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

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      TAVERNS

      These remarks remind us that although the symposium has been treated as the classic context for drinking in Greek society as late as the fourth century, it carries over from the archaic period associations with the lifestyle of one particular group within society, the aristocracy and their emulators. As Oswyn Murray observes: ‘However much the fifth-century democracy might try to provide public dining-rooms and public occasions for feasting, the symposion remained largely a private and aristocratic preserve.’ The lingering connotations of elitism are quite clear in the final scenes of the Wasps, in the awkwardness with which an Athenian Everyman, a dikast, like Philocleon, approaches the symposium: ‘to the fifth-century Athenian audience, the symposion is an alien world of licence and misbehaviour. ‘²⁵

      Those beyond the aristocratic pale had to get their liquid refreshment elsewhere, in the tavern or kapēleion, a far more demotic and promiscuous space than the private and selective andrōn. This well-attested institution does not seem to have been given as much scholarly attention as it deserves. After the reference-filled columns of Hug’s brief entry in Pauly-Wissowa’s panoramic encyclopedia of the ancient world, it is hard to find any detailed study and few bother even to refer to it. To some extent this neglect is a direct result of the prominence accorded the symposium and the anthropological model of commensality in accounts of Greek drinking. In contrast to the symposium, the kapēleion looks out of historical place, foreshadowing the consumerized, individualized drinking which ought to be the prerogative of modern times. In addition there are some philological questions that sometimes cause problems. A kapēlos can be both a retailer in general and a taverner in particular, although in comedy and oratory, when it is used without qualification, the latter sense can almost always be assumed.²⁶

      These taverners seem to have sold wine, vinegar and torches to light the way home at night and offer protection from cloak-snatchers. In some of these establishments, it seems, you could have something to eat as well. The kapēloi began as wholesalers and continued to sell wine in bulk to those who could afford to entertain at home. But they also broke the bulk, a practice known as ‘half-pinting’ (kotulizein), and served smaller quantities of wine with water to be drunk on the premises. In Gorgias Plato mentions one particular kapēlos, called Sarambus, whose skill at ‘preparing’ (paraskeuazōri) wine he compares with the work of Athens’ finest baker and Mithaecus, a Syracusan cook, reputed to be the Pheidias of the kitchen. Some translators treat Sarambus as simply a seller of wine, and translate ‘prepare’ as ‘provide’, but the fact that he is put alongside creative characters like a baker and a chef suggests that Sarambus is more than a simple retailer. Plato is talking of his skills as a taverner, and in fact it is precisely this passage that the lexicographer Pollux uses to demonstrate that in classical Attica kapēloi also mixed the wine. Plato, he says, is praising Sarambus for his oinourgia, his ‘winesmanship’. What the oinourgia of a good taverner consisted of in actual fact is open to speculation; honest measures of good wine, perhaps, from an amphora not long opened, strained of debris, blended with clean, chilled water, maybe a little perfume, served in fine cups with some bar-food, some tragémata (desserts) perhaps or hales (savouries) as an accompaniment. There is evidence for the suppression of such establishments in Thasos at least and we don’t hear much of taverns before Aristophanes, but in his comedies they appear as an already well-worn feature of the urban environment and it would be dangerous to argue from silence that taverns were a late-fifth-century phenomenon, supplanting the older more traditional aristocratic symposia as the fourth century progressed. The two institutions of drinking continued to exist side by side for a long time and they had probably coexisted for some years before they turn up in our sources.

      There are enough references in all manner of different texts to indicate that taverns were widespread and popular. In Pompeii they reached a density that compares with the frequency of bars and pubs in modern cities. An assessment of their distribution in Athens must of necessity be rather more impressionistic. But take, to begin with, the laconic remark which Aristotle in the Rhetoric ascribes to Diogenes the Cynic: ta kapēleia ta Attika phiditia (‘taverns are the refectories of Attica’). The impact of the facetious comparison lies in the conjunction of two starkly opposed institutions: the communal dining-halls of Sparta, the epitome of a conservative collective, archetypes of elite commensality, membership of which effectively defined citizenship, and Athenian taverns, a typically democratic efflorescence, quintes-sentially commercial and apparently plebeian. But behind the sarcasm of Diogenes’ comparison there lies an observation about the popularity of taverns in Attica. Just as the common messes feed and water the entire citizenry in Sparta, so the whole population of Attica can be found of an evening thronging the kapēleia,²⁷

      Diogenes’ observation is confirmed by the frequent references in comedy and forensic speeches to ‘the neighbourhood kapēleion, offering a picture of bars spread widely throughout the city. So common a feature of the cityscape were they that the cuckold Euphiletus, justifying his murder of Eratosthenes in cold blood at the beginning of the fourth century, notes that he and his friends were able to buy torches for their expedition late at night from ‘the nearest kapēleion’ so that all could fully witness his wife’s adultery before her lover was despatched. Apart from these literary sources, kapēleia feature frequently in curse tablets, lead-letters commissioned from magicians and deposited in infernal postboxes, usually graves or crevices, conjuring Hermes and Persephone to spell-bind their enemies. One tablet in particular from an unsuccessful rival, or an impoverished alcoholic, vividly confirms the picture portrayed in comedy and court speeches of Athens with kapēleia on every corner: ‘I bind Callias, the taverner and his wife Thraitta, and the tavern of the bald man, and Anthemion’s tavern near […] and Philo the taverner. Of all these I bind their soul, their trade [ergasia], their hands and feet, their taverns … and also the taverner Agathon, servant of Sosimenes … I bind Mania the bar-girl at the spring, and the tavern of Aristander of Eleusis.’ The ‘kapēleion of the bald man’ seems to have been a common tag for a well-known tavern which crops up again in an inscription, a tavern of which perhaps Callias and Thraitta were the owners or staff. That a number of these tavern-keepers were slaves is indicated not only by mention of their owners, but also by their names. Thraitta (Thracian woman), for instance, is sometimes used almost as a synonym for slave-girl. The fragment of Alexis’ Aesop mentioned above refers to the practice of selling wine from carts, and some of these kapēleia may have been nothing more than this, conveniently situated by a spring perhaps to enable the wine to be mixed with cold water and drunk there and then. Other more solidly founded bars had wells or cisterns on the premises.²⁸

      A vase in a private collection, currently on loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is almost certainly an illustration of a kapēleion. The mouth of the buried cistern or lakkos is behind the youth who asks for ‘trikotylos’, cheap wine sold at three obols a chous. An oinochoē or pitcher hangs behind him in case he wants to drink it on the premises. He is either opening the amphora or tasting wine with a sponge, which may symbolize thirst, or greed for wine. In the other hand he carries a bag of money to pay for it. The cup may have been destined for a symposium, juxtaposing hospitality with the market-place by reminding the symposiasts how the wine they are drinking got there and allowing the symposium’s plebeian counterpart into the confines of the andrōn to show how aristocratic it is, or perhaps it was itself destined for a bar indicating that the kapēleion was also perhaps capable of sealing itself off from the world with an imagery of endless self-reflexion.

      In the early 1970s excavators in the Agora unearthed a building of the early fourth century BCE which looks very like one of these taverns, adjacent to, or incorporating within it, some kind of eating-place. In ‘room six’ of the complex they discovered a well which having run dry was used for rubbish and filled with the debris of plates, fish-bones