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Plato was a famously careful writer. After his death a tablet was found among his possessions with the first eight words of the Republic written out in different arrangements. Socrates’ carelessness here is extremely well calculated and it illustrates perfectly the problem with opson. It already has a well-established position in the traditions of Greek diet and cannot ultimately be dislodged, but this omission puts it firmly in its negligible place. It is something to be ignored, elided or forgotten, something of no importance. When forced to address the oversight, Socrates tries to fix opson in a state of nature; he fills the dietary space with the most perfunctory edibles, whatever is ready to hand, requiring the bare minimum of preparation. Opson receives a similar kind of limitation, a progressive annihilation, even, in Xenophon’s Cyropedia, an idealistic and ascetic vision of the ancestral Persians. In the old system of education, we are told, boys up to sixteen or seventeen lived off bread as sitos, water from a river to supply them with liquid, and cardamon (a type of cress) as opson. The slightly older boys, whom Xenophon calls the ephebes, went hunting with one day’s ration of bread, and nothing at all in the way of opson but what they managed to catch in the field. Opson has at this point become no more than an opportunity. According to Xenophon, however, Socrates went even further and ate just sufficient food ‘so that desire for sitos was its opson’, appetite the best sauce.
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The philosophers’ efforts to neglect, elide or reduce opson to the status of a vacuum are evidence of a profound nervousness about the whole category. The dangerous supplement threatens to divert eating away from sustenance and into pleasure, and even to usurp the place of bread as the bedrock of existence. It is this anxiety that explains why Socrates is so disturbed by the young man’s table manners at the banquet with which we began. By taking no bread or only a little, the opsophagos threatens to invert the dietary hierarchy and allow simple sustenance to be diverted into pleasure. The error of the opsophagos lies not in eating opson, as everyone else does, but in living off it.
ST JOHN THE FISHMONGER?
One version of the vice of opsophagia, then, relates to carefully balancing the elements of diet to keep staples staple and everything else decorative. Plutarch’s version on the other hand more straightforwardly says opsophagia is love of fish. How can these two rather different versions be reconciled? Whom do we trust to translate for us, Plutarch the eminent antiquarian or Xenophon, a reliable witness, surely, of the language of his own time?
To resolve this dispute we need to take another detour, to another controversy and another part of the ancient world, the sea of Galilee in the reign of the emperor Tiberius. An unlucky night is at last drawing to a close, revealing on the water’s surface a boat, with plenty of fishermen aboard but no fish. In the breaking light a figure can be made out on shore. He asks if they have caught anything. They answer that they have not. He advises them to cast the net on the right-hand side of the boat. They follow his instructions and find their nets full, so full in fact that they cannot bring the catch on board and have to tow it ashore. When they reach the land, they find that the stranger has already started cooking a breakfast of bread and fish. They daren’t ask him who he is because they now know it must be the risen Christ.
This is the tale of the miraculous draught of fishes, as told by John. The story itself occurs with slight variations in Luke as well and raises many points of interest for Bible scholars and theologians. What concerns us here, however, is not theology but philology. John uses two different words for fish, first, as we would expect, ichthus (which by the logic of the acronym – Iesous CHristos THeou Uios Soter [Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour] – made fish a secret sign of Christian credence in the first centuries after Christ and a symbol of Christian pride in our own), but when the fish are brought to be eaten John uses a different word, opsarion, a word which occurs five times in John and nowhere else in the New Testament. This idiosyncrasy of vocabulary has led to some bold conclusions about the author. For John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, the word properly referred to cooked fish and was proof that the evangelist, usually considered the latest of the gospel-writers, was on the contrary the earliest, a witness of the things he described, being none other than John the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve disciples, a fisherman and trader in fish. Only a professional, Robinson implies, would bother with such trade distinctions.
A. N. Wilson, in a more recent biography of Jesus, took this observation as proof that new things can still be discovered in the text of the Bible. He clarified the Bishop’s rather allusive argument by suggesting that by ‘cooked fish’ this professional fishmonger was referring to something like a bloater or smoked fish.
(#litres_trial_promo) Disappointingly, however, there is nothing technical about John’s vocabulary. ‘The feeding of the five thousand’ is not about to become ‘the miracle of the kippers’. Opson together with its diminutive opsarion were by this period perfectly commonplace words for fish, not smoked, and not necessarily cooked, but certainly in dire danger of being, since they corresponded to ichthus as pork does to pig, referring to fish as food. In fact it is from opsarion, and not ichthus, that the modern Greeks get their own word for fish, psari. This explains why Plutarch thought an opsophagos 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.
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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.
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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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 claimed that in pronouncing the word for self, ego, the lip and chin pointed to the speaker, thus bringing word and meaning into immediate and intimate identity in a single original articulate gesture.
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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.
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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.”’
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”’
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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I do not intend to devote too much space in the rest of this book, trying the reader’s patience with this kind of philology, but far from being dead or dry or irrelevant, this debate over words gives access to the very heart of Greek desires. Just as psychoanalysts can discover the key to traumas in a slip of the tongue, the fish conspicuously missing from the texts of Xenophon and Plato testify to the real danger that lay in appetites. Ancient texts do more than inform us about ancient desires. They do more than provide us with samples of the ancient discourse of desires. Ancient desire itself is in the text, repressed perhaps, but still present. In their hesitations and omissions our authors reveal a struggle in the very composition of their prose, an ongoing battle with dangerous passions that threaten all the time to consume them and their readers.
II DRINKING (#ue1250ee1-677e-5524-9669-fb8a886cef2d)
not much like Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût. Above all he objected to the brief entry for wine: ‘Noah the patriarch is regarded as the inventor of wine; it is a liqueur made from the fruit of the vine.’ If a man from the moon or a further planet, the poet notes sarcastically, were to land on Earth in need of some refreshment and turned to Brillat-Savarin, how could he fail to find all he needed to know ‘de tous les vins, de leurs différentes qualités, de leurs inconvénients, de leur puissance sur l’estomac et sur le cerveau’. He offers as compensation his own gushing celebration of the properties of wine, an anecdote about a Spaniard and a prosopopoeia of the spirit of wine itself. As Roland Barthes pointed out in his introduction to the 1975 edition of the Physiologie, Baudelaire’s sarcasm reveals a fundamental conflict of views about the nature of wine: ‘For Baudelaire, wine is remembering and forgetting, joy and melancholy; it enables the subject to be transported outside himself … it is a path of deviance; in short, a drug.’ For Brillat-Savarin, on the other hand:
Wine is not at all a conductor of ecstasy. The reason for this is clear: wine is a part of food, and food, for BS, is itself essentially convivial, therefore wine cannot derive from a solitary protocol. One drinks while one eats and one always eats with others; a narrow sociality oversees the pleasure of food … Conversation (with others) is the law, as it were, which guards culinary pleasure against all psychotic risk and keeps the gourmand within a ‘sane’ rationality: by speaking – by chatting – while eating, the person at the table confirms his ego and is protected from any subjective flight by the image-repertoire of discourse. Wine holds no privilege for BS: like food and with it, wine lightly amplifies the body (makes it ‘brilliant’) but does not mute it. It is an anti-drug.
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Alcohol has long been famous for its ability to make men voluble. In the last two hundred years in particular, occupying an optimal position on the scale of vices intermediate between what is too banal to notice and what is too terrible to speak of, it has become a division of knowledge in its own right, the stimulus for a vast array of investigation, categorization and legislation, public debate and academic study. From the pamphlets of the Temperance Movement to the self-help groups of the late twentieth century, by way of Prohibition, the perceived dangers of alcohol have put drinkers under the close watch of churches, doctors, satirists, the police and sociologists, not to speak of the most unforgiving gaze of all, the careful invigilation by drinkers of themselves, of their own habits and desire for a drink.
The residue of this fascination has provided rich pickings for modern social historians who can study without ideological fervour the drinking practices of the last century carefully catalogued by fervent teetotallers, but the tenor of this discourse has made prevalent some rather universalizing and totalizing notions, which have had the effect of pushing the study of drinking beyond the bounds of history. The broad range of intoxicating liquors known to man are viewed as manifestations of a single drug, alcohol, in various disguises. The wide experience of enjoying these beverages and the manifold forms of consuming them are viewed as manifestations of a monotonous pathology of intoxication and addiction, as ethyl first ensnares and then takes over the body.
This view which is still pervasive in modern society has been challenged recently by anthropologists. They have found it difficult to apply categories such as ‘alcoholic’ and conditions like ‘alcoholism’ to the drinking practices of other societies and have tended to group liquors under the rubric of commensality (the fellowship of the table), with food and other non-intoxicating beverages, stressing the drinker’s relationship with other drinkers rather than with his drink, emphasizing companionship, that breaking of the bread together, which is such a quaint feature of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the Inns of Court and mass. Some have gone so far as to suggest that problem-drinking is a purely Western phenomenon that could be remedied through socialization.
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It is not difficult to see that the general outline of the debate between anthropologists and alcoholists is anticipated already by Baudelaire’s differences with Brillat-Savarin. For the poet and the alcoholist drink is an essence, a drug. What concerns them is the alien state of being within one’s own private intoxication. For the gourmand and the anthropologist drink is merely another part of food. What is important is the context in which it is consumed, the rituals of drinking, the community of drinkers. One could argue, at the risk of oversimplification, that the root of the controversy lies in a modern Western prejudice against solitary drinking, a pervasive feeling that alcohol’s effects are moderated or at least rendered negligible by the presence of other drinkers, that alcoholism reveals its true form in the period before the pubs are open and after they have closed, when the drinker is left alone with his drink. This special anxiety about opening a bottle for oneself seems misplaced. Many dangerous and persistent drinkers reach their state of intoxication in company although the violence that accompanies their inebriation may appear only at home. Nevertheless, for many it is the quiet spinster caught swigging amontillado in the morning rather than rowdy behaviour at the bar that crystallizes most clearly the image of the alcoholic.
Both the alcoholist approach and the anthropological have been employed in recent studies of wine-consumption in antiquity. While some have concentrated their efforts on looking for ancient evidence of ethyl-addiction and the problem behaviour modern sociologists associate with problem drinking, others have adopted the anthropologists’ lens, through which an apparently commonplace practice like drinking wine is transformed into something rich and strange. The familiar intoxicating liquid is a distraction. It has no importance in and of itself but only as the catalyst of peculiar cultural practices, as the sticky glue of distinctive social relationships.
The Greeks’ own vinous discourse was rich. By accident as well as by design an enormous proportion of surviving Greek painting of the sixth and early fifth centuries BCE comes from vases made for drinking, whose decorative imagery more often than not echoes their function. At about the same time a drinking literature was flourishing in the form of sympotic poetry performed at drinking-parties on the subject of women, boys, wine and pleasure. Belonging to a rather later period and much closer in appearance to branches of the modern discourse there were medical texts, although few modern doctors would repeat the advice of Athens’ most illustrious fourth-century physician, Mnesitheus, who considered heavy drinking beneficial. A number of ancient philosophers, including Aristotle and Theo-phrastus, produced treatises On Drunkenness although none of them unfortunately survives intact. Something of their style and concerns may be intimated in the series of questions and answers about the physiological aspects of intoxication, collected as book three of the Aristotelian Problemata. Wine even infiltrated history and politics. One historian in particular, Theopompus of Chios, seems to have had a keen nose for the scent of alcohol on the breath of tyrants and statesmen. A large portion of his surviving fragments, ascribed to a large number of different books of his histories of Greece and of Philip, allude to the drinking habits of princes and nations. Athenaeus even says of Theopompus that he ‘compiled a list of drink-lovers and drunks’.
(#litres_trial_promo) To add to this are occasional allusions in the orators to watering-holes of low repute and disapproved-of drinking practices. Demosthenes, for instance, notoriously, was teetotal. Perhaps the most important source for Athenian drinking in the classical period, however, is Attic comedy, which in all periods managed to place drunks on stage and enact the preparations for drinking-parties. This was nothing less than appropriate given that the plays were performed under the tutelage of Dionysus, the god of wine himself.
This ancient discourse falls readily within the boundaries set by the two sides of the modern controversy, turning from drink to the community of drinkers and back again to drink, enabling us to escape in the first place some of Baudelaire’s most trenchant criticisms and present a brief survey ‘de tous les vins, de leurs différentes qualités…’
WINE
The vine was familiar all over mainland Greece and in those coastal enclaves from Catalonia to the Crimea that the Greeks colonized. In fact, wine-drinking was considered nothing less than a symbol of Greek cultural identity. It was a mark of their barbarism that the barbarians drank beer. If they did know of wine, and the Greeks acknowledged that other cultures were not totally ignorant of it, they misused it. The wine itself, in the raw and undiluted form rarely tasted by the Greeks, was often sweet and thanks to hot weather and low yields probably towards the upper end of the scale of potency at 15–16 per cent as opposed to the 12.5 per cent which is normal today. It usually had bits of grape and vine debris floating in it and needed to be sieved before being mixed or poured out. This will have made red wines correspondingly dark in colour and somewhat tannic. The scent of ancient wine was said to have a powerful effect on wine-lovers and was often compared to the scent of flowers. Some other aromas may have been unfamiliar to the modern nose. For a start, the wine absorbed the taste of the container in which it had been carried or stored; not the oak that lends to modern wines their characteristic vanilla flavours, but pitch or resin used to seal amphoras and, on occasion, the sheep and goats that provided the raw material for wine-skins. Other items were sometimes added at various points in the process of manufacturing and preparation including salt water, aromatic herbs, perfume and in one case honey and dough. Aristotle in a fragment of his treatise On Drunkenness mentions drinking wine from a ‘Rhodes jar’ which was prepared with an infusion of myrrh and rushes. Apparently when heated the vessel lessened the intoxicating power of the liquid inside.
According to Mnesitheus, three colours of wine were differentiated, ‘black’, ‘white’ and kirrhos, or amber. The white and amber wines could be either sweet or dry, the ‘black’ could also be made ‘medium’. The Hippocratic treatise On Diet categorizes wines also as ‘fragrant’ or ‘odourless’, ‘slender’ or ‘fat’, and ‘strong’ or ‘weaker’. Theophrastus says wines were sometimes blended.
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The Greeks, unlike the Romans after them, seem to have had no appreciation of particular vintages, but certainly recognized the value of ageing, something which amazed antiquarians as late as the early eighteenth century, when wines usually deteriorated quickly. This misunderstanding seems to be a simple consequence of the fact that in the early Middle Ages readily sealable clay amphoras fell out of favour to be replaced by less air-tight receptacles. The age of wine was a matter of some importance to connoisseurs, inspiring the gourmand Archestratus to heights of purple poetastery that make modern connoisseurs look prosaic:
Then, when you have drawn a full measure for Zeus Saviour, you must drink an old wine, bearing on its shoulders a head hoary indeed, a wine whose wet curls are crowned with white flowers, a wine begat of wave-girdled Lesbos. And Bybline, the wine that hails from holy Phoenicia, I recommend, though I do not place it in the same rank as the other. For if you were not previously on intimate terms and it catches your taste-buds unaware, it will seem more fragrant than the Lesbian, and it does retain its bouquet for a prodigious length of time, but when you come to drink it you will find it inferior by far, while in your estimation the Lesbian will soar, worthy not merely of wine’s prerogatives but of ambrosia’s. Some swagger-chattering gas-bags may scoff that Phoenician was ever the sweetest of wines but to them I pay no heed … The wine of Thasos too makes noble drinking, provided it be old with the fair seasons of many years.
Wine’s ability to age well drew some unfavourable comparisons with the human species. A character in a play of Eubulus, for instance, remarks on how the hetaeras esteem old wine, but not old men. A fragment of Cratinus conjures up a more sophisticated deployment of the human lifetime analogy. He talks of ‘Mendaean wine coming of age’ (hēbōnta, literally ‘in bloom’ or ‘pubescent’), thereby bringing to mind modern maturity charts of the ‘life’ of a wine divided into periods of maturation: ‘Ready’, ‘Peak’, ‘Tiring’, ‘Decline’.
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The vast bulk of the wine consumed was undistinguished local produce from the harvest of small unspecialized holdings. This was what the Athenians called trikotylos, or ‘litre wine’ (literally, three half-pints) because, according to the lexicographer Hesychius, you could get three half-pint measures of it for only an obol. Some, however, was of a much higher quality imported from areas famous for their wines and grown on large estates. These wines are often found listed along with other fine foods in comedy, although the top rank contains rather fewer specimens than the number of fishes, for instance, at the poets’ command, rarely amounting to more than three or four at a time. Membership of this elite is not always consistent, but the wines of Thasos, Chios and Mende, a city in the Chalcidice, are the most prominent for most of the classical period. These are joined by the wines of Lesbos which are occasionally found in lists as early as the fifth century BCE, although Pliny has the impression that their reputation dated only from the end of the fourth. Characters in the plays discourse freely on the peculiar qualities of each wine, its characteristic colour and scent, its sweetness, as in this speech of Dionysus from a play of Hermippus: ‘With … Mendaean wine the gods themselves wet their soft beds. And then there is Magnesian, generous, sweet and smooth, and Thasian upon whose surface skates the perfume of apples; this I judge by far the best of all the wines, except for blameless, painless Chian.’
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The fine wines of the classical period have left traces of their popularity not only in the remnants of ancient literature, but also in fragments of amphoras, dug up around the Athenian Agora and elsewhere. Each of the great wine-exporting cities packaged its wine in distinctive and more or less uniformly-shaped vases, which can be differentiated by archaeologists. The Chians even used their amphora as an identifying symbol on their coinage. This confirms what the comic fragments suggest, that these city wines were specific products, with recognizable characteristics. Some cities specialized in producing only one kind of wine, others produced more. Chian wine, for instance, came in three types, austēros (dry), glukazōn (sweet), and one called autokratos in between the two. The individuality of these wines can be explained as the result of the natural prevalence of particular varieties of vine and certain traditional methods specific to a region. It is not a coincidence that the sources of these distinctive wines are, without exception, isolated agricultural economies, literally in the case of islands like Thasos and Chios, or, like Mende, surrounded by barbarians. It is significant, in this respect, that Lesbian wine takes its name from the island itself, the geographical entity, rather than from the cities, the political entities, Mitylene, Eresus and Methymna, that divided the territory between them. Some very occasional references indicate ancient recognition of that rather less tangible quality of terroir, the magical influence of specific plots of land. The best Chian wine apparently came from an area in the north-west of the island, and was known as Ariusian. We also hear of a wine called Bibline which, contra Archestratus, probably came not from Phoenician Byblos, but from an area in Thrace opposite the north-western part of Thasos, and which probably belonged to the territory of one of the cities in the area, perhaps to Thasos itself.
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Thasos also provides, in contrast, the best evidence for highly organized viticulture carried out on a large scale, the haphazard blessings of sound traditional methods and good soil supplemented with legislation. A series of inscriptions from the island reveal that political intervention in the wine trade could be intense and far-reaching. The overall concern of the laws seems to be for quality, a consideration which benefited not only the Thasian consumers of Thasian wine, but the exporters too, whose success depended on maintaining the island’s reputation for high standards.
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THE SYMPOSIUM
The most formal context for the consumption of wine in the Greek world was the drinking-party or symposium, a highly ritualized occasion and an important crucible for the forging of friendships, alliances and community in ancient Greece, an almost perfect example in fact of the anthropologists’ commensal model of drinking in which socializing is paramount. Its practices can be pieced together from a number of accounts. The space in which it took place was the ‘men’s room’, the andrōn, a small room with a slightly raised floor on all sides, which makes it one of the most easily identified spaces in the archaeology of the Greek house. This ledge provided a platform for the couches, which usually numbered seven, sometimes eleven, and occasionally as many as fifteen. Each couch could take two people, reclining on their left sides. The arrangement was more or less a squared circle but the seating was not for that reason undifferentiated. The circle of drinkers was broken by the door, which meant that there was a first position and a last and places for host, guests, symposiarchs, honoured guests and gate-crashers. Wine, song and conversation went around the room from ‘left to right’, that is, probably, anti-clockwise. The arrangement was less a static circle of equality than a dynamic series of circulations, evolving in time as well as in space, with the potential for uncoiling into long journeys, expeditions, voyages.
(#litres_trial_promo) Within the little andrōn the drinkers could travel long distances.
The symposium occupied a space perfectly commensurate with the walls. The atmosphere was correspondingly intense and intimate. ‘Nothing takes place behind the drinkers; the whole visual space is constructed to make sightlines converge and to ensure reciprocity.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The sympotic space conspired with the effect of the alcohol to create a sense of entering a separate reality. The managers of modern nightclubs and casinos make sure there are no windows or clocks to remind their clientele of the time-zone outside. In the symposium a similar severing of ties to the extramural world was effected with a repertoire of images and discourse peculiar to itself, reflecting the symposium and reflections of the symposium en abîme. In the men’s room they would recline and drink from cups decorated with images of men reclining and drinking from decorated cups; they would recite sympotic poetry and tell anecdotes about other drinking-parties in other times and other places. They never need stray from the sympotic themes of love and sex, pleasure and drinking. In fact, it could be said that the symposium for the period of its duration, symbolically constituted the world.
A bizarre story told by Timaeus of Taormina illustrates graphically the sense of separation between the world within and the world without the drinking-party:
In Agrigentum there is a house called ‘the trireme’ for the following reason. Some young men were getting drunk in it, and became feverish with intoxication, off their heads to such an extent that they supposed they were in a trireme, sailing through a dangerous tempest; they became so befuddled as to throw all the furniture and fittings out of the house as though at sea, thinking that the pilot had told them to lighten the ship because of the storm. A great many people, meanwhile, were gathering at the scene and started to carry off the discarded property, but even then the youths did not pause from their lunacy. On the following day the generals turned up at the house, and charges were brought against them. Still sea-sick, they answered to the officials’ questioning that in their anxiety over the storm they had been compelled to jettison their superfluous cargo by throwing it into the sea.
The story belongs to a rich Greek tradition of marine metaphors for the sympotic community.
(#litres_trial_promo) The high sea represents the boundlessness of wine, the obliteration of points of reference. The metaphor is captured with characteristic economy inside a cup of the archaic painter Exekias. He shows Dionysus, relaxed and triumphant on a boat decked out with bunches of grapes and the irrepressible branches of a vine, having turned the tables on his pirate abductors who swim around the vessel transformed into fishes. Normally the interior decoration of a kylix is reserved for a small central tondo, but here the red-painted sea has burst the banks of its confinement and laps the edges of the cup in vine-like exuberance, just as the drinking-party washes against the walls of the andrōn. On the boundless sea of wine the company floats free from the boundaries of reality and off into the deep. It is not surprising that in another context, among the Etruscans of Italy, the symposium was associated with the rituals of death.
The solid section of the dinner was concluded by the removal of tables. The floor was swept of the shells and bones that had accumulated during the feast and water was passed around for the guests to wash their hands. The guests were sometimes garlanded with flowers at this point and anointed with perfumed oils. The symposium itself began with a libation of unmixed wine for the Agathos Daimōn, the ‘Good divinity’, accompanied by paeans sung to the god. This was the only occasion on which a taste of undiluted wine was permitted and reflects the atmosphere of danger that permeated the evening’s carousal. The banqueters were embarking on a dangerous voyage. According to the historian Philochorus, the ritual toast of unmixed wine was instituted along with the other drinking customs by Amphictyon, a legendary king of Athens, as a ‘demonstration of the power of the good god. Moreover, they had to repeat over this cup the name of Zeus the Saviour as a warning and reminder to drinkers that only when they drank in this way [i.e. mixing the wine with water] would they be safe and sound.’ The libation was made out of a special cup called a metaniptron, which was passed around among the guests. By election, or by some other means, a symposiarch was selected to preside over the mixing and the toasts.
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It was a peculiar custom of the Greeks, not shared by other ancient wine-drinking cultures, to add water to their wine. The two were blended in a large mixing-bowl known as the krater. The water could be cold or warm, and snow was sometimes used to chill the unmixed wine in a psykter (wine-cooler), or even allowed to melt directly into the bowl. According to Theophrastus, in his own time it was fashionable to pour the wine in first and then dilute it, a procedure he considers more dangerous than adding wine to water to bring it up to strength, imagining, I suppose, that the idea of ‘watering down the wine’ was conducive to a stronger blend than ‘flavouring or strengthening the water’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The swirling motion of the liquids as they were blended together is reflected in the name for one kind of mixing-bowl, the dinos or whirlpool.
There was much dispute about the correct mixture. Athenaeus records a number of characters in Attic comedies arguing over the proportions. The majority of fragments refer to a mixture of half and half, but where the context is clear it seems this is supposed to designate a particularly excessive and greedy kind of drinking. A character in Sophilus’ play The Dagger, for instance, describes wine so blended as unmixed, akratos. Even a mixture of one-third wine could be considered to go against custom, while a quarter was too weak. The dilution which seems most acceptable from the comic fragments lies somewhere in between at two-sevenths, that is five parts water to two of wine. The resulting liquid could have been as potent as modern beers and consumed in similar quantities. The wine and water are considered to be somehow competing with each other, a poison and its antidote. Even a notoriously heavy drinker, like Proteas the Macedonian, described in the account of Caranus’ lavish banquet, ‘sprinkles a little water’ superstitiously before downing six pints of Thasian in one go.
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Once the wine had been mixed it was distributed by a slave, first ladling the wine into an oinochoē or jug and then pouring it into each cup in turn. The symposiarch would decide not only the measures of water and wine, but also the number of kraters to be mixed. A good decent symposium would be confined to three. Dionysus on stage in a play of Eubulus announces: ‘Three kraters only do I propose for sensible men, one for health, the second for love and pleasure and the third for sleep; when this has been drunk up, wise guests make for home.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The number of kraters could be set beforehand or decided as the symposium evolved. Plato’s Symposium begins with the guests’ deliberations about how they are going to drink. Since they are still suffering from the previous night’s carousing, moderation is in order. The discussion implies that they will all be drinking the same and need to agree beforehand how much. Apart from the number of kraters and the strength of the mixture, they could vary the number and size of toasts, the size of drinking cups and the frequency of rounds. With such means at his disposal the symposiarch could effectively dictate the pace of drinking, leaving some to complain of forced or ‘compulsory’ drinking. At public gatherings, officials called oinoptai, or ‘wine-watchers’, were appointed to make sure all drank the same.
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The picture of the classic moderate drinking-party which emerges from all these passages must not be seen as a mirror on Greek dinnerparties, held up to themselves by the Greeks for the benefit of posterity, but as a symptom of anxiety about how to drink properly. This anxiety was well founded. Disturbances of the proper rhythm of drinking can be observed at all levels of the ritual. For a start, the drinkers may not finish with the third krater, and the well-ordered symposium, even with its rituals intact, could spiral out of control, its machinery functioning no longer to check excess, but to gather drunken momentum. Dionysus in Eubulus’ play goes on to describe what happens if the drinking continues beyond the three kraters he considers advisable: ‘The fourth krater is mine no longer, but belongs to hybris; the fifth to shouting; the sixth to revel; the seventh to blackeyes; the eighth to summonses; the ninth to bile; and the tenth to madness and people tossing the furniture about.’ Hurtling furniture seems to have been a common manifestation of the symposium’s final stage of madness. Disruption could also come from the wrong mixture: ‘If you exceed the measure’, says the speaker in a comic fragment, ‘wine brings hybris. If you drink in the proportion of half and half, it makes for madness. If you drink it unmixed, physical paralysis.’
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Despite the risk, akratos, neat wine or strong wine, was sometimes consumed. This could be achieved only if the structures of orderly drinking were dispensed with, if the sympotic machinery of dilution and circulation that took the wine from the jars and psykters where it was kept and cooled into the neutralizing krater and then out into the ladle, the oinochoe or jug, and finally the cup, was interrupted. One comic character indicates his resolve to get drunk by calling for all the sympotic paraphernalia to be removed, except what he needs to reach his goal. Another refers to men drinking directly from the ladle. More straightforwardly, a determined drinker could simply reach out for the psykter of wine before it had been mixed with water. A character in Menander’s Chalkeia thought it was a modern habit: ‘As is the custom nowadays, they were calling out “akratos, the big cup!” And someone would wreak havoc on the poor sods by proposing a psykter for a toast.’
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The most famous example of this ‘modern’ practice comes from Plato’s Symposium. The drinking-party in Agathon’s house has thus far been exemplary. The drinking has been moderate, the symposiarch has not been forcing people to drink toasts, and the speeches have been moving around the room in turns. At this point glorious Alcibiades arrives in a state of high intoxication. He refuses, at first, to join in the rules of the symposium and elects himself symposiarch in order to force them to catch up quickly with his own level of inebriation. Leading from the front he proceeds to drink akratos out of the psykter and then gets Socrates to do the same. Before long, however, Eryximachus, the legitimate symposiarch, reasserts his authority and Alcibiades is socialized, brought into the group and into the conversation. Towards the end of the dialogue, however, there is a second disruption of komastic revellers who invade the gathering and force the guests to drink large quantities ‘in no kind of order’ en kosmōi oudeni. With the end of drinking order the symposium itself dissolves.
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COMMENSALITY
‘There is another correct interpretation of drinking cups:’ wrote Artemidorus, the interpreter of dreams, ‘they symbolize those who greet us with a kiss. And so, if they break, it means that some of the dreamer’s family or friends will die.’
Drinking wine out of the same mixing-bowl forged bonds of consubstantiation among the drinking community akin to the sharing in the sacrificial meat after a religious ceremony. Sometimes the symposiasts enjoyed even greater intimacy by sharing the same cup. The metaniptron, for instance, was probably passed around and Critias considered it a peculiarly Spartan custom not to. We also hear of a cup of friendship, a philotēsia, which can be pledged in alliance. The strong sense of community forged in the symposium is epitomized in a striking image deployed by Aristophanes. The Chorus in Acharnians illustrate their difficulty in handling War by comparing him to a drunken guest who, unlike Alcibiades at Agathon’s, refuses to be brought into the group:
Never will I welcome War into my home, never will he sing Harmodius reclining by my side, because he’s nothing but a troublemaker when he’s drunk. This is the fellow who burst upon our prosperity, like a komast, wreaking all manner of destruction, knocking things over, spilling wine and brawling, and still, when we implored him repeatedly, ‘Drink, recline, take the cup of friendship’, still more did he set fire to our trellises, and violently spilled the wine from our vines.
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The symbolism of drinking together is used again in the Knights to make a rather more down-to-earth point. At some point in the last quarter of the fifth century a man called Ariphrades had managed to acquire notoriety as a practitioner of cunnilingus. The Chorus expresses its abhorrence quite vividly with a resolution, not, it should be noted, against Ariphrades and his mouth, but against his acquaintances: ‘Whoever does not utterly loathe such a man shall never drink from the same cup with me.’ The theme of pollution brings us to the festival of Choes and its founding myth. The details are obscure, but it seems that Choes was the name given to the second day of a three-day festival known as the Anthesteria. We hear about it from two classical sources in particular: Dicaeopolis, the hero of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, is shown enjoying the private peace he has concluded with Sparta by celebrating his own private Choes while the rest of the city prepares for war, and in Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Orestes describes the origin of the ritual in a banquet held for himself in Athens. Judging from these passages and the ancient commentary on them, Choes seems to have been marked by unusual drinking practices: ‘The evening of the twelfth [Anthes-terion] was a traditional occasion to invite friends to a party, but the host only provided garlands, perfumes and dessert. The guests each brought their own food and still more significantly their own drink in the form of a wine-jar … It was apparently the tradition that each drinker consumed his share in silence. This was the complete antithesis of the symposium with its sharing of talk or song.’ These unusual practices were supposed to represent the ambivalent hospitality extended by a king of Athens to polluted Orestes, at that time still an outcast from society after the murder of his mother. In Iphigenia he describes how he was given his own table, and drank separately from the others of wine poured in equal measure into a vessel touched by his lips alone. There are difficulties in reconstructing the festival, notably in integrating the private and public aspects of the accounts. For our purposes it is enough to note the contrast which was so apparent to a classical author and his audience between the customs of the Choes and the normal practice of Attic drinking, and the way that the perceived contrast is used to demonstrate Orestes’ social isolation. The very fact that the drinking at the festival was not from a drinking vessel but from a jug, a chous meant for pouring, is enough in Athenian eyes to define that way of drinking as an interruption of the processes of distribution, just as Alcibiades’ drinking from the psykter indicates an interruption in the process of mixing the wine with water.
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Another factor which underlines the subversion of drinking rules in the ambiguous hospitality shown to Orestes is the lack of verbal communication. He feasts, says Euripides, ‘not speaking and not spoken to’. The abstract concept of sociability was realized in the symposium, as for Brillat-Savarin, in the concrete practices of discourse. Conversation was such a defining feature of the symposium that Theophrastus referred to the notoriously chatty barber-shops as ‘symposia without the wine’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the Greek context, the passage of wine and the passage of words supported and complemented each other, linked metaphorically and structurally. This linkage can be quite formal, as in Plato’s Symposium, where each guest in turn has to make a little speech. Talking was the paramount purpose of such symposia. Drinking was ancillary, serving only to loosen the tongue and facilitate the flow of words. In practice, however, the primacy of discourse was rarely observed and the advocates of conversation were disappointed. Instead of coming to the aid of dialectic, wine and words competed with one other, an unequal contest that wine usually won and drink for drinking’s sake, drinking to get drunk, supervened, destroying rather than cementing the society of drinkers with violence, or binding them closer together in a dangerous collective hysteria.
A proper flow of conversation is accordingly connected with the proper admixture of water and with drinking in small draughts, all practices designed to moderate the effects of the drug. The practice of silent swigging in the manner of the drinking contest at Choes was quite exceptional and, outside the festival, strongly condemned. The contrast was made most explicit in some pages of the manuscript of Athenaeus that were ripped out and survive only in epitome: ‘It can even be considered gentlemanly to spend time drinking, provided that one does it with good taste, not drinking deeply (kōthōnizomenon) and not swigging it without a breath, in the Thracian fashion, but blending conversation with the drink as a health potion.’ Because we don’t possess the full text at this point, it is impossible to know if Athenaeus is citing classical sources for this idea or simply expressing his own Middle Imperial thoughts, but older texts than his make the same connection between conversation and moderate drinking. One of Socrates’ arguments against huge draughts in Xenophon’s Symposium is that it will mean they won’t be able ‘to say anything’. ‘Let’s not forever be taking a pull from cups filled to the brim, but let something conversational strike the company,’ says a character in Antiphanes’ Wounded Man. The same contrast is echoed by characters in several plays of Alexis. ‘You see’, says Solon in Aesop, ‘this is the Greek way of drinking, using moderately-sized cups and chattering and gossiping with each other pleasantly.’ In contrast, a polyphagous parasite in Alexis’ play of that name is the image of the silent guzzler: ‘He dines as mute as Telephus, nodding his head to those who direct some question to him.’ It is characteristic of degenerates, comments Satyrus, foreshadowing the views of Brillat-Savarin and the anthropologists, ‘to take pleasure in wine rather than in their drinking-companions’.
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Athenaeus’ talks of ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘liberal’ (eleutherion) behaviour, and this emphasis on class (in its broadest sense) also finds echoes in earlier literature. Alexis makes the statement that ‘no man who is a wine-lover can be of low character (kakos). For twice-mothered Bromius [Dionysus] doesn’t enjoy the company of coarse men and a life of no refinement.’ A similar sentiment is found expressed at the beginning of Wasps where the audience is trying to guess the nature of jury-loving Philocleon’s vice. One suggests he is a wine-lover (philopotēs) and Xanthias replies, never, since that disease is a ‘disease of worthies’ (chrēstōn). Towards the end of the same play Philocleon’s sophisticated son Bdelycleon orders the slave to get dinner prepared so that they can get drunk. His low-class father objects that drinking leads to bashing-in of doors, violence and fines. ‘Not if you are in the company of gentlemen’ (kaloi k’agathoi), replies his son. At this point the audience is probably expecting something along the lines of Athenaeus’ remarks about how true gentlemen know how to moderate their drinking with the refinements of conversation, but Bdelycleon’s mind is running along a different track. There will be no less violence, but once all the damage has been caused, the gentlemen intercede with the victim for you, or you yourself come up with some witty story, one of Aesop’s amusing fables or some tale of old Sybaris which you learned in the symposium; and so you turn it into a laughing matter and he forgets about it and goes off.
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