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

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.²⁰

      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.²¹

      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’.²² 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’.²³

      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;