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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ