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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ