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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ