-hugging striped bream is an awful fish, worthy ever of nought’ and try the line ‘bonito buy when autumn wanes’, but now alas ’tis spring, and in summer ‘the grey-mullet is wonderful when winter has arrived’, and many other lines of that sort. For you will scare off shoppers by the score and many passersby, and in so doing you will force him to accept a price you think is right.²⁰

The fishmongers in question belonged to a characteristically urban environment of crafty charlatans and tricksy merchants, for one consequence of the placing of fish in a trade-economy was that it came to be seen as part of the world of the. city. If fish do ever make an appearance in the countryside they seem almost exotic, as a fragment from a satire on peasants makes clear:

‘You, Pistus, will take some money and do some shopping for me.’

‘Not me, I never mastered the art of shopping.’

‘Well then, Philumenus, what’s your favourite fish?’

‘I like them all.’

‘Go through them one by one, which fish would you like to taste?’

‘Well, once a fishmonger came to the country, and he had sprats with him and little red-mullets, and by Zeus he was popular with all of us!’

‘So, now you would like some of them?’

‘Yes, and if there is any other small one; for it is my opinion that all those large fishes are man-eaters.’

The notion of the fish-ignorant countryside goes back at least as far as Aristophanes who in one fragment describes a city-dweller who decides to move out to the country so that he can ‘have chaffinches and thrushes to eat instead of hanging around for little fishies from the market, two days old, overpriced and tortured at the hands of a lawless fishmonger’.²¹ Eating fish, and knowing which ones to prefer, is not only an indication of modernity and secularity, it is also a mark of urbanity.

The ancient passion for fish, then, can be explained largely in terms of what it was not, in terms of its positioning within a series of intersecting contrasts that set it against other types of food. Eating fish was free of a prehistory commemorated in festival banquets, or Homer’s epics, or Platonic recollections of the primitive condition. It was not a serious or venerable activity. Fish were not slaughtered or distributed in a ritualized symbolic context. Fish stood outside the theatre of sacrifice and outside official banquets. It had no public role or responsibilities, free to play itself, the quintessential modern commodity fully fetishized for the private consumer, a food whose value could be gauged only according to desirability and demand, the object of constant assessment according to species and specimen, and the subject of an exquisite discourse, argued over and haggled for in comedies and dinner-parties, in markets and treatises.

A DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT

So far so good. We have answered Socrates’ question. Thanks to Plutarch we know what an opsophagos is and we can see why philosophers might get upset about it. An opsophagos was a fish-lover. Fish-lovers were mad about fish and philosophers thought them decadent. Unfortunately, Plutarch was not at the banquet and the question is not as simple as that. In Xenophon’s discussion a number of possibilities are canvassed for the meaning of opsophagia but fish-eating is not one of them. But if the vice of the opsophagos is not fish-philia, what is it?

We need, perhaps, to go back to basics. The noun and its verb, opsophagein, first make an appearance in Greek literature towards the end of the fifth century in the poetry of Aristophanes. During his battle with bad-mannered Badlogic in the Clouds, for instance, old-fashioned Betterargument claims opsophagein is one of those bad habits the Athenians of former times prohibited, along with giggling, fidgeting and snatching celery from one’s elders. In another of Xenophon’s anecdotes, Socrates comes across someone thrashing an attendant. When he asks what the man has done to deserve such punishment his master replies it is for being ‘an opsophagos to an extreme degree’. It seems clear the word is made up of two elements, opson and phagein. Phagein means eating. It does seem clear, then, that an opsophagos is a man with some kind of reprehensible eating-habit. Opson too should be quite transparent in meaning. Whereas we normally talk of nourishment as comprising two elements, food and drink, the Greeks could distinguish three, a feat achieved by dividing the solid part of sustenance into two distinct halves: the staple and what you eat on the staple, sitos and opson. The staple was usually bread made from wheat or some other grain. Opson represented almost everything else. This tripartite division of diet: staple, relish and drink, or bread, opson and wine, occurs in numerous passages in ancient literature from Homer onwards, whenever the Greeks discussed sustenance as a medical, economic or moral question. The most famous example perhaps is Thucydides’ story of how the Great King rewarded Themistocles for going over to the Persian side by granting him the revenues of three rich cities to meet his needs, ‘Magnesia for his bread … Lampsacus for his wine and Myus for his opson’.²²

An opsophagos, then, straightforwardly enough, is an opson-eater, a relish-eater, ‘an eater of non-farinaceous food’. This appellation, however, is not quite as transparent as it appears. To begin with, it seems to distinguish nobody, for of course man cannot be expected to live by bread alone … But perhaps at this point we should rejoin the dinner-party and let Socrates continue in his own words:

‘[A]ll men, of course, eat opson on their bread when it is available; but they have not yet, I think, been labelled opson-eaters for doing so.’

‘No, certainly not,’ said one of those present.

‘What, then, if someone eats the opson itself, without the staple, not as part of an athletic regime, but for the sake of pleasure, does he seem to be an opsophagos or not?’

‘If not, it’s hard to say who would be,’ replied the other.

And someone else said, ‘What about the man who eats a large amount of opson on a bit of staple?’

‘He too seems to me to deserve the epithet,’ said Socrates.

By this time the ears of the young man whose eating habits have been under such close scrutiny start to burn. He surreptitiously takes a piece of bread. Socrates notices this complaisant gesture and, not being a man to let things lie, calls on the boy’s neighbours to watch he does not use the bread as a mere garnish, ‘to see whether he treats the sitos as opson, or the opson as sitos’.

The three elements of diet were carefully differentiated in practice. Eating and drinking, for a start, were formally quite separate activities; dinner was concluded, the tables sided, and the floor swept, before the symposium, the liquid part of the meal, could begin. Staples and opson were not to be so drastically divided, but there are a number of indications that a strict code of dining protocols incorporated this fundamental division too into the structure of eating. The practice of eating with fingers appears to our Western manners as an absence rather than a difference of manners. However, contrary to the popular image of medieval banqueters with greasy faces tearing with abandon at the flesh of animals, societies which use their hands to eat have very strict rules governing not only which hands may be used for what, but also which parts of the hand, which fingers, and even which parts of fingers. Eating by hand was such a natural and habitual part of ancient life that it is rarely referred to in the sources, but there are enough indications to show that the Greeks were not less rigorous in their manners than other hand-to-mouth cultures. Plutarch, for instance, notes intriguingly that children are taught to use one finger to take preserved fish, but two for fresh. Such table-manners seem to have been the principal method of keeping the two elements of food separate at mealtimes. Margaret Visser inferred from their habit of reclining on the left elbow that the Greeks and Romans, like the ancient Chinese, kept their left hands away from food altogether. In fact, it seems, their table-manners were closer to those of the Abbasids, their successors on the southern side of the Aegean, who allowed the left hand to touch bread alone reserving the right for communal dishes, and for bringing food to the mouth, a perfectly practicable arrangement even while in the Greek reclining position (which was not an everyday practice anyway). Thus sitos was taken with the left hand, opson with the right. Plutarch describes how children were castigated if they used their hands the wrong way round. This practice throws light on two passages from the classical period. Xenophon, for instance, describes how Cyrus’ tent was organized with the opson-chefs on the right and the bakers on the left and a satirical attack on the gourmand Callimedon suggests erecting a statue of him in the agora with a roasted crayfish in his right hand as if to eat it.²³ Perhaps there were, as in many modern societies, toilet habits which complement these eating habits, helping to complete a system based on ideas of a clean hand, which can be used to dip into communal dishes and a dirty hand which one keeps to oneself. The opson/sitos separation depends perhaps on an even more important differentiation between food and excrement.

On the one hand so unremarkable and unremarked a feature of daily life that it could almost have escaped the notice of posterity, this distinction seems a classic case of a habit which inscribes ideology into practice. A particular set of beliefs about the world can become more rather than less powerful through being unspoken, aspiring to the rank of habit rather than ideology, and a status beyond language, questioning and argument in the cultural unconscious. In place of articulation, value and meaning can be assigned by means of carefully modulated differences between symbolically charged zones and directions. In a city like Athens, contrasted spaces, such as the women’s quarters and the men’s room, or private interiors and public streets, were symbolically charged. In the case of food, value could be read into the orientations of personal geography: left and right, bottom and top, staple and opson.²⁴ Opson is not a material object, and not really an idea. It is, above all, a space.

This space turns out to be somewhat ambivalent. It has a well-established position in the diet and yet seems somehow superfluous, merely decorative. In this it bears more than a passing resemblance to what Derrida identified as a persistent source of anxiety in Western philosophy, an addition which seems to complete something and yet to be extraneous, threatening all the time to forget its negligible subordinate role and take over what it is supposed merely to complete or embellish. Following Rousseau, he labelled this ambiguous addition the ‘dangerous supplement’, a phrase that seems to describe opson, the dietary supplement, rather accurately. Numerous passages seem to treat opson as an essential; it is what the right hand reaches out for to complement the bread in the left; it is one of the three pillars of existence, listed in numerous ancient writings on diet. It crops up in accounts of daily expenditure along with other essentials such as barley and wood. It is a prerequisite of allowances and salaries.²⁵ On the other hand it can be considered a mere dietary accessory, whose only purpose is to make the real sustaining part of diet, the staple, more palatable. This treatment of opson as the merest garnish is also found early on in the annals of Greek literature, in a passage well known to the Socratic circle and cited by both Plato and Xenophon: a scene from Iliad 11.630 in which the poet describes Nestor’s servant preparing a drink in a magnificent cup of heroic proportions to which is added a piece of onion as opson. The habitual differentiation at meal-times of left and right, bottom and top is easily translated into more ideological contrasts: substance and decoration, necessity and excess, truth and façade.

The other two elements of diet could be fixed and controlled without difficulty. Bread could be substituted for sitos, and water or wine for potos, but there was no such simple solution to the space of opson, which remained intrinsically awkward to pin down, a space for dietary variety. Philosophers in particular were deeply suspicious about a part of sustenance which represented an opportunity for innovation and extravagance, as Plato makes clear in a section of dialogue from the Republic. Socrates is fantasizing about early society in a pristine state of nature: ‘They will produce sitos and wine and clothes and shoes. They will live off barley-meal or wheat-meal, laid out on rushes or fresh leaves and they will feast magnificently with their children around them, recumbent on couches of myrtle and bryony, drinking wine, festooned with garlands and singing hymns to the gods, in enjoyment of each others’ company.’ After this little excursus on an ancient idyll, Glaucon interrupts, to point out the obvious omission: ‘You’re making these people dine without opson.’ ‘You’re quite right’, says Socrates disingenuously, ‘I forgot that they will have opson too,’ going on to list the most desultory things he can think of: salt, oil and cheese and whatever vegetable matter can be gathered from the fields: acorns, for example. Glaucon is outraged and adds the rather sinister comment that Socrates has been talking as if he were fattening up a city of pigs. He demands ‘What is normal’, including ‘opsa that modern men have’. Socrates counters that Glaucon, in that case, is talking not simply of a city, but of a luxurious city, a city with couches and tables and all the other articles of furniture, he continues contemptuously, ‘opsa, of course, as well as perfumes, aromatic fumigations, hetaeras and cakes, in all their various varieties’.²⁶

Plato was a famously careful writer. After his death a tablet was found among his possessions with the first eight words of the Republic written out in different arrangements. Socrates’ carelessness here is extremely well calculated and it illustrates perfectly the problem with opson. It already has a well-established position in the traditions of Greek diet and cannot ultimately be dislodged, but this omission puts it firmly in its negligible place. It is something to be ignored, elided or forgotten, something of no importance. When forced to address the oversight, Socrates tries to fix opson in a state of nature; he fills the dietary space with the most perfunctory edibles, whatever is ready to hand, requiring the bare minimum of preparation. Opson receives a similar kind of limitation, a progressive annihilation, even, in Xenophon’s Cyropedia, an idealistic and ascetic vision of the ancestral Persians. In the old system of education, we are told, boys up to sixteen or seventeen lived off bread as sitos, water from a river to supply them with liquid, and cardamon (a type of cress) as opson. The slightly older boys, whom Xenophon calls the ephebes, went hunting with one day’s ration of bread, and nothing at all in the way of opson but what they managed to catch in the field. Opson has at this point become no more than an opportunity. According to Xenophon, however, Socrates went even further and ate just sufficient food ‘so that desire for sitos was its opson’, appetite the best sauce.²⁷

The philosophers’ efforts to neglect, elide or reduce opson to the status of a vacuum are evidence of a profound nervousness about the whole category. The dangerous supplement threatens to divert eating away from sustenance and into pleasure, and even to usurp the place of bread as the bedrock of existence. It is this anxiety that explains why Socrates is so disturbed by the young man’s table manners at the banquet with which we began. By taking no bread or only a little, the opsophagos threatens to invert the dietary hierarchy and allow simple sustenance to be diverted into pleasure. The error of the opsophagos lies not in eating opson, as everyone else does, but in living off it.

ST JOHN THE FISHMONGER?

One version of the vice of opsophagia, then, relates to carefully balancing the elements of diet to keep staples staple and everything else decorative. Plutarch’s version on the other hand more straightforwardly says opsophagia is love of fish. How can these two rather different versions be reconciled? Whom do we trust to translate for us, Plutarch the eminent antiquarian or Xenophon, a reliable witness, surely, of the language of his own time?

To resolve this dispute we need to take another detour, to another controversy and another part of the ancient world, the sea of Galilee in the reign of the emperor Tiberius. An unlucky night is at last drawing to a close, revealing on the water’s surface a boat, with plenty of fishermen aboard but no fish. In the breaking light a figure can be made out on shore. He asks if they have caught anything. They answer that they have not. He advises them to cast the net on the right-hand side of the boat. They follow his instructions and find their nets full, so full in fact that they cannot bring the catch on board and have to tow it ashore. When they reach the land, they find that the stranger has already started cooking a breakfast of bread and fish. They daren’t ask him who he is because they now know it must be the risen Christ.

This is the tale of the miraculous draught of fishes, as told by John. The story itself occurs with slight variations in Luke as well and raises many points of interest for Bible scholars and theologians. What concerns us here, however, is not theology but philology. John uses two different words for fish, first, as we would expect, ichthus (which by the logic of the acronym – Iesous CHristos THeou Uios Soter [Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour] – made fish a secret sign of Christian credence in the first centuries after Christ and a symbol of Christian pride in our own), but when the fish are brought to be eaten John uses a different word, opsarion, a word which occurs five times in John and nowhere else in the New Testament. This idiosyncrasy of vocabulary has led to some bold conclusions about the author. For John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, the word properly referred to cooked fish and was proof that the evangelist, usually considered the latest of the gospel-writers, was on the contrary the earliest, a witness of the things he described, being none other than John the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve disciples, a fisherman and trader in fish. Only a professional, Robinson implies, would bother with such trade distinctions.

A. N. Wilson, in a more recent biography of Jesus, took this observation as proof that new things can still be discovered in the text of the Bible. He clarified the Bishop’s rather allusive argument by suggesting that by ‘cooked fish’ this professional fishmonger was referring to something like a bloater or smoked fish.²⁸ Disappointingly, however, there is nothing technical about John’s vocabulary. ‘The feeding of the five thousand’ is not about to become ‘the miracle of the kippers’. Opson together with its diminutive opsarion were by this period perfectly commonplace words for fish, not smoked, and not necessarily cooked, but certainly in dire danger of being, since they corresponded to ichthus as pork does to pig, referring to fish as food. In fact it is from opsarion, and not ichthus, that the modern Greeks get their own word for fish, psari. This explains why Plutarch thought an opsophagos was simply a fish-lover. It proves nothing about the identity or profession of his near contemporary St John other than his fluency in the currencies of Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman Empire.²⁹

That one word could mean ‘anything we eat with bread’ and also simply ‘fish as food’ caused misunderstandings among generations of Greek readers down the centuries, of which the disagreement between Plutarch and Xenophon over opsophagia is only one example. The historian Diodorus of Sicily, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, read Thucydides’ description of the three cities, representing the three pillars of diet, granted by the Great King to Themistocles for going over to the Persian side, but understood something rather different. After commenting on the productivity of Lampsacene vineyards and the fecundity of the wheat-fields of Magnesia he couldn’t resist adding an explanatory footnote to the choice of the city of Myus for his opson: ‘it has a sea well-stocked with fish’, although the city was by that time many stades inland.

It is clear, then, that opson could mean simply ‘sea-food’ already by the first century BCE. The question which exercised ancient students of the language was how much earlier than this the usage first appeared, and in particular whether it counted as good classical Attic Greek. To push it back a couple of centuries seems straightforward. Some modern scholars have argued convincingly that Plutarch took his definition from Hegesander of Delphi, a Hellenistic source of the second century BCE, and some Egyptian papyri attest the use in the third century, but are there any earlier passages where opson means fish? Are there any classical authors in the fourth or even the fifth centuries who use opson like John the Evangelist? Never with greater urgency was this important question addressed than during the rise of Atticism in the reign of Hadrian and his Antonine successors.³⁰

In the second century CE educated men from all over the Roman Empire were growing philosophical beards and trying to write, to speak, even, the kind of Greek thought to have been used in classical Athens five or six hundred years earlier. At this time there was prestige and money to be made out of being a man of letters. An imperial chair of rhetoric was set up at Athens and rival grammarians and lexicographers from every province fought for the right to sit on it by discharging eulogies at the royal family and recriminations against each other. In this climate Atticism became a burning issue and rival camps sprang up of extremists and moderates. While this often bitter pedantry may not be to our taste, it was not without benefit to posterity, and a large number of the fragments on which this book is based survive simply because someone writing centuries later cited them as evidence for the classical purity of his vocabulary. Needless to say, thanks to its complex and confusing history, opson and its derivatives became something of a cause célèbre in the Atticist debate.

Pollux of Naucratis, a moderate, was said to be of limited talent as a speech-maker but blessed with a mellifluous delivery which seduced the emperor Commodus’ ear and won him the professorship at Athens some time after 178 CE. His Onomasticon, or Book of Words, which survives in an abridged and interpolated form, was a collection of Attic vocabularies grouped by topic, including thirty-three terms with which to abuse a tax-collector, and fifty-two terms useful in praising a king. When he came to list words to do with the fish-trade he didn’t let himself fret about it too much: ‘fishmongers, fish-selling, fish, fishies, opson’ His critic and rival for the emperor’s favour, Phrynichus ‘the Arab’, a scholar whose standards of Attic purity were so high that even some of the classical authors failed to make the grade, was contemptuous of such laxity. He wrote his own lexicon of Attic in thirty-seven books: ‘not fish,’ he says in a gloss on opsarion, ‘although people today use it like that.’ Athenaeus, like Pollux, was from Naucratis. His Banquet of Scholars was composed c. 200 CE and takes the form of a dinner attended by certain luminaries of the period, including the physician Galen and the jurist Ulpian of Tyre. The banqueters alternate between consuming food and talking about it, managing also to fit in learned disquisitions on sex, decadence and crockery. This discourse in turn is interrupted by a meta-discourse which comments on the conversation and on the appropriateness of the words in which it is conducted, all carefully supported with the citation of classical authorities. The diners make great efforts to talk in the most authentic Greek possible and jump on one another with a vicious pedantic energy if they think they have spotted something too modern. Inevitably, the subject of opsarion crops up: ‘A huge fish was then served in a salty vinegar sauce, and someone said that all fish [opsarion] was at its tastiest if served in this way. At this Ulpian, who likes to collect thorny questions, frowned and said, “… I can think of none of the authors ‘at source’ using opsarion.” Now most people told him to mind his own business and carried on dining,’ says Athenaeus. However, one member of the company, a character known as Myrtilus of Thessaly, rises to the bait and proceeds to catalogue the use of opsarion as fish in various Attic comedies of the fifth century and later, including Pherecrates’ Deserters, Philemon’s Treasure, and Anaxilas’ Hyacinthus the Whoremonger.

Myrtilus’ appeal to actual usage should have been enough to answer the question once and for all. But unfortunately the problem could not be resolved by a survey of classical texts, because the answers they gave were not consistent. To be put against the comic poets cited by Myrtilus, for instance, were Xenophon, and above all mighty Plato, a prince among prosateurs and the greatest authority for the strict Atticists. Although he wrote later than some of the authorities cited by Athenaeus, he seems to have been completely unaware that opson, not to speak of its numerous derivatives, could mean fish. What accounts for such a discrepancy in the vocabulary of these classical contemporaries? How is it that a usage which was bandied about quite happily in the theatres never made it into the groves of the Academy? One solution is provided by examining the influence of etymology on Greek ideas about language. Another, by examining Plato’s attitude to fish.

From an early period the Greeks manifested a great interest in language in general and etymology in particular. This concern with where words came from was not simply a casual preoccupation with the history of language. Etymology, which comes from etymos ‘truth’, was believed to give access to a word’s authentic meaning. Modern lexicographers are profoundly suspicious of this approach: ‘Etymology may be valuable in its own right,’ writes Sidney Landau, ‘but it tells us little about current meaning and is in fact often misleading.’³¹ Nevertheless, an interest in where words come from retains a powerful hold on our collective imagination and in newspaper columns, classrooms and dinner-parties a careless speaker will often be upbraided for an error of usage, by being reminded of its derivation.³² ‘Such a view of etymology’, notes the critic Derek Attridge, ‘implies the belief that the earlier a meaning the better, which must depend on a diagnosis of cultural decline … or a faith in a lost Golden Age of lexical purity and precision.’³³ Nowadays, etymological folk are content to trace words back as far as Latin and Greek, leaving this lexical age d’or no more than an inference. In antiquity, however, the putative original and pure state of language was the subject of a certain amount of speculation. Herodotus records the famous experiment of the pharaoh Psamtik to discover the oldest language by isolating two babies from human communication at birth and listening for the first sound to emerge spontaneously from their mouths. That utterance, it turned out, was bekos, which meant nothing in Egyptian, but was a word for bread in Phrygian, which was thus awarded the distinction of first language. Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue of that name postulates a single prehistoric inventor of language, who assigned signifiers not arbitrarily but with superhuman insight into the true nature of things. Socrates in the same dialogue imagines language having its roots in nature and the body. According to this theory anthrōpos (man) was derived from man’s characteristic upright posture, ho anathrōn ha opōpen (‘the one who has seen what he has seen, by looking up’). Chrysippus the Stoic went even further in search of the natural origins of language and claimed that in pronouncing the word for self, ego, the lip and chin pointed to the speaker, thus bringing word and meaning into immediate and intimate identity in a single original articulate gesture.³⁴

But this golden age, where signifier and signified enjoyed so perfectly honest a relationship, so pristine a unity of purpose, was not to last. A hero’s offspring may fall far short of his father’s heroism, notes Socrates in the Cratylus, but he will still be entitled to inherit his name. Under the influence of the etymological fallacy the history of words is no longer a neutral recording of changes in usage, noting diachronic differences without ascribing differential value, but instead a genealogical narrative, a story of strays wandering further and further away from the garden of Eden, deviants whose distance from original and true meaning is measurable in terms of dilution, distortion and error. This makes of writing much more than a straightforward medium of communication. An ideological element creeps in. Texts can be used not merely as a means to communicate most efficiently according to the most generally accepted contemporary understanding, but as a restorative of language, leading words back to their roots, closer to their original authenticity, to their ‘proper’ prelapsarian truth.

The researches of Wilhelm Schulze and Friedrich Bechtel at the turn of the century suggested that the most plausible origin of opson was from a word like psōmos meaning a ‘mouthful’ or a ‘bite’ plus a prothetic o, indicating ‘with’. The most recent etymological dictionaries, considering even this a little reckless, give its derivation as ‘obscure’ and ‘nicht sicher erklärt’.³⁵ In antiquity, however, philologists were less circumspect and confidently traced opson back to words relating to cooking, especially from hepso, ‘boil’, a derivation which was widely accepted until the end of the nineteenth century, and which still survives as the ‘proper’ meaning in some modern dictionaries (thus drawing A. N. Wilson and Bishop Robinson off the track of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes). For the earliest explicit statement of this etymology we are indebted once more to Athenaeus, but it looks as if it was already known to Plato in the classical period. Apart from the circumstantial evidence of his own usage – in his work opson most often refers to a cooked dish – he draws attention to this etymology in the discussion of the diet of primitive civilization. Socrates, we remember, has just been reprimanded for ‘forgetting’ to give his ancient citizens any opson. He retorts that ‘they will indeed have opson: cheese and onions, olives and vegetables, ‘such things as there are in the countryside for boiling, they will boil’ (hepsēmata, hepsēsontai). With this bizarre terminology, Plato is pointing to a true meaning for opson as ‘something boiled’ at the time of the misty golden age of language formation.³⁶

If it was the ordinary fate of words to slip their moorings and wander casually into error, what happened to opson must have seemed the very pinnacle of luxurious degeneration. There have been many theories in recent times to explain how opson came to mean ‘fish’, but the simplest as well as the most convincing account was provided by Isaac Casaubon’s notes on Athenaeus, published in 1600. He suggested it was short for opson thalattion (sea-food), a more obviously comestible term than ichthus, and also more inclusive, appropriate for those delicacies of the deep like crustaceans and molluscs whose inclusion in the category of fish was sometimes considered problematic. Ancient scholars, however, seem to have been quite unaware of this neat process of linguistic shift. Instead, the coinage was presented as a triumph comparable to Homer’s triumph in the canons of literature: ‘Though there are many poets, it is only one of them, the foremost, whom we call “the poet”; and so, though there are many opsa, it is fish which has won the exclusive title “opson” … because it has triumphed over all others in excellence,’ as Plutarch puts it.³⁷

Plato himself, along with many other philosophers, was far from sharing this opinion, and seems on the contrary to have disapproved strongly of his contemporaries’ taste for poissonerie. This is implicit in the Republic where he carefully elides sea-food from the golden age feast and where, in the discussion of the fish missing from Homer, he connects the eating of fish with perfume and hetaeras and all the degenerate paraphernalia of the modern banquet. In addition, at least two Hellenistic authors knew of a story in which the philosopher reproached another member of the Socratic circle, Aristippus, for his fish-consumption. According to Hegesander’s version, ‘Plato objected to him returning from a shopping-spree with a large number of fish, but Aristippus answered that he had bought them for only two obols. Plato said he himself would have bought them at that price, to which Aristippus replied “Well, then, in that case, my dear Plato, you must realize that it is not I who am an opsophagos, but you who are a cheapskate.”’³⁸

For such ascetics, the use of opson to mean fish took on a rather different meaning. It was not so much a triumph as a naturalization of vice, a perversion of language as morally objectionable as when we use ‘drink’ – ‘I need a drink’ – ‘No! A real drink!’ – as a reference to alcohol or ‘smoke’ for ‘smoke cannabis’. To assume that when someone mentioned opson they were referring to some kind of seafood, the finest and most expensive of delicacies, must have seemed to Plato, who thought about these things, a quite enervated assumption. After having carefully removed fish from the category of opson when discussing golden age diet he was not going to allow it into his semantic field.³⁹ Morality and usage were too closely connected. Ancient authors have long been suspected of being unreliable witnesses of the world they affect to describe. In some cases they are not better witnesses of the language they affect to describe it in.

The definition of opsophagia that Xenophon puts into the mouth of Socrates can now be seen for what it really is: not a straightforward discussion of meaning, but an attempt to impose one particular meaning and one particular method of finding meaning to the exclusion of others. It is extraordinary that in a discussion of the vice of opsophagia, fish, which had long before become the opsophagos’ favourite food (no matter how he was defined), is never mentioned. Just afterwards the memorialist records another remark of Socrates: ‘In the Attic dialect,’ he used to say, ‘they call sumptuous banqueting “having a bite to eat.”’⁴⁰ Xenophon was not about to make the same mistake.

Socrates’ apparently idle question, directed obliquely at the young man he was trying to embarrass and redirected by Xenophon at us, has stimulated a whole range of answers down the centuries in the work of Plato, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Phrynichus ‘the Arab’, Pollux the lexicographer, and modern classicists such as Casaubon, Passow, Kalitsunakis and Liddell Scott and Jones. They do not agree with one another and the question cannot be described as settled even today. It seems a very dry debate, terribly pedantic and rather hard-going, exactly what a reader fears perhaps when she opens a book on classical Athens. Worst of all, it may seem irrelevant. Most people in classical Athens would have recognized the vice of opsophagia when they witnessed it, though the accused might have denied the charge or someone else might have disputed what exactly it was in this kind of eating that made the epithet applicable. In many cases there was nothing to debate about: ‘Another fish, proud of its great size, has Glaucus brought to these parts,’ says a character in Axionicus’ play The Euripides Fanatic, ‘some bread for opsophagoi.’ A big word, perhaps opsophagein meant different things to different groups of people, especially perhaps to different levels of society. Words do not have fixed and unitary meanings and it distorts one’s understanding of a text to treat them as if they do. If this is true today, it must have been even more true of classical Athens. In a world that was still free of the tyranny of dictionaries and public education systems, the meaning of words would have been generally quite slippery and quite difficult to tie down.⁴¹

I do not intend to devote too much space in the rest of this book, trying the reader’s patience with this kind of philology, but far from being dead or dry or irrelevant, this debate over words gives access to the very heart of Greek desires. Just as psychoanalysts can discover the key to traumas in a slip of the tongue, the fish conspicuously missing from the texts of Xenophon and Plato testify to the real danger that lay in appetites. Ancient texts do more than inform us about ancient desires. They do more than provide us with samples of the ancient discourse of desires. Ancient desire itself is in the text, repressed perhaps, but still present. In their hesitations and omissions our authors reveal a struggle in the very composition of their prose, an ongoing battle with dangerous passions that threaten all the time to consume them and their readers.

II DRINKING

not much like Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût. Above all he objected to the brief entry for wine: ‘Noah the patriarch is regarded as the inventor of wine; it is a liqueur made from the fruit of the vine.’ If a man from the moon or a further planet, the poet notes sarcastically, were to land on Earth in need of some refreshment and turned to Brillat-Savarin, how could he fail to find all he needed to know ‘de tous les vins, de leurs différentes qualités, de leurs inconvénients, de leur puissance sur l’estomac et sur le cerveau’. He offers as compensation his own gushing celebration of the properties of wine, an anecdote about a Spaniard and a prosopopoeia of the spirit of wine itself. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his introduction to the 1975 edition of the Physiologie, Baudelaire’s sarcasm reveals a fundamental conflict of views about the nature of wine: ‘For Baudelaire, wine is remembering and forgetting, joy and melancholy; it enables the subject to be transported outside himself … it is a path of deviance; in short, a drug.’ For Brillat-Savarin, on the other hand:

Wine is not at all a conductor of ecstasy. The reason for this is clear: wine is a part of food, and food, for BS, is itself essentially convivial, therefore wine cannot derive from a solitary protocol. One drinks while one eats and one always eats with others; a narrow sociality oversees the pleasure of food … Conversation (with others) is the law, as it were, which guards culinary pleasure against all psychotic risk and keeps the gourmand within a ‘sane’ rationality: by speaking – by chatting – while eating, the person at the table confirms his ego and is protected from any subjective flight by the image-repertoire of discourse. Wine holds no privilege for BS: like food and with it, wine lightly amplifies the body (makes it ‘brilliant’) but does not mute it. It is an anti-drug.¹

Alcohol has long been famous for its ability to make men voluble. In the last two hundred years in particular, occupying an optimal position on the scale of vices intermediate between what is too banal to notice and what is too terrible to speak of, it has become a division of knowledge in its own right, the stimulus for a vast array of investigation, categorization and legislation, public debate and academic study. From the pamphlets of the Temperance Movement to the self-help groups of the late twentieth century, by way of Prohibition, the perceived dangers of alcohol have put drinkers under the close watch of churches, doctors, satirists, the police and sociologists, not to speak of the most unforgiving gaze of all, the careful invigilation by drinkers of themselves, of their own habits and desire for a drink.

The residue of this fascination has provided rich pickings for modern social historians who can study without ideological fervour the drinking practices of the last century carefully catalogued by fervent teetotallers, but the tenor of this discourse has made prevalent some rather universalizing and totalizing notions, which have had the effect of pushing the study of drinking beyond the bounds of history. The broad range of intoxicating liquors known to man are viewed as manifestations of a single drug, alcohol, in various disguises. The wide experience of enjoying these beverages and the manifold forms of consuming them are viewed as manifestations of a monotonous pathology of intoxication and addiction, as ethyl first ensnares and then takes over the body.

This view which is still pervasive in modern society has been challenged recently by anthropologists. They have found it difficult to apply categories such as ‘alcoholic’ and conditions like ‘alcoholism’ to the drinking practices of other societies and have tended to group liquors under the rubric of commensality (the fellowship of the table), with food and other non-intoxicating beverages, stressing the drinker’s relationship with other drinkers rather than with his drink, emphasizing companionship, that breaking of the bread together, which is such a quaint feature of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the Inns of Court and mass. Some have gone so far as to suggest that problem-drinking is a purely Western phenomenon that could be remedied through socialization.²

It is not difficult to see that the general outline of the debate between anthropologists and alcoholists is anticipated already by Baudelaire’s differences with Brillat-Savarin. For the poet and the alcoholist drink is an essence, a drug. What concerns them is the alien state of being within one’s own private intoxication. For the gourmand and the anthropologist drink is merely another part of food. What is important is the context in which it is consumed, the rituals of drinking, the community of drinkers. One could argue, at the risk of oversimplification, that the root of the controversy lies in a modern Western prejudice against solitary drinking, a pervasive feeling that alcohol’s effects are moderated or at least rendered negligible by the presence of other drinkers, that alcoholism reveals its true form in the period before the pubs are open and after they have closed, when the drinker is left alone with his drink. This special anxiety about opening a bottle for oneself seems misplaced. Many dangerous and persistent drinkers reach their state of intoxication in company although the violence that accompanies their inebriation may appear only at home. Nevertheless, for many it is the quiet spinster caught swigging amontillado in the morning rather than rowdy behaviour at the bar that crystallizes most clearly the image of the alcoholic.

Both the alcoholist approach and the anthropological have been employed in recent studies of wine-consumption in antiquity. While some have concentrated their efforts on looking for ancient evidence of ethyl-addiction and the problem behaviour modern sociologists associate with problem drinking, others have adopted the anthropologists’ lens, through which an apparently commonplace practice like drinking wine is transformed into something rich and strange. The familiar intoxicating liquid is a distraction. It has no importance in and of itself but only as the catalyst of peculiar cultural practices, as the sticky glue of distinctive social relationships.

The Greeks’ own vinous discourse was rich. By accident as well as by design an enormous proportion of surviving Greek painting of the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE comes from vases made for drinking, whose decorative imagery more often than not echoes their function. At about the same time a drinking literature was flourishing in the form of sympotic poetry performed at drinking-parties on the subject of women, boys, wine and pleasure. Belonging to a rather later period and much closer in appearance to branches of the modern discourse there were medical texts, although few modern doctors would repeat the advice of Athens’ most illustrious fourth-century physician, Mnesitheus, who considered heavy drinking beneficial. A number of ancient philosophers, including Aristotle and Theo-phrastus, produced treatises On Drunkenness although none of them unfortunately survives intact. Something of their style and concerns may be intimated in the series of questions and answers about the physiological aspects of intoxication, collected as book three of the Aristotelian Problemata. Wine even infiltrated history and politics. One historian in particular, Theopompus of Chios, seems to have had a keen nose for the scent of alcohol on the breath of tyrants and statesmen. A large portion of his surviving fragments, ascribed to a large number of different books of his histories of Greece and of Philip, allude to the drinking habits of princes and nations. Athenaeus even says of Theopompus that he ‘compiled a list of drink-lovers and drunks’.³ To add to this are occasional allusions in the orators to watering-holes of low repute and disapproved-of drinking practices. Demosthenes, for instance, notoriously, was teetotal. Perhaps the most important source for Athenian drinking in the classical period, however, is Attic comedy, which in all periods managed to place drunks on stage and enact the preparations for drinking-parties. This was nothing less than appropriate given that the plays were performed under the tutelage of Dionysus, the god of wine himself.

This ancient discourse falls readily within the boundaries set by the two sides of the modern controversy, turning from drink to the community of drinkers and back again to drink, enabling us to escape in the first place some of Baudelaire’s most trenchant criticisms and present a brief survey ‘de tous les vins, de leurs différentes qualités…’

WINE

The vine was familiar all over mainland Greece and in those coastal enclaves from Catalonia to the Crimea that the Greeks colonized. In fact, wine-drinking was considered nothing less than a symbol of Greek cultural identity. It was a mark of their barbarism that the barbarians drank beer. If they did know of wine, and the Greeks acknowledged that other cultures were not totally ignorant of it, they misused it. The wine itself, in the raw and undiluted form rarely tasted by the Greeks, was often sweet and thanks to hot weather and low yields probably towards the upper end of the scale of potency at 15–16 per cent as opposed to the 12.5 per cent which is normal today. It usually had bits of grape and vine debris floating in it and needed to be sieved before being mixed or poured out. This will have made red wines correspondingly dark in colour and somewhat tannic. The scent of ancient wine was said to have a powerful effect on wine-lovers and was often compared to the scent of flowers. Some other aromas may have been unfamiliar to the modern nose. For a start, the wine absorbed the taste of the container in which it had been carried or stored; not the oak that lends to modern wines their characteristic vanilla flavours, but pitch or resin used to seal amphoras and, on occasion, the sheep and goats that provided the raw material for wine-skins. Other items were sometimes added at various points in the process of manufacturing and preparation including salt water, aromatic herbs, perfume and in one case honey and dough. Aristotle in a fragment of his treatise On Drunkenness mentions drinking wine from a ‘Rhodes jar’ which was prepared with an infusion of myrrh and rushes. Apparently when heated the vessel lessened the intoxicating power of the liquid inside.

According to Mnesitheus, three colours of wine were differentiated, ‘black’, ‘white’ and kirrhos, or amber. The white and amber wines could be either sweet or dry, the ‘black’ could also be made ‘medium’. The Hippocratic treatise On Diet categorizes wines also as ‘fragrant’ or ‘odourless’, ‘slender’ or ‘fat’, and ‘strong’ or ‘weaker’. Theophrastus says wines were sometimes blended.⁴

The Greeks, unlike the Romans after them, seem to have had no appreciation of particular vintages, but certainly recognized the value of ageing, something which amazed antiquarians as late as the early eighteenth century, when wines usually deteriorated quickly. This misunderstanding seems to be a simple consequence of the fact that in the early Middle Ages readily sealable clay amphoras fell out of favour to be replaced by less air-tight receptacles. The age of wine was a matter of some importance to connoisseurs, inspiring the gourmand Archestratus to heights of purple poetastery that make modern connoisseurs look prosaic:

Then, when you have drawn a full measure for Zeus Saviour, you must drink an old wine, bearing on its shoulders a head hoary indeed, a wine whose wet curls are crowned with white flowers, a wine begat of wave-girdled Lesbos. And Bybline, the wine that hails from holy Phoenicia, I recommend, though I do not place it in the same rank as the other. For if you were not previously on intimate terms and it catches your taste-buds unaware, it will seem more fragrant than the Lesbian, and it does retain its bouquet for a prodigious length of time, but when you come to drink it you will find it inferior by far, while in your estimation the Lesbian will soar, worthy not merely of wine’s prerogatives but of ambrosia’s. Some swagger-chattering gas-bags may scoff that Phoenician was ever the sweetest of wines but to them I pay no heed … The wine of Thasos too makes noble drinking, provided it be old with the fair seasons of many years.

Wine’s ability to age well drew some unfavourable comparisons with the human species. A character in a play of Eubulus, for instance, remarks on how the hetaeras esteem old wine, but not old men. A fragment of Cratinus conjures up a more sophisticated deployment of the human lifetime analogy. He talks of ‘Mendaean wine coming of age’ (hēbōnta, literally ‘in bloom’ or ‘pubescent’), thereby bringing to mind modern maturity charts of the ‘life’ of a wine divided into periods of maturation: ‘Ready’, ‘Peak’, ‘Tiring’, ‘Decline’.⁵

The vast bulk of the wine consumed was undistinguished local produce from the harvest of small unspecialized holdings. This was what the Athenians called trikotylos, or ‘litre wine’ (literally, three half-pints) because, according to the lexicographer Hesychius, you could get three half-pint measures of it for only an obol. Some, however, was of a much higher quality imported from areas famous for their wines and grown on large estates. These wines are often found listed along with other fine foods in comedy, although the top rank contains rather fewer specimens than the number of fishes, for instance, at the poets’ command, rarely amounting to more than three or four at a time. Membership of this elite is not always consistent, but the wines of Thasos, Chios and Mende, a city in the Chalcidice, are the most prominent for most of the classical period. These are joined by the wines of Lesbos which are occasionally found in lists as early as the fifth century BCE, although Pliny has the impression that their reputation dated only from the end of the fourth. Characters in the plays discourse freely on the peculiar qualities of each wine, its characteristic colour and scent, its sweetness, as in this speech of Dionysus from a play of Hermippus: ‘With … Mendaean wine the gods themselves wet their soft beds. And then there is Magnesian, generous, sweet and smooth, and Thasian upon whose surface skates the perfume of apples; this I judge by far the best of all the wines, except for blameless, painless Chian.’⁶

The fine wines of the classical period have left traces of their popularity not only in the remnants of ancient literature, but also in fragments of amphoras, dug up around the Athenian Agora and elsewhere. Each of the great wine-exporting cities packaged its wine in distinctive and more or less uniformly-shaped vases, which can be differentiated by archaeologists. The Chians even used their amphora as an identifying symbol on their coinage. This confirms what the comic fragments suggest, that these city wines were specific products, with recognizable characteristics. Some cities specialized in producing only one kind of wine, others produced more. Chian wine, for instance, came in three types, austēros (dry), glukazōn (sweet), and one called autokratos in between the two. The individuality of these wines can be explained as the result of the natural prevalence of particular varieties of vine and certain traditional methods specific to a region. It is not a coincidence that the sources of these distinctive wines are, without exception, isolated agricultural economies, literally in the case of islands like Thasos and Chios, or, like Mende, surrounded by barbarians. It is significant, in this respect, that Lesbian wine takes its name from the island itself, the geographical entity, rather than from the cities, the political entities, Mitylene, Eresus and Methymna, that divided the territory between them. Some very occasional references indicate ancient recognition of that rather less tangible quality of terroir, the magical influence of specific plots of land. The best Chian wine apparently came from an area in the north-west of the island, and was known as Ariusian. We also hear of a wine called Bibline which, contra Archestratus, probably came not from Phoenician Byblos, but from an area in Thrace opposite the north-western part of Thasos, and which probably belonged to the territory of one of the cities in the area, perhaps to Thasos itself.⁷

Thasos also provides, in contrast, the best evidence for highly organized viticulture carried out on a large scale, the haphazard blessings of sound traditional methods and good soil supplemented with legislation. A series of inscriptions from the island reveal that political intervention in the wine trade could be intense and far-reaching. The overall concern of the laws seems to be for quality, a consideration which benefited not only the Thasian consumers of Thasian wine, but the exporters too, whose success depended on maintaining the island’s reputation for high standards.⁸

THE SYMPOSIUM

The most formal context for the consumption of wine in the Greek world was the drinking-party or symposium, a highly ritualized occasion and an important crucible for the forging of friendships, alliances and community in ancient Greece, an almost perfect example in fact of the anthropologists’ commensal model of drinking in which socializing is paramount. Its practices can be pieced together from a number of accounts. The space in which it took place was the ‘men’s room’, the andrōn, a small room with a slightly raised floor on all sides, which makes it one of the most easily identified spaces in the archaeology of the Greek house. This ledge provided a platform for the couches, which usually numbered seven, sometimes eleven, and occasionally as many as fifteen. Each couch could take two people, reclining on their left sides. The arrangement was more or less a squared circle but the seating was not for that reason undifferentiated. The circle of drinkers was broken by the door, which meant that there was a first position and a last and places for host, guests, symposiarchs, honoured guests and gate-crashers. Wine, song and conversation went around the room from ‘left to right’, that is, probably, anti-clockwise. The arrangement was less a static circle of equality than a dynamic series of circulations, evolving in time as well as in space, with the potential for uncoiling into long journeys, expeditions, voyages.⁹ Within the little andrōn the drinkers could travel long distances.

The symposium occupied a space perfectly commensurate with the walls. The atmosphere was correspondingly intense and intimate. ‘Nothing takes place behind the drinkers; the whole visual space is constructed to make sightlines converge and to ensure reciprocity.’¹⁰ The sympotic space conspired with the effect of the alcohol to create a sense of entering a separate reality. The managers of modern nightclubs and casinos make sure there are no windows or clocks to remind their clientele of the time-zone outside. In the symposium a similar severing of ties to the extramural world was effected with a repertoire of images and discourse peculiar to itself, reflecting the symposium and reflections of the symposium en abîme. In the men’s room they would recline and drink from cups decorated with images of men reclining and drinking from decorated cups; they would recite sympotic poetry and tell anecdotes about other drinking-parties in other times and other places. They never need stray from the sympotic themes of love and sex, pleasure and drinking. In fact, it could be said that the symposium for the period of its duration, symbolically constituted the world.

A bizarre story told by Timaeus of Taormina illustrates graphically the sense of separation between the world within and the world without the drinking-party:

In Agrigentum there is a house called ‘the trireme’ for the following reason. Some young men were getting drunk in it, and became feverish with intoxication, off their heads to such an extent that they supposed they were in a trireme, sailing through a dangerous tempest; they became so befuddled as to throw all the furniture and fittings out of the house as though at sea, thinking that the pilot had told them to lighten the ship because of the storm. A great many people, meanwhile, were gathering at the scene and started to carry off the discarded property, but even then the youths did not pause from their lunacy. On the following day the generals turned up at the house, and charges were brought against them. Still sea-sick, they answered to the officials’ questioning that in their anxiety over the storm they had been compelled to jettison their superfluous cargo by throwing it into the sea.

The story belongs to a rich Greek tradition of marine metaphors for the sympotic community.¹¹ The high sea represents the boundlessness of wine, the obliteration of points of reference. The metaphor is captured with characteristic economy inside a cup of the archaic painter Exekias. He shows Dionysus, relaxed and triumphant on a boat decked out with bunches of grapes and the irrepressible branches of a vine, having turned the tables on his pirate abductors who swim around the vessel transformed into fishes. Normally the interior decoration of a kylix is reserved for a small central tondo, but here the red-painted sea has burst the banks of its confinement and laps the edges of the cup in vine-like exuberance, just as the drinking-party washes against the walls of the andrōn. On the boundless sea of wine the company floats free from the boundaries of reality and off into the deep. It is not surprising that in another context, among the Etruscans of Italy, the symposium was associated with the rituals of death.

The solid section of the dinner was concluded by the removal of tables. The floor was swept of the shells and bones that had accumulated during the feast and water was passed around for the guests to wash their hands. The guests were sometimes garlanded with flowers at this point and anointed with perfumed oils. The symposium itself began with a libation of unmixed wine for the Agathos Daimōn, the ‘Good divinity’, accompanied by paeans sung to the god. This was the only occasion on which a taste of undiluted wine was permitted and reflects the atmosphere of danger that permeated the evening’s carousal. The banqueters were embarking on a dangerous voyage. According to the historian Philochorus, the ritual toast of unmixed wine was instituted along with the other drinking customs by Amphictyon, a legendary king of Athens, as a ‘demonstration of the power of the good god. Moreover, they had to repeat over this cup the name of Zeus the Saviour as a warning and reminder to drinkers that only when they drank in this way [i.e. mixing the wine with water] would they be safe and sound.’ The libation was made out of a special cup called a metaniptron, which was passed around among the guests. By election, or by some other means, a symposiarch was selected to preside over the mixing and the toasts.¹²

It was a peculiar custom of the Greeks, not shared by other ancient wine-drinking cultures, to add water to their wine. The two were blended in a large mixing-bowl known as the krater. The water could be cold or warm, and snow was sometimes used to chill the unmixed wine in a psykter (wine-cooler), or even allowed to melt directly into the bowl. According to Theophrastus, in his own time it was fashionable to pour the wine in first and then dilute it, a procedure he considers more dangerous than adding wine to water to bring it up to strength, imagining, I suppose, that the idea of ‘watering down the wine’ was conducive to a stronger blend than ‘flavouring or strengthening the water’.¹³ The swirling motion of the liquids as they were blended together is reflected in the name for one kind of mixing-bowl, the dinos or whirlpool.

There was much dispute about the correct mixture. Athenaeus records a number of characters in Attic comedies arguing over the proportions. The majority of fragments refer to a mixture of half and half, but where the context is clear it seems this is supposed to designate a particularly excessive and greedy kind of drinking. A character in Sophilus’ play The Dagger, for instance, describes wine so blended as unmixed, akratos. Even a mixture of one-third wine could be considered to go against custom, while a quarter was too weak. The dilution which seems most acceptable from the comic fragments lies somewhere in between at two-sevenths, that is five parts water to two of wine. The resulting liquid could have been as potent as modern beers and consumed in similar quantities. The wine and water are considered to be somehow competing with each other, a poison and its antidote. Even a notoriously heavy drinker, like Proteas the Macedonian, described in the account of Caranus’ lavish banquet, ‘sprinkles a little water’ superstitiously before downing six pints of Thasian in one go.¹⁴

Once the wine had been mixed it was distributed by a slave, first ladling the wine into an oinochoē or jug and then pouring it into each cup in turn. The symposiarch would decide not only the measures of water and wine, but also the number of kraters to be mixed. A good decent symposium would be confined to three. Dionysus on stage in a play of Eubulus announces: ‘Three kraters only do I propose for sensible men, one for health, the second for love and pleasure and the third for sleep; when this has been drunk up, wise guests make for home.’¹⁵ The number of kraters could be set beforehand or decided as the symposium evolved. Plato’s Symposium begins with the guests’ deliberations about how they are going to drink. Since they are still suffering from the previous night’s carousing, moderation is in order. The discussion implies that they will all be drinking the same and need to agree beforehand how much. Apart from the number of kraters and the strength of the mixture, they could vary the number and size of toasts, the size of drinking cups and the frequency of rounds. With such means at his disposal the symposiarch could effectively dictate the pace of drinking, leaving some to complain of forced or ‘compulsory’ drinking. At public gatherings, officials called oinoptai, or ‘wine-watchers’, were appointed to make sure all drank the same.¹⁶

The picture of the classic moderate drinking-party which emerges from all these passages must not be seen as a mirror on Greek dinnerparties, held up to themselves by the Greeks for the benefit of posterity, but as a symptom of anxiety about how to drink properly. This anxiety was well founded. Disturbances of the proper rhythm of drinking can be observed at all levels of the ritual. For a start, the drinkers may not finish with the third krater, and the well-ordered symposium, even with its rituals intact, could spiral out of control, its machinery functioning no longer to check excess, but to gather drunken momentum. Dionysus in Eubulus’ play goes on to describe what happens if the drinking continues beyond the three kraters he considers advisable: ‘The fourth krater is mine no longer, but belongs to hybris; the fifth to shouting; the sixth to revel; the seventh to blackeyes; the eighth to summonses; the ninth to bile; and the tenth to madness and people tossing the furniture about.’ Hurtling furniture seems to have been a common manifestation of the symposium’s final stage of madness. Disruption could also come from the wrong mixture: ‘If you exceed the measure’, says the speaker in a comic fragment, ‘wine brings hybris. If you drink in the proportion of half and half, it makes for madness. If you drink it unmixed, physical paralysis.’¹⁷

Despite the risk, akratos, neat wine or strong wine, was sometimes consumed. This could be achieved only if the structures of orderly drinking were dispensed with, if the sympotic machinery of dilution and circulation that took the wine from the jars and psykters where it was kept and cooled into the neutralizing krater and then out into the ladle, the oinochoe or jug, and finally the cup, was interrupted. One comic character indicates his resolve to get drunk by calling for all the sympotic paraphernalia to be removed, except what he needs to reach his goal. Another refers to men drinking directly from the ladle. More straightforwardly, a determined drinker could simply reach out for the psykter of wine before it had been mixed with water. A character in Menander’s Chalkeia thought it was a modern habit: ‘As is the custom nowadays, they were calling out “akratos, the big cup!” And someone would wreak havoc on the poor sods by proposing a psykter for a toast.’¹⁸

The most famous example of this ‘modern’ practice comes from Plato’s Symposium. The drinking-party in Agathon’s house has thus far been exemplary. The drinking has been moderate, the symposiarch has not been forcing people to drink toasts, and the speeches have been moving around the room in turns. At this point glorious Alcibiades arrives in a state of high intoxication. He refuses, at first, to join in the rules of the symposium and elects himself symposiarch in order to force them to catch up quickly with his own level of inebriation. Leading from the front he proceeds to drink akratos out of the psykter and then gets Socrates to do the same. Before long, however, Eryximachus, the legitimate symposiarch, reasserts his authority and Alcibiades is socialized, brought into the group and into the conversation. Towards the end of the dialogue, however, there is a second disruption of komastic revellers who invade the gathering and force the guests to drink large quantities ‘in no kind of order’ en kosmōi oudeni. With the end of drinking order the symposium itself dissolves.¹⁹

COMMENSALITY

‘There is another correct interpretation of drinking cups:’ wrote Artemidorus, the interpreter of dreams, ‘they symbolize those who greet us with a kiss. And so, if they break, it means that some of the dreamer’s family or friends will die.’

Drinking wine out of the same mixing-bowl forged bonds of consubstantiation among the drinking community akin to the sharing in the sacrificial meat after a religious ceremony. Sometimes the symposiasts enjoyed even greater intimacy by sharing the same cup. The metaniptron, for instance, was probably passed around and Critias considered it a peculiarly Spartan custom not to. We also hear of a cup of friendship, a philotēsia, which can be pledged in alliance. The strong sense of community forged in the symposium is epitomized in a striking image deployed by Aristophanes. The Chorus in Acharnians illustrate their difficulty in handling War by comparing him to a drunken guest who, unlike Alcibiades at Agathon’s, refuses to be brought into the group:

Never will I welcome War into my home, never will he sing Harmodius reclining by my side, because he’s nothing but a troublemaker when he’s drunk. This is the fellow who burst upon our prosperity, like a komast, wreaking all manner of destruction, knocking things over, spilling wine and brawling, and still, when we implored him repeatedly, ‘Drink, recline, take the cup of friendship’, still more did he set fire to our trellises, and violently spilled the wine from our vines.²⁰

The symbolism of drinking together is used again in the Knights to make a rather more down-to-earth point. At some point in the last quarter of the fifth century a man called Ariphrades had managed to acquire notoriety as a practitioner of cunnilingus. The Chorus expresses its abhorrence quite vividly with a resolution, not, it should be noted, against Ariphrades and his mouth, but against his acquaintances: ‘Whoever does not utterly loathe such a man shall never drink from the same cup with me.’ The theme of pollution brings us to the festival of Choes and its founding myth. The details are obscure, but it seems that Choes was the name given to the second day of a three-day festival known as the Anthesteria. We hear about it from two classical sources in particular: Dicaeopolis, the hero of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, is shown enjoying the private peace he has concluded with Sparta by celebrating his own private Choes while the rest of the city prepares for war, and in Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Orestes describes the origin of the ritual in a banquet held for himself in Athens. Judging from these passages and the ancient commentary on them, Choes seems to have been marked by unusual drinking practices: ‘The evening of the twelfth [Anthes-terion] was a traditional occasion to invite friends to a party, but the host only provided garlands, perfumes and dessert. The guests each brought their own food and still more significantly their own drink in the form of a wine-jar … It was apparently the tradition that each drinker consumed his share in silence. This was the complete antithesis of the symposium with its sharing of talk or song.’ These unusual practices were supposed to represent the ambivalent hospitality extended by a king of Athens to polluted Orestes, at that time still an outcast from society after the murder of his mother. In Iphigenia he describes how he was given his own table, and drank separately from the others of wine poured in equal measure into a vessel touched by his lips alone. There are difficulties in reconstructing the festival, notably in integrating the private and public aspects of the accounts. For our purposes it is enough to note the contrast which was so apparent to a classical author and his audience between the customs of the Choes and the normal practice of Attic drinking, and the way that the perceived contrast is used to demonstrate Orestes’ social isolation. The very fact that the drinking at the festival was not from a drinking vessel but from a jug, a chous meant for pouring, is enough in Athenian eyes to define that way of drinking as an interruption of the processes of distribution, just as Alcibiades’ drinking from the psykter indicates an interruption in the process of mixing the wine with water.²¹

Another factor which underlines the subversion of drinking rules in the ambiguous hospitality shown to Orestes is the lack of verbal communication. He feasts, says Euripides, ‘not speaking and not spoken to’. The abstract concept of sociability was realized in the symposium, as for Brillat-Savarin, in the concrete practices of discourse. Conversation was such a defining feature of the symposium that Theophrastus referred to the notoriously chatty barber-shops as ‘symposia without the wine’.²² In the Greek context, the passage of wine and the passage of words supported and complemented each other, linked metaphorically and structurally. This linkage can be quite formal, as in Plato’s Symposium, where each guest in turn has to make a little speech. Talking was the paramount purpose of such symposia. Drinking was ancillary, serving only to loosen the tongue and facilitate the flow of words. In practice, however, the primacy of discourse was rarely observed and the advocates of conversation were disappointed. Instead of coming to the aid of dialectic, wine and words competed with one other, an unequal contest that wine usually won and drink for drinking’s sake, drinking to get drunk, supervened, destroying rather than cementing the society of drinkers with violence, or binding them closer together in a dangerous collective hysteria.

A proper flow of conversation is accordingly connected with the proper admixture of water and with drinking in small draughts, all practices designed to moderate the effects of the drug. The practice of silent swigging in the manner of the drinking contest at Choes was quite exceptional and, outside the festival, strongly condemned. The contrast was made most explicit in some pages of the manuscript of Athenaeus that were ripped out and survive only in epitome: ‘It can even be considered gentlemanly to spend time drinking, provided that one does it with good taste, not drinking deeply (kōthōnizomenon) and not swigging it without a breath, in the Thracian fashion, but blending conversation with the drink as a health potion.’ Because we don’t possess the full text at this point, it is impossible to know if Athenaeus is citing classical sources for this idea or simply expressing his own Middle Imperial thoughts, but older texts than his make the same connection between conversation and moderate drinking. One of Socrates’ arguments against huge draughts in Xenophon’s Symposium is that it will mean they won’t be able ‘to say anything’. ‘Let’s not forever be taking a pull from cups filled to the brim, but let something conversational strike the company,’ says a character in Antiphanes’ Wounded Man. The same contrast is echoed by characters in several plays of Alexis. ‘You see’, says Solon in Aesop, ‘this is the Greek way of drinking, using moderately-sized cups and chattering and gossiping with each other pleasantly.’ In contrast, a polyphagous parasite in Alexis’ play of that name is the image of the silent guzzler: ‘He dines as mute as Telephus, nodding his head to those who direct some question to him.’ It is characteristic of degenerates, comments Satyrus, foreshadowing the views of Brillat-Savarin and the anthropologists, ‘to take pleasure in wine rather than in their drinking-companions’.²³

Athenaeus’ talks of ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘liberal’ (eleutherion) behaviour, and this emphasis on class (in its broadest sense) also finds echoes in earlier literature. Alexis makes the statement that ‘no man who is a wine-lover can be of low character (kakos). For twice-mothered Bromius [Dionysus] doesn’t enjoy the company of coarse men and a life of no refinement.’ A similar sentiment is found expressed at the beginning of Wasps where the audience is trying to guess the nature of jury-loving Philocleon’s vice. One suggests he is a wine-lover (philopotēs) and Xanthias replies, never, since that disease is a ‘disease of worthies’ (chrēstōn). Towards the end of the same play Philocleon’s sophisticated son Bdelycleon orders the slave to get dinner prepared so that they can get drunk. His low-class father objects that drinking leads to bashing-in of doors, violence and fines. ‘Not if you are in the company of gentlemen’ (kaloi k’agathoi), replies his son. At this point the audience is probably expecting something along the lines of Athenaeus’ remarks about how true gentlemen know how to moderate their drinking with the refinements of conversation, but Bdelycleon’s mind is running along a different track. There will be no less violence, but once all the damage has been caused, the gentlemen intercede with the victim for you, or you yourself come up with some witty story, one of Aesop’s amusing fables or some tale of old Sybaris which you learned in the symposium; and so you turn it into a laughing matter and he forgets about it and goes off.²⁴

TAVERNS

These remarks remind us that although the symposium has been treated as the classic context for drinking in Greek society as late as the fourth century, it carries over from the archaic period associations with the lifestyle of one particular group within society, the aristocracy and their emulators. As Oswyn Murray observes: ‘However much the fifth-century democracy might try to provide public dining-rooms and public occasions for feasting, the symposion remained largely a private and aristocratic preserve.’ The lingering connotations of elitism are quite clear in the final scenes of the Wasps, in the awkwardness with which an Athenian Everyman, a dikast, like Philocleon, approaches the symposium: ‘to the fifth-century Athenian audience, the symposion is an alien world of licence and misbehaviour. ‘²⁵

Those beyond the aristocratic pale had to get their liquid refreshment elsewhere, in the tavern or kapēleion, a far more demotic and promiscuous space than the private and selective andrōn. This well-attested institution does not seem to have been given as much scholarly attention as it deserves. After the reference-filled columns of Hug’s brief entry in Pauly-Wissowa’s panoramic encyclopedia of the ancient world, it is hard to find any detailed study and few bother even to refer to it. To some extent this neglect is a direct result of the prominence accorded the symposium and the anthropological model of commensality in accounts of Greek drinking. In contrast to the symposium, the kapēleion looks out of historical place, foreshadowing the consumerized, individualized drinking which ought to be the prerogative of modern times. In addition there are some philological questions that sometimes cause problems. A kapēlos can be both a retailer in general and a taverner in particular, although in comedy and oratory, when it is used without qualification, the latter sense can almost always be assumed.²⁶

These taverners seem to have sold wine, vinegar and torches to light the way home at night and offer protection from cloak-snatchers. In some of these establishments, it seems, you could have something to eat as well. The kapēloi began as wholesalers and continued to sell wine in bulk to those who could afford to entertain at home. But they also broke the bulk, a practice known as ‘half-pinting’ (kotulizein), and served smaller quantities of wine with water to be drunk on the premises. In Gorgias Plato mentions one particular kapēlos, called Sarambus, whose skill at ‘preparing’ (paraskeuazōri) wine he compares with the work of Athens’ finest baker and Mithaecus, a Syracusan cook, reputed to be the Pheidias of the kitchen. Some translators treat Sarambus as simply a seller of wine, and translate ‘prepare’ as ‘provide’, but the fact that he is put alongside creative characters like a baker and a chef suggests that Sarambus is more than a simple retailer. Plato is talking of his skills as a taverner, and in fact it is precisely this passage that the lexicographer Pollux uses to demonstrate that in classical Attica kapēloi also mixed the wine. Plato, he says, is praising Sarambus for his oinourgia, his ‘winesmanship’. What the oinourgia of a good taverner consisted of in actual fact is open to speculation; honest measures of good wine, perhaps, from an amphora not long opened, strained of debris, blended with clean, chilled water, maybe a little perfume, served in fine cups with some bar-food, some tragémata (desserts) perhaps or hales (savouries) as an accompaniment. There is evidence for the suppression of such establishments in Thasos at least and we don’t hear much of taverns before Aristophanes, but in his comedies they appear as an already well-worn feature of the urban environment and it would be dangerous to argue from silence that taverns were a late-fifth-century phenomenon, supplanting the older more traditional aristocratic symposia as the fourth century progressed. The two institutions of drinking continued to exist side by side for a long time and they had probably coexisted for some years before they turn up in our sources.

There are enough references in all manner of different texts to indicate that taverns were widespread and popular. In Pompeii they reached a density that compares with the frequency of bars and pubs in modern cities. An assessment of their distribution in Athens must of necessity be rather more impressionistic. But take, to begin with, the laconic remark which Aristotle in the Rhetoric ascribes to Diogenes the Cynic: ta kapēleia ta Attika phiditia (‘taverns are the refectories of Attica’). The impact of the facetious comparison lies in the conjunction of two starkly opposed institutions: the communal dining-halls of Sparta, the epitome of a conservative collective, archetypes of elite commensality, membership of which effectively defined citizenship, and Athenian taverns, a typically democratic efflorescence, quintes-sentially commercial and apparently plebeian. But behind the sarcasm of Diogenes’ comparison there lies an observation about the popularity of taverns in Attica. Just as the common messes feed and water the entire citizenry in Sparta, so the whole population of Attica can be found of an evening thronging the kapēleia,²⁷

Diogenes’ observation is confirmed by the frequent references in comedy and forensic speeches to ‘the neighbourhood kapēleion, offering a picture of bars spread widely throughout the city. So common a feature of the cityscape were they that the cuckold Euphiletus, justifying his murder of Eratosthenes in cold blood at the beginning of the fourth century, notes that he and his friends were able to buy torches for their expedition late at night from ‘the nearest kapēleion’ so that all could fully witness his wife’s adultery before her lover was despatched. Apart from these literary sources, kapēleia feature frequently in curse tablets, lead-letters commissioned from magicians and deposited in infernal postboxes, usually graves or crevices, conjuring Hermes and Persephone to spell-bind their enemies. One tablet in particular from an unsuccessful rival, or an impoverished alcoholic, vividly confirms the picture portrayed in comedy and court speeches of Athens with kapēleia on every corner: ‘I bind Callias, the taverner and his wife Thraitta, and the tavern of the bald man, and Anthemion’s tavern near […] and Philo the taverner. Of all these I bind their soul, their trade [ergasia], their hands and feet, their taverns … and also the taverner Agathon, servant of Sosimenes … I bind Mania the bar-girl at the spring, and the tavern of Aristander of Eleusis.’ The ‘kapēleion of the bald man’ seems to have been a common tag for a well-known tavern which crops up again in an inscription, a tavern of which perhaps Callias and Thraitta were the owners or staff. That a number of these tavern-keepers were slaves is indicated not only by mention of their owners, but also by their names. Thraitta (Thracian woman), for instance, is sometimes used almost as a synonym for slave-girl. The fragment of Alexis’ Aesop mentioned above refers to the practice of selling wine from carts, and some of these kapēleia may have been nothing more than this, conveniently situated by a spring perhaps to enable the wine to be mixed with cold water and drunk there and then. Other more solidly founded bars had wells or cisterns on the premises.²⁸

A vase in a private collection, currently on loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is almost certainly an illustration of a kapēleion. The mouth of the buried cistern or lakkos is behind the youth who asks for ‘trikotylos’, cheap wine sold at three obols a chous. An oinochoē or pitcher hangs behind him in case he wants to drink it on the premises. He is either opening the amphora or tasting wine with a sponge, which may symbolize thirst, or greed for wine. In the other hand he carries a bag of money to pay for it. The cup may have been destined for a symposium, juxtaposing hospitality with the market-place by reminding the symposiasts how the wine they are drinking got there and allowing the symposium’s plebeian counterpart into the confines of the andrōn to show how aristocratic it is, or perhaps it was itself destined for a bar indicating that the kapēleion was also perhaps capable of sealing itself off from the world with an imagery of endless self-reflexion.

In the early 1970s excavators in the Agora unearthed a building of the early fourth century BCE which looks very like one of these taverns, adjacent to, or incorporating within it, some kind of eating-place. In ‘room six’ of the complex they discovered a well which having run dry was used for rubbish and filled with the debris of plates, fish-bones (of course) and a large number of amphora fragments revealing that, apart from the local Attic wine, Mendaean had been poured, along with Chian, Corinthian, Samian and Lesbian. In among these shards of coarse ceramic they found a large number of drinking cups of various types, some of a rather high standard: ‘–they suggest that the establishment catered to a clientele of some quality and some indication of the power of that wine and the popularity of the shop is possibly to be inferred from the extraordinary breakage of which our well preserves the record.’²⁹

Like fishmongers and other traders, kapēloi seem to have been held in low esteem by the general population. In one play Theopompus the playwright compared the Spartans to barmaids (kapēlides) because after their victory in the Peloponnesian War they gave the Greeks a taste of freedom, and then disappointed them with vinegar instead. Blepyrus in Aristophanes’ Wealth mistakes the wretched personification of Poverty for the local barmaid who ‘cheats grossly’ in her half-pint measures. Again in Thesmophoriazusae the herald includes among the public curses imprecations against ‘the taverner or the barmaid who cheats without shame on the full legal measure of the choēs or kotylō. It is not long before kapēlos and its cognates comes to denote hucksterism or trickery in general; honest barmen were correspondingly prized.³⁰ The nervous measure-watching atmosphere of the kapēleion makes a striking contrast with the generous equality of the symposium.

It seems quite clear that most of our sources (representing something far short of a cross-section of society) see the kapēleia as a feature characteristic of democratic and commercial cities, and ascribe the popularity of such establishments to the ‘baser’ elements of society. This, for instance, is the historian Theopompus’ tirade against the people of Byzantium and Chalcedon, taken from book eight of his Philippica:

The fact that they had been practising democracy for what was by now a long time together with the fact that their city was situated at a trading post, not to mention the fact that the entire populace spent their time around the agora and the harbour, meant that the people of Byzantium lacked self-discipline and were accustomed to get together in bars for a drink. And the people of Chalcedon, before they came to share with the Byzantines in their government all used to pursue a better way of life. But when they had tasted Byzantine democracy they fell to decadence and from having been the most self-controlled and moderate in their daily life, they became drink-lovers and squanderers.

Later the historian Phylarchus, echoing Diogenes’ observation about Athens, noted that the Byzantines virtually took up residence in taverns. In Thasos, on the other hand, breaking the bulk and selling by the kotylē was illegal, a measure intended, it seems, to outlaw taverns altogether.³¹

According to Isocrates the pamphleteer, only a certain type of person would allow himself to be seen at one of these establishments. In a eulogy of the ancient aristocratic council of the Areopagus, for instance, he looks back with nostalgia to the way young men used to behave in the good old days: ‘No one, not even a servant, at least not a respectable servant, would have been so brazen as to eat or drink in a kapēleion. For they cultivated dignity, not buffoonery.’ The same theme is repeated with some elaboration in the Antidosis:

You have brought it about that even the most respectable [epieikeis] of the young men are wasting their time in drinking and assignations [sunousiai], and idleness and childish games … whereas those who are more base in nature spend their days in the kind of degenerate pastimes which not even a decent servant would have dared to pursue in former times. Some of them chill wine at the Nine Fountains, others drink in kapēleia, there are some who play dice in the gambling-dens and many who loiter around the place where the flute-girls are trained.³²

Isocrates was not alone in his prejudices: In his speech Against Patrocles, the orator Hyperides, a contemporary of Demosthenes, records that ‘the Areopagites barred anyone who had breakfasted in a kapēleion from going up to the Areopagus’. This was, of course, as much as anything, an attempt to stop drunken deliberations, and it seems likely that when our sources talk of people drinking during the day it is to the kapēleia that they are referring.³³ There seems to be an attack on the demagogue Cleon’s morning attendance at these watering-holes of the Agora before a debate in the nearby Assembly – if not the actual bar unearthed by the archaeologists then one very similar – contained in the Paphlagonian’s boast at Knights: ‘I who can consume hot slices of tuna, drink a chous of neat wine and then go and screw the generals at Pylos.’

Isocrates allows us to set up an opposition between two kinds of drinking, the potoi (sympotic drinking) of the most ‘respectable’ (epieikēs) and the tavern drinking of those ‘worse in nature’. Clearly, elements of social prejudice are in operation in his distinction between coarse low-class buffoonery (bōmolochia) and decency (epieikeia) as the reference to the ‘servant’ indicates. But we should not give the orator’s nostalgic fantasy more credit than it deserves. Even with the limited information at our disposal we can see there were ranks among the taverns, running from high-quality kapēleia like theone dug up in the Agora, whose patrons could get hold of the best wines from the best producers, served in good ceramic ware by highly-regarded barmen like Plato’s Sarambus through to the small stalls owned by the characters we encounter on the curse-tablets, some of which perhaps consisted of nothing more than a slave-girl and a cart by a spring. The clientele reflects this range. According to the rhetorical sources, the taverns are places where you could meet a member of the Areopagus, or Aeschines the Socratic, or Euphiletus and his friends, picking up torches on their way to kill Eratosthenes. In comedy they are places well known to men like Blepyrus in Wealth or slaves in Lysistrata, and to women of all levels of society, the citizen women of the Lysistrata, Thesriophonazusae and the Ecclesiazusae as well as a nurse in Eubulus’ Pamphilus. In the tavern as in the andrōn, wine was drunk mixed, but without all the ritual and regulation of the well-ordered symposium: ‘As for me – for there happened to be a large new kapēleion across the road from the house – I was keeping my eye on the girl’s nurse, for I had ordered the barman to mix me a chous [six pints] for an obol and to accompany it with the biggest kantharos he had.’ Wine in the tavern was mixed for the individual in an individual vessel, with an individual cup to drink it out of. The elaborate rituals of sharing from the kratēr which are such a conspicuous feature of the symposium, have no part in the commercial environment of the tavern. Aristophanes uses the symposium as a metaphor for community threatened by unwelcome outsiders, like War or the friends of Ariphrades. The kapēleion on the other hand, he uses as an allegory of cheating, the swindling taverners out to exploit to the fullest extent their clients on the other side of the bar. In the kapēleion are to be found those who had no part in the symposium: ‘des femmes, des esclaves, des barbares.’ It seems, therefore, to fulfil a role as the symposium’s Other, on the margins of the Athenian community of citizens, a place where people drink ‘in no kind of order’ as Plato observes of the drinking which disrupts and dissolves his own Symposium. The tavern is a place where wines are identified by their price, where drink is commodified and severed from social ties, a place where drink is for getting drunk, a place where ancient drinking comes to look most like the drinking we apparently do today.³⁴

But this is to ignore certain characteristics of this commercial drinking which shine through, even though the evidence is so scattered. First of all, the bars are so often ‘local’. They nestle snugly into the neighbourhood. The nurse only has to pop across the road to her kapēleion, as do so many others from cuckolded Euphiletus to Blepyrus in the Wealth, and there she finds someone to buy her a drink. Blepyrus in that play thinks he recognizes in the goddess Poverty the cheating barmaid from his local and there is certainly an expectation that customers and clients would know each other and their drinking habits. This is a long way from anonymous drinking: ‘There is a taverner in our neighbourhood; and whenever I feel like a drink and go there, he knows at once – and he only knows – how I have it mixed. I always know that I’ll be drinking it neither too watery, nor too strong.’ The bonds betwen barmen and their regulars are reflected in the practice of drinking on tick. Athens was a city in which borrowing was very common. Ready use of credit is often seen as an indication of a highly developed capitalist economy, but in many societies, and in particular at Athens, it seems to have more in common with pre-money economies based on gift-exchange, a transaction which shifts the burden of trust away from the quality of the coinage and back to personal acquaintance. The practice of ‘prodo-sin pinein’ fatally compromises the impersonality of drinking in a tavern, tying up the free-flowing promiscuous exchange of commodities with bonds of debt and trust. It is a sign of the depths to which insolvency has brought Aeschines the Socratic, that even the local kapēloi have stopped advancing him credit.³⁵

The distinction between symposium and kapēleion, then, was one of class and culture rather than of socialization. The tavern was differently socialized rather than unsocialized and if it was the site of those excesses whose debris so impressed the archaeologists, its reputation at Athens was not worse than that of the symposium. In fact, in the popular imagination it figures, if anything, as less of a threat to public order than the aristocratic drinking-party. For this, of course, was a democratic city with a radical reputation. Non-Athenians like Theopompus and Diogenes or the government of Thasos looked on taverns very differently.

To a surprising degree the Greeks anticipate modern debates about drinking as a drug or as a social catalyst. They were nervous drinkers and shared the anthropologists’ anxiety about the threat wine presented to socialization, agreeing with Brillat-Savarin that the discipline of conversation must restrain it. One important aspect of the Greek problematic of wine finds few modern parallels, however, focusing neither on the community of drinkers nor on the drink, but on something in between.

CUPS

Some of the most surprising texts on the subject of drinking in antiquity are those fragments in poetry and prose in praise of Spartan drinking habits composed by the Spartan-loving revolutionary oligarch, Critias of Athens. In his Elegies he contrasted Spartan drinking habits – each man from his own cup, no toasts passed around and, he insists, no drunken excess – with Athenian practice. In a similar work, The Constitution of the Spartans, he elaborated his praise of Spartan institutions in prose with an encomiastic examination of the smallest details of their daily life from their footware to their crockery: ‘Laconian shoes are the best; their cloaks are the most pleasant to wear as well as being the most useful; the Spartan kōthōn is a cup most appropriate for military service and easily transportable in a kit-bag. It is a cup for soldiers, because it is often necessary for them to drink water that is not clean: the liquid inside a kōthōn cannot be seen too clearly, and the cup has ridges so that it retains any impurities.’

This fragment of Critias is the first in a strange series of rationalizations penned by the supporters of Sparta’s peculiar conventions. Xenophon, for instance, tells us that Lycurgus devised red cloaks for the Spartiates because he believed this costume had least of all in common with a woman’s dress. He also permitted men past their first youth to wear their hair long, not for the sake of vanity, but because he thought it would make them look taller, more gentlemanly, more terrifying. Aristotle in his Constitution of the Spartans returned to the same theme. Red cloaks were inherently masculine. Their sanguinary dye accustomed the Spartans to depise the flow of blood. Plutarch had a slightly different explanation: the crimson colour was designed to disguise from the enemy the fact that they had been wounded. In the Rhetoric, again, Aristotle gives a Veblenian elaboration of Xenophon’s views on long hair: ‘it is the mark of a gentleman, for it is not easy to perform a plebeian task with long hair.’³⁷

It is not difficult to see that this exegesis of the semiotics of Spartan fashion is rather defensive in tone, the self-conscious forging of a myth. The writers protest too much, and the reason for their defensiveness is not hard to find: the habits they describe look rather like luxurious practices to the Athenian eye. This is most obvious with the custom of wearing the hair long, a vogue that, outside the boundaries of Laconia, aroused considerable suspicions, drawing charges of effeminacy and enervation and bringing to mind paragons of long-haired vice like the fictional profligate Pheidippides in Aristophanes’ Clouds or, on the very streets of Athens, infamous Alcibiades. Similar connotations of luxury hover around other items of Spartan fashion. Laconian shoes are fine pieces of footwear, the shoes of gentlemen in contrast to the felt slippers of the poor. The phoinikis too, the scarlet cloak with its expensive vermilion dye, evokes extravagance to an outsider’s eye.³⁸ In democratic Athens the whole get-up would look like something very far from asceticism. The attachment of the Spartan epithet to the paraphernalia of a rich and opulent lifestyle was a continual rebuttal of those citizens of oligarchic tendency who tried to emulate the Spartan way of life, holding it up as an example of moderation and restraint.

Critias’ elaborate defence of the Spartan cup falls into the same apologetic category. This too was a suspicious object. Spartan drinking, without the lively conversation, the toasts and the passing of the cup which characterized well-ordered drinking at Athens, looked rude, ill-mannered and dangerous to Critias’ audience. The Spartan way of drinking from one’s own cup, in silence, bore most resemblance to the transgressive and competitive drinking-to-get-drunk of Choes, the feast of the Pitchers. The cup was itself a symbol for the wrong kind of drinking, as Aristophanes made explicit in his lost play The Banqueters. The play centres on the activities of a man’s two sons, one of them a model of self-control, the other utterly dissipated in every field. An illustration of this dissipation is provided by his drinking habits; no moderate measure for him, no gentle sipping from shallow vessels between anecdotes, but ‘Chian wine from Spartan cups’.³⁹ The kōthōn, in an Athenian context, far from being an attribute of the rugged asceticism of soldiers, stands for the worst kind of vinous indulgence practised by urban degenerates. The reason for the cup’s infamy seems clear. It was the wrong shape.

The Greeks enjoyed a rich and varied array of cups in all manner of shapes and sizes. There are indications that it was customary to progress from small cups at the start of the symposium to larger ones at the end. The Scythian Anacharsis, who represents for the Greeks something akin to the naive wisdom of the eighteenth-century’s ‘noble savage’, thought this very odd. Why drink from small cups when you’re empty and from big cups when you’re full? At the drinking-party described by Xenophon in his Symposium one of the guests, breathless from an impromptu dancing performance, tries to hurry things along and asks for ‘the big cup’ to quench his thirst. The host concurs and asks for big cups all round; the others are thirsty too, not from dancing but from laughing at his performance. Predictably, however, Socrates, who is a guest at an alarming number of attested symposia, intercedes and speaks in favour of ‘small cups sprinkled frequently, so that we will be seduced into reaching a state of amusement, instead of being forced by the wine into drunkenness’. The moderate drinking practices of the well-ordered symposium call for moderately-sized cups. Drinkers who are getting serious about drinking, on the other hand, typically ask for a big cup, or a bigger cup to show they mean business. The woman in Pherecrates’ Corianno goes so far as to bring her own well-sized vessel along, rejecting the little kyliskē hopefully offered to her.⁴⁰

It is important to observe that in the literature big cups are almost always deep cups. The vessels to which they are opposed are flat, shallow, saucerish things. A fragment from a play of Pherecrates makes this relationship between size and shape quite clear. In his play Tyranny, which seems to have been a fantasy of women seizing power on the lines of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, he describes the women’s control of men’s drinking as follows:

Then for the men they had cups made which were flat, nothing but a base with no sides, and room for not so much as a cockleful, like little ‘tasters’; for their female selves, on the other hand, they had deep cups made, cups like wine-transporting merchantmen, well-rounded, delicate vessels that bulged out in the middle; cups designed with far foresight for maximum consumption and minimal accountability. The result? Whenever we charge them with drinking up the wine they reproach us and swear that they have had no more than a single cup. But this single one is greater than a thousand cups.

A similar contrast is made by Epigenes in his play Heroine: ‘But the potters don’t even make kantharoi nowadays, you poor chap, not those fat ones; they all make these low-lying elegant things instead … as if it were the cups themselves we were drinking rather than the wine.’⁴¹ The size and shape of the vessels represented a difference in the manner of drinking. Deep cups meant deep drinking, long draughts knocked back from fat vessels, bottoms-up; shallow cups in contrast were drained more elegantly, tilted slightly and sipped frequently between dialectical contributions.

Typical of these vessels of depth was the bat-eared goblet of the Boeotians and Etruscans, the kantharos: ‘Let’s put out into the deep; into the kantharos, boy, pour it, by Zeus, into the kantharos,’ says a comic character to his slave. A huge kantharos is what gets the nurse drunk in Eubulus’ Pamphilus (she drains it dry in one go), and it is a kantharos that Hermaiscus is seen knocking back in Alexis’ Cratias. It is no surprise, then, that it is this cup above all that Dionysus keeps by his side, that, indeed, becomes so closely associated with the god of wine as to constitute an attribute.⁴²

The horn-shaped vessels called rhyton and keras belong to the same capacious category. A fragment of Epinicus describes three cups of legendary capacity, all of them rhyta. One holding two choes, approximately twelve pints, is known as the elephant tusk, to be drunk, apparently, in one go. At least one other source refers to such a vessel; it may be more than a figment of comedy’s hyperbolic imagination. Drinking-horns share the kantharos’ symbolic associations with Dionysus and his retinue, indicating in particular a primitive or barbarian approach to drinking. Often, it seems, they were filled with akratos. One striking image from a vase of about 500 BCE shows a foreshortened symposiast dressed up for drinking like a Scythian, a huge drinking-horn silhouetted against him in the foreground. When someone in a comedy asks for a drinking-horn or even for ‘cups deeper to drink from than drinking-horns’, it is clear that the well-ordered Greek forms of drinking are being ushered out of the door. A striking illustration of this comes from the plastic vases, ceramic cups moulded into figures. The cups come in a variety of forms, but never assume the features of the white males for whose lips they were intended, a striking exception that François Lissarrague in his study of the imagery of the symposium thought significant: ‘there are no gods except for Dionysus and Heracles; instead one finds only women, both male and female blacks, Asians and satyrs … It is as if the anthropology of such moulded vases was meant to define the opposite of the Greek drinker and to hold up to him all the things that he was not.’⁴³ It is no coincidence that the cups most often used for refashioning into the form of these notoriously immoderate drinkers are the cups of immoderate drinking, the kantharos and the horn being particular favourites for makeover.

Drinking-horns presented something of a problem for moralists. For if, as the philosopher Chamaeleon of Heracleia insisted, in his treatise On Drunkenness, big cups were an invention of modern decadence and did not exist in earlier times, how was it that the rhyton was an attribute of the heroes of the past? The philosopher had an answer for this objection. The artists represent heroes with large cups, so that it will be seen that their characteristic rage is due not to their temperamental nature, but to their inebriation.⁴⁴

Other rather more obscure shapes share the reputation of the kantharos and the rhyton. The kumbion was a deep vessel shaped like a boat, a favourite shape of one notorious drinker in the fourth century, known as Euripides. Another deep cup called lepastē was associated with the verb laptō, which Athenaeus glosses as ‘to drink in one go’. A fragment of Pherecrates has a character offering one to the thirsty members of his audience suggesting they swig it like Charybdis. Elsewhere, we find it emptied by old women, and used successfully to charm Lysander when a kōthōn had failed. One of thesedeep cups is actually called a ‘breathless cup’, because its contents were drunk down without a breath.⁴⁵

Despite the competition, it is Critias’ kōthōn that comes to stand par excellence for deep drinking at Athens. It shares many of the features of those deep cups associated with Dionysus and his followers, emptied in single draughts. A kōthōn referred to in a play of Alexis could hold about two pints. In a painting described by Polemon in a fragmentary ecphrasis from his To Adaeus and Antigonus, Dionysus is seated on a rock accompanied by a bald-headed satyr holding a kōthōn. A woman in Theopompus’ Stratiotides describes the customary way this cup was drained: ‘I, for one, would be prepared to stretch back my throat to drink from the neck-twisting kōthōn.’ Most commentators suggest that this comic drama played on the consequences of the fantastic scenario of women in the army, and there seems to be more to the kōthōn, s military connection than special pleading on the part of Critias. They are found in the hands of soldiers in Archilochus’ early archaic Elegies, and in Aristophanes’ late-fifth-century Knights. However, contra Critias, the liquid most likely to be discovered inside was not water but wine. There has been some debate over what the Spartan cup actually looked like. Many have been misled by Critias’ description to look in vain for a vessel with an elaborate folded-over rim to catch impurities. But the fragment refers more simply to ambōnas, meaning ‘ridges’ or ‘ribs’. At least one vase, shaped like a stout mug or tankard, has been discovered with kōthōn actually written on the base, and it now seems clear that this shape satisfies most of the literary references. By Critias’ time at the end of the fifth century they were being made with vertical ridges all the way round. Normally such ridging was simply decorative, an attempt to make ceramic ware look like silver, but on the kōthōns the ridging is often found on the inside too, apparently a rather pointless exercise that would only weaken the fabric. Some students of vases have suggested this could only be explained as an obsession with imitating metalware taken to counter-productive extreme. But Critias explains it much better. What is the point of having ridges to collect the lees unless you have them on the inside?⁴⁶ If such vessels are rarely mentioned in modern accounts of Greek drinking it is because they do not fit the image of the classic elegant sympotic cup, looking more like a medieval tankard. Beazley, the great connoisseur of Greek pots, preferred to leave them nameless, classifying them (despite their lack of a pouring-spout) with jugs.

We are now in a position to subvert Critias’ special pleading and to restore to the kōthōn its normal connotations. It was a very useful cup for scooping, not from streams of mountain water, but from vats of wine as described with such relish by Archilochus. Its contents would be less visible than in an ordinary flat sympotic cup, not to disguise the dirtiness of the water drawn from mountain streams, but simply because it was a deep cup made for deep drinking. The ridging was suitable not for catching Critias’ river-dirt but for saving the swigger from getting a mouthful of lees and all the other bits and pieces left in ancient Greek wine. It may have started as a military cup, but it seems to have found its way into the symposium at an early date.⁴⁷ There it will have stood alongside the keras and other deep cups as a challenge to the orderly blending and distribution of the wine. The kōthōn, with its characteristic single handle does not look like a cup made for sharing.

From the name of this cup the Greeks generated the noun kōthōnismos and the verb kōthōnizein which first appear in the fourth century. They refer to ‘deep drinking’: ‘je vide la grande coupe’ is how a French commentator begins the conjugation of this interesting verb. The physician Mnesitheus wrote a treatise in the form of a letter around the middle of the century, suggesting that in certain circumstances kōthōnismos could be good for you, like an emetic or a purgative. He gives three main points to bear in mind when engaging in such drinking: ‘not to drink poor wine or akratos, and not to eat tragēmata [dried fruits and nuts and other desserts of the second table] in the middle of kōthōnismoi. When you have had enough, don’t go to sleep until you have vomited more or less. Then, if you vomit sufficiently go to bed after a light bath. If, however, you weren’t able fully to purge yourself, use more water and completely immerse yourself in a warm tub.’⁴⁸ This kind of drinking had probably always gone on, but it wasn’t until the fourth century that the culture of kōthōnismos caught the attention of the orators and moralists.

Demosthenes, according to Hyperides, considered it a particular vice of the young. He described them as akratokōthōnes, a remark that subsequently became notorious. The parasite known as the Lark demonstrated the wit that excused his gate-crashing by connecting Demosthenes’ remark to his notorious readiness to accept bribes, accusing the orator of a kind of metaphorical hypocrisy: ‘This man who calls other men akratokōthōnes has himself drained the big cup dry.’ Such drinking seems to have been social and competitive and may well have taken place in a sympotic context, although it transgressed so many of the symposium’s rules. By the early third century kōthōn means a cup no longer, but a drinking-bout, or drinking-party. Two kinds are mentioned, sumbolikos and asumbolos, with and without contributions, the former requiring each participant to bring his own wine, the second providing an open bar. When Lycon the Peripatetic arrived as a student in Athens in the early third century he made great progress in acquiring knowledge of these p.b.a.b. parties as well as the rates charged by each of the city’s courtesans.⁴⁹

As Demosthenes’ coinage indicates, the kōthōn was associated not simply with slugging deep draughts, but with drinking strong wine. This is something it had in common with other deep cups. The notion of ‘depth’ is the key to the problematic of drinking at Athens, enabling us to draw up a division along two axes. One kind of consumption emphasizes the horizontal plane: the wine is blended expansively with water; it is sipped slowly from smaller shallower cups; there are as a result more rounds, more of those processes of circulation and distribution which make the symposium such a bonding experience; words join water in diluting the wine whose proper role is to facilitate conversation. In this shallow form of drinking the emphasis is not on the wine but on the company of drinkers joined around the kratēr, protected from the power of liquor by a whole theatre of mitigation, and the distracting play of discourse and representation. Wine is effectively flattened and rendered negligible. This is the wine of commensality, of Brillat-Savarin and the anthropologists.⁵⁰ Opposed to this is the degenerate consumption of the vertical axis, the wine of Baudelaire and the alcoholists: the wine is akratos, thick, three-dimensional and strong; the cups are large and deep; drinking is long and breathless. Wine can reassert its primacy and, in the stampede to inebriation, the niceties of social interaction get trampled underfoot. Here wine is no longer a catalyst of conversation. It is a drug once more.

PART II DESIRE

III WOMEN AND BOYS

THE ORATOR APOLLODORUS is attacking Neaera, a prostitute, in court. He digresses, for a moment, on the uses of women in Athens: ‘Hetaeras we keep for pleasure, concubines for attending day-by-day to the body and wives for producing heirs, and for standing trusty guard on our household property.’¹ Ancient literature contains no shortage of attempts by ancient men to put ancient women in their proper sexual place, and a whole lexicon of labels and terms with which to do it: ‘two-obol woman’, ‘ground-beater’, ‘flute-girl’, ‘companion’, ‘wage-earner’, ‘wanderer’, ‘wife’. The very act of naming was an important part of policing women and women’s sexuality. According to the laws of Syracuse, for instance, the great Greek city on the southern tip of Sicily, a woman was forbidden from wearing ‘gold ornaments or gaily-coloured dresses or garments with purple borders unless she admitted she was a common prostitute’.² Apollodorus’ neat three-kinds-of-women statement has been particularly influential among modern historians and is sometimes cited as a straightforward account of female roles in Athens. It is far from that, however. The speaker himself shows a remarkable level of inconsistency in conferring his titles on Neaera and the whole thrust of the speech is that such distinctions are easily flouted, enabling Neaera’s daughter, ‘a common whore’ (pornē), to infiltrate the ranks of decent citizens by marrying the King Archon, even presiding with him over the most ancient rites in the city’s religious calendar and risking the wrath of the gods. As the great French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant comments, the author’s ‘remarks in this … speech indicate better than anything both the desire to establish a clear demarcation … and at the same time the impossibility of so doing’.³

Other writers are no more helpful than Apollodorus, frequently applying several different terms to the same woman, and thus confounding their own taxonomies. This ambivalence is at the very heart of the vocabulary used to describe women’s roles. Gunē, wife, can also mean more generally ‘woman’ (cf. French femme), and was sometimes used for a concubine or mistress. The more normal word for a woman in that kind of informal relationship was hetaera, but that could equally well designate a woman of independent means and high fees, or, at the other end of the scale, a slave-girl working for a madam. It is hardly surprising, then, that despite the survival of numerous ancient definitions, attempts to establish clear demarcations between the different categories of women in Athens (to distinguish wives from concubines [pallakai] and concubines from ‘courtesans’ and ‘courtesans’ from ‘common whores’ [pornai]) are highly problematic, and consensus rarely survives for more than a generation. Most recently, many scholars have become impatient with this inconsistency on the part of ancient writers. Ignoring Vernant’s advice they have concluded that one division alone can be made with some confidence, one division that really mattered: the division between Wives and the Rest. The other distinctions represent nothing more substantial than a rich vocabulary with which men could express varying degrees of contempt for the women they used.

This ‘two-types’ model in works on women in antiquity has had a devastating effect on the career of the courtesan or hetaera who has moved from a position at centre-stage in earlier accounts of prostitution to near invisibility in more recent ones. In the early years of this century, when such subjects as Women and Sex were first considered worthy of attention, the hetaera exercised a strong fascination on male historians. She was represented as a sophisticated lady, a cultured woman of the world, witty, philosophical and flirtatious. In these earlier, idealized treatments a strong distinction was made between high-class courtesans and the pornai, the lower-class prostitutes of the brothels and the streets, who alone represented the ‘bad’ kind of prostitution. Charles Seltman, for instance, writing in the 1950s, maintained:

The framework of social life in Athens was not far different from that of Paris up to 1939. There were brothels, mainly for foreigners of all sorts, licensed under the laws of Solon as far back as the early sixth century BC. The licensing was done to prevent brawling in the streets. Later street-walkers living under the care of a ‘Madame’ began to appear. All this, of course, is the same as in any Mediterranean city today, a world-wide misfortune. But hetaeras were certainly in a very different class; often highly educated women, foreigners from other Greek states and cities, earning a living sometimes in commerce, business girls, bachelor girls, models.⁴

That the hetaeras who associated with the leading men of the period, who engaged Pericles and Alcibiades in droll conversation, also sold their bodies for sex, was an uncomfortable fact, readily pushed into the background.

The new accounts of women in antiquity, however, influenced by feminist attitudes to prostitution, have reacted strongly against this picture, treating it as an attempt by male fantasists, ancient and modern, to romanticize an inherently obnoxious institution. Women had two roles available to them: the wife or the prostitute; there was no room for any equivocating ‘courtesan’ in between.⁵ Eva Keuls, for instance, in a chapter entitled ‘Two Kinds of Women. The Splitting of the Female Psyche’, remarks:

If the sexual conduct of the respectable woman is restricted to marital intercourse while the corresponding male is permitted to be promiscuous, it must of necessity follow that the female population is divided sharply into two classes: those who have limited sexual contacts in the course of a lifetime, probably far less than their physical nature could accommodate, and those who have sex in great abundance, far more than they could possibly experience in a meaningful way.⁶

This initially rather radical idea has now settled comfortably into the mainstream of ancient studies: ‘Athenian society perfected a quite precise double standard,’ claims one textbook, ‘which did not involve contradiction, or subterfuge, but rather relied on a clear separation between two categories of women who were not to be confused: legitimate wives (or potential legitimate wives) and all other women.

The first were the chaste mothers and daughters of Athenian citizens; the second were open to free sexual exploitation.’⁷ In this version of the position of women at Athens there are only two very starkly contrasted groups, almost mirror-images of one another. They are connected only by the hydraulic operation of male heterosexuality, the prostitutes providing release for the pressures produced by the chaste seclusion of decent women, relief for the sexual frustrations of men not yet married, or forced to marry women whose only attractions were a large dowry or an influential family. She is a sexual substitute for the wife, a body-double or, in the words of a recent German study, an ‘Ersatzfrau’.⁸

Under the influence of this transcendental distinction between Wives and the Rest the old distinction made between courtesans and ‘common whores’, hetaeras and pornai, has become obsolete. They both fall more or less happily now into a single modern category. They are all prostitutes.⁹ At the same time, important intervening terms like the Athenian hetaera and the concubine have been elided, forgotten or ignored as if all Athenian women were chastely married or about to be, and all hetaeras were foreigners speaking in strange dialects with funny accents. These need not trouble the two-women theory. Either they are ‘paradoxical’ exceptions whose existence ‘paradoxically’ confirms the basic truth of the doctrine or they are put into the even more fuzzy class of ‘pallakai’ and classed with wives or hetaeras depending on convenience. There are, to be sure, not many references to these native-born courtesans and concubines (they will have found it easier than most to fade into decent obscurity), but they certainly existed, providing an important bridge between Wives and the Rest and muddying masculine distinctions.¹⁰ One cannot help thinking that this dogmatic distinction is a way for scholars to avoid dealing with prostitution altogether and helps to account for the astonishing lack of research in a subject which sits at the intersection of two of the biggest growth areas in modern classics, the study of women and the study of sexuality.

Instead of two stark groups of women and one great undifferentiated mass of sex-workers I want in the next couple of chapters to emphasize the diversity and complexity of the sex market in Athens and to re-establish the importance of the hetaera. There were numerous gradations between the miserable life of the streets and the comfortable existence of the most successful courtesans, quietly encroaching on the territory of the legitimate family and causing consternation to Apollodorus and his fellow-citizens. To talk of ‘mistresses’ and ‘courtesans’ may risk glamorizing, romanticizing or exoticizing a life that was in most cases nasty, brutish and short and there are dangers in reconstructing a kind of hierarchy, but, on the other hand, historians are providing no compensation for the wretchedness of ancient women’s lives by lumping all ‘bad girls’ together. Moreover, the sex market in Athens was not just about the exploitation of women. Men were sexual commodities as well as consumers and although male sex-workers were, I think, nowhere near as numerous as their female counterparts, they did take on very similar roles in the city, making prostitution more than a straightforward gentler issue.

The terms used to describe women were so slippery that to avoid misunderstandings Athenians had to resort to various, often revealing, circumlocutions. Instead of simply gunē, a wife might be described as a gunē gametē, ‘a married wife’, or even a gunē gametē kata tous nomous, ‘a wife married according to the laws’. A hetaera could be more closely defined as ‘one of those women that are hired out’ or ‘one of those women who run to the symposia for ten drachmas’.¹² It was in law, however, that the categorization of women became a matter of vital necessity. Adultery carried heavy penalties in Athens. One antique law from the Draconian code (c. 621 BCE) allowed a man caught in the act of having sex with another man’s woman (wife, daughter, mother, sister, concubine) to be slaughtered on the spot. It was thus a matter of some importance to define those women with whom one could copulate in safety and so another ancient law, ascribed to Solon (c. 594), specified the women who fell outside the law’s protection, referring not to pornai, but to ‘those who sit in a brothel or those who walk to and fro in the open’.¹³

STREETS

As we have seen, space in antiquity was rarely a neutral concept and its silent dispositions were very often charged with symbolic meaning and ideological distinctions. On the personal level this might involve the opposition between right and left that governs the morality of eating. On a grander scale it provided separate domains for gods and goddesses within the territory of the polis, the cultivated spaces of Demeter, the marginal mountains, meadows and woods that belonged to Artemis and Pan, and the citadels of Athena. One of the most carefully delineated zones within the city was the zone of Hestia centred on hearth and home, opposed to the sphere of Hermes god of the threshold, of the paths that led from it, and of luck.¹⁴ According to this stark symbolic opposition, the women of the streets stood at the farthest remove from the world of the wife who kept to the interiors, ‘trusty guardian of what’s inside’, as Apollodorus puts it. Women who wanted to preserve a reputation for decency rarely strayed out of doors except under pressing necessity and a thick cloak; public activities, such as politics and shopping, were the province of men. Women of the streets therefore lived on the wrong side of the threshold and advertised their availability by submitting to the public gaze. They carried their homelessness in their names, which convey in terse slang something of the monotony of life on foot: ‘bridge-woman’ (gephuris), ‘runner’ (dromas), ‘wanderer’ (peripolas), ‘alley-treader’ (spodesilaura), ‘ground-beaters’, ‘foot-soldiers’.¹⁵ They form an anonymous mass of women, faceless ‘ranks’, or ‘droves’.

Not surprisingly, these women have left little trace apart from their nicknames in the historical record. A roofless existence and a nomadic lifestyle were not productive of long-lasting monuments. But the casual remarks of observers indicate that ‘women who walk to and fro in the open’ were still very much a feature of the urban landscape long after Solon made them an exception. Xenophon, for instance, records Socrates in the late fifth century observing that the streets of Athens were full of such safety-valves for ‘releasing the pressures of lust’.¹⁶ More evidence for this form of prostitution can be gleaned from speeches and comedies casting aspersions on the sexual morality of male politicians. This often obscene innuendo takes us a little beyond mere speculation and sheds some light on the alfresco shadowlands of Athenian sexuality.

Most revealing of all is Aeschines’ prosecution of Timarchus of Sphettus, whom he accused of having been a common prostitute. It seems quite clear that Aeschines in fact had very little evidence to substantiate his allegations and he relies instead on rumour and insinuation, recalling in particular an event at a meeting of the Council some months previously. Timarchus was lecturing the committee on the need to strengthen the city’s defences, but the grave atmosphere had been punctured by giggles whenever he mentioned the ‘walls’, or ‘a tower’ in need of repair or someone being ‘led off somewhere’. Since Aeschines uses this laughter to prove that the defendant’s activities as a common prostitute were common knowledge, it seems clear that the places mentioned were known to be the favoured haunts of ‘ground-beaters’ and ‘alley-treaders’. At a general Assembly of the People held on a winter morning some time later, Autolycus, a distinguished member of the august Areopagus, decided to take issue with Timarchus’ proposals: ‘You must not be surprised, fellow-citizens,’ he began, ‘if Timarchus is better acquainted than the members of the Areopagus with this deserted area and the region of the Pnyx … we can make some such allowance as this for Timarchus: he thought that where everything is so quiet, there will be but little expense for each of you.’ Immediate applause and cheers and loud laughter. Autolycus does not quite get the joke. He frowns and continues, but when he comes to the question of the ‘derelict buildings’ and ‘the wells’, the whole Assembly degenerates into a riot. ‘Fortunately the modern reader is spared a knowledge of the double-entente that made the vulgar listeners laugh –’, claims Charles Darwin Adams in a footnote to his translation of this passage, but if he or she bears in mind that Timarchus was formally charged with prostitution at the same meeting, the modern reader should not find the ancient allusions quite so opaque. Lakkos, a well or a cistern, is the most straightforward to decipher. It was used of prostitutes, referring apparently to their enormous sexual capacity, or, more graphically, to their passive reception of effluvia.¹⁷

City walls, on the other hand, in many times and places have had a reputation as areas for quick and surreptitious sexual transactions, and where they still stand they still do, but here perhaps ‘the walls’ and the ‘tower’ might refer more specifically to the red-light district of Athens, the Ceramicus, lying in the north-west around the main entrance to the city, the double Dipylon gate. The Ceramicus took its name originally from the potters who used to dominate the district, but it was distinguished also for the splendid monumental tombs that lined the roads out of Athens, taking the initiated to celebrate the Mysteries at Eleusis, or leading would-be philosophers to the gymnasium of Academy for a session with Plato. When later commentators explained its significance to their readers, however, they fixed on a quite different local feature: ‘a place at Athens where prostitutes (pornai) stood’ was the usual succinct gloss. This green and tranquil park is one of the quieter archaeological sites in Athens, but a passage from Aristophanes’ Knights helps to bring it noisily to life: the Sausage-seller having knocked the chief demagogue off his perch thinks up a suitable punishment for him: ‘he will have my old job, a solitary sausage-selling franchise at the gates, blending dog meat with asses’ parts, getting drunk and exchanging unpleasantries with the whores, and then quenching his thirst with dirty-water from the baths.’ ‘Yes, an excellent idea. That’s all he’s good for, outbawling the bath attendants and the whores.’¹⁸ Some of the prostitutes lining the streets will have had beds in the brothels nearby, others may have made do with the nearby cemetery itself, enabling Aristophanes to concoct a gross combination of two extra-mural activities, mourning and whoring, in another piece of invective against a public figure: ‘Amidst the tombs, I hear, Cleisthenes’ boy bends over, plucking the hair from his arse, tearing at his beard … and crying out.’¹⁹ In Peace Aristophanes outdoes even this gross image and reveals in passing that Athens’ port, the Piraeus, was another popular zone for street-women. Flying high above the city on the back of a dung-beede on a mission to rescue the goddess Peace, Trygaeus catches sight of ‘a man defecating amongst the prostitutes in the Piraeus’, a disaster if his coprophiliac transport should catch the smell.²⁰ He calls down to the man quickly to dig a hole, plant around it aromatic thyme and drench it in myrrh.

By the late sixth century if not before, the boisterous street-walkers had competition from the more tuneful aulētrides. Often called ‘flute-girls’, the double-reeded and frequently double-piped aulos they played was closer in timbre to an oboe or shawm. The Greeks likened it to the buzzing of wasps at the lower end of its range and the honking of geese on the high notes. Pollux the lexicographer put together a list of Attic words used to describe it: ‘wailing, enticing, lamenting’.²¹ Along with other music-girls the aulētrides played an important role at the symposium, entertaining the guests with music at the beginning and with sex at the end of the party, but just as often they are to be found out of doors, in the docks of the Piraeus where ‘just past puberty they take a fee and no time at all to sap the strength of cargo men’ or in Athens ‘smiling at you on streetcorners’; clearly it was possible to have sex with a flute-girl without taking her to a party first.²² Unlike the solipsistic lyre which accompanied poetic introversion and repose, the aulos was usually found providing music for working and moving, more particularly for moving off in the dancing-lines of the procession and the march.²³ It possessed a supernatural power to take over the body; when the aulos played, men forgot themselves. The showpiece orator of the Roman period, ‘Goldenmouthed’ Dio, tells the story of the great flautist Timotheus performing for Alexander. Alexander was so excited by the tones of the music and by the rhythm of the playing that he got to his feet at once and rushed for his weapons like one possessed. Even animals were susceptible to its charms. It was said that the decadent Sybarites made the mistake of acquainting their horses with the sound of flutes and watched helplessly when in mid-battle the cavalry started dancing to the enemies’ tune, waltzing off into the opposite camp. In the ancient world all flutes were half way to being magic ones.²⁴ The flute was an important element in the symposium, providing the rhythm for the mixing and distributing of the wine as well as the singing, but in many ways this narrow space of horizontal drunkenness was rather restricting for the aulos. One medical writer knew of a man who was thrown into a panic whenever he heard its tone within the andrōn’s narrow confines. It was outside, on the street, that the flute-girls really came into their element, in the kōmos, a conga of revellers that took the drinking-party out into the city on expeditions of riot and debauch.²⁵

We hear of ‘training-schools for flute-girls’ where old men like Isocrates thought young men were spending too much time, but Plato implies they could not play very well, and it was not generally for their musical skill that they were so popular.²⁶ Although a few among them rose to the highest ranks of the courtesans, it seems quite clear that flute-girls were always considered among the cheapest and most despised of hired women. By the fourth century aulētris is used almost as a synonym for ‘cheap prostitute’.²⁷ Crucially they shared the same space as the ground-beaters, in the Piraeus, on the streets, or under the walls, providing musical accompaniment when the battlements were torn down in 404 after the victory of Sparta.²⁸ It was not long before the ramparts rose again, of course, to provide Athens with seclusion, but for about ten years the city, too, knew what it was like to be on the outside.

The streets could be rough. Fighting over prostitutes was a commonplace of low-life escapades and flute-girls were especially vulnerable to being mauled by competing males. Demosthenes refers casually to a member of the board of archons, the thesmothetai, who had been involved in a punch-up while attempting to carry off a flute-girl. In Wasps Aristophanes stages just such a tug-of-war with a father on one side, his son on the other, and a naked aulētris, stolen from a party, in between. In Achamians he reduces the origins of the Peloponnesian War from a high-minded feud over sacred land to a squalid dispute over pornai, and makes a straightforward equation between naval expeditions, flute-girls and black-eyes.²⁹ So long as these fights were confined to the symposium, it was a private matter to be sorted out in a private law-suit. On the streets, however, there was a serious problem of public order, and the Astynomoi, a board of ten responsible for keeping the highways of the city open and clear, were empowered by law to sort out disputes peacefully, making sure that the flute-girls and other musicians did not themselves profit from the demand for their services. A maximum fee for the night was set at two drachmas. If more than one man wanted the same woman the matter was setted by drawing lots; she herself was not consulted.³⁰ This was not an idle statute and we know of prosecution through the heavy-handed mechanism of eisangelia (public impeachment) against men who paid more than the law allowed.³¹

The other duties of the Astynomoi involved disposing of the corpses of those who died in the street and making sure the shit-collectors dumped their shit at a requisite distance from the city walls, and this seems a fair summary of the spatial, administrative and symbolic position of street-women in Athens, occupying the places where bathmen poured the effluent of public baths, where those who needed to might take a casual crap, where the city buried its dead. A street-woman was not just on the streets, she was somehow of the streets as well, a ‘public thoroughfare’ in the words of the poet Anacreon, a public convenience for bodily functions, a ‘cistern’ for collecting the effluent of surplus sexual desire.³²

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