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

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.¹²

      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’.¹³ 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.¹⁴

      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.’¹⁵ 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.¹⁶

      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.’¹⁷

      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.’¹⁸

      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.¹⁹

      COMMENSALITY