Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. James Davidson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ