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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ