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

metaphors are only to be expected in comic discourse, with its fondness for startling and jarring images, but the practice of comparing women to mouth-watering fish and fish to women seems to have been rather more general in Athenian society. Apart from the anchovy sisters mentioned above, we find flute-girls and hetaeras given nicknames like ‘Sand-smelt’, ‘Red Mullet’ and ‘Cuttlefish’, a practice exploited to full comic effect by the poet Antiphanes in his play She Goes Fishing, where he plays on this double-meaning of the names of fish, so that it is hard to know at any one time whether he is satirizing his victims for their love of fish or for their excessive devotion to hetaeras and boys.¹¹

      Fish seduces and conquers. It functions like the forces of persuasion, or the allure of a hetaera, or the magical power of charms. Comic authors made use of this notion of piscine irresistibility to create spoof imprecations and oaths. In Aristophanes’ Knights the Sausage-seller curses the Paphlagonian (a thinly disguised caricature of the demagogue Cleon), his rival for the favours of old Demos (i.e. the people), in the following terms:

      I will not make threats, but I do offer the following prayer: May your sizzling skillet of squid be standing by. And may you be about to make a speech on the Milesian business and turn a talent in bribes if you get the job done. And may you hurry to get the calamary down in time for going to the Assembly. And may the man come for you before you have time to eat. And, in your eagerness to get the talent, may you choke to death with your mouth full.

      In his Acharnians a similar malediction is invoked against a rival playwright; this time the longed-for squid is pictured sailing slowly and tantalizingly towards the accursed and putting ashore on the table beside him only to be snatched away at the last minute by a dog. Antiphanes even uses the irresistibility of fish to a fish-lover in an oath: ‘I’d as soon give up my purpose as Callimedon would give up the head of a grey-fish’, says one character in resolute defiance. It is perhaps not surprising that the Stoic Chrysippus, writing in the following century, preferred to refer to such people as opsomanes instead of opsophagos, meaning ‘fish-mad’, and comparing the man so afflicted to the gunaikomanes, mad about girls.¹²

      THE FISH MISSING FROM HOMER

      Historians are sometimes criticized for taking in earnest what their sources clearly meant in joke. Others are accused of deliberately exaggerating, without explaining, a period’s idiosyncrasies in order to exoticize a culture for the reader’s amusement. Any study of the phenomenon of ancient fish-madness is in danger of committing both these errors at the same time. These writers are being ironic. The extraordinary celebrations of fish penned by Archestratus or put by Aristophanes into the mouth of Melanthius are manifestly tongue-in-cheek. Demosthenes was sending up Philocrates and his treacherous purchases, Aristophanes was sending up the tragic fish-lover, and Archestratus, with his epic hexameters and mock epithets was sending up himself. Any amusement we might feel at the ancients’ excitement at the prospect of fish for dinner is forestalled by the irony and bathos which is already a distinctive feature of the Greek evidence. It’s almost as if they catch the amused eye of posterity in the rear-view mirror and play to it, as if they know how peculiar they are going to look to future generations.

      It is true that the Greeks considered self-knowledge one of the very highest virtues, but that kind of foresight was beyond even them. So why is fish as strange and amusing for them as it is for us? This is more than a marginal question. Their ironic tone holds a clue to unravelling the mystery of fish-madness. What made fish funny for the Greeks goes some way towards explaining what made them so good to eat.

      The first thing to notice is that fish never found its way into the rituals that surrounded the consumption of beef, mutton and pork. With one or two exceptions, fish was not considered a suitable animal for sacrifice. The origins of this exclusion are open to debate. Some believe it was because Greek sacrifice was essentially a blood sacrifice, or a sacrifice of large animals that must be eaten communally. The tuna, one of the few fish that could be sacrificed (to Poseidon, of course) is noted both for its exceptional bloodiness, and for the fact that these large fish are usually trapped and killed in large numbers, providing a single huge catch for the community to consume. Others emphasize that the Greeks sacrificed only domestic animals, and that fish are to be counted among the animals of the chase, wild game that could be killed willy-nilly, outside the symbolic rigours of formal sacrifice. However, the rationale behind the exclusion does not really concern us. What is important is that the omission of fish helped to construct an opposition between the meat of pigs, sheep and cattle, all of which had to be sacrificed before it could be eaten, and fish, which was quite free of such structures, an item for private, secular consumption, as and when desired. In an important sense, fish-consumption was simply not taken as seriously as other kinds of carnivorousness.

      Fish were also absent from another important scene, noted by a character in a comedy of Eubulus: ‘Where has Homer ever spoken of any Achaean eating fish?’ Fish were not present at the banquets of the Iliad, something the fish-mad Greeks of the classical period were not slow to pick up on. A contemporary of Eubulus, the philosopher Plato, thought the missing fish very significant. In a discussion of the regime appropriate for the warrior athletes of his Republic he takes Homer as his reference:

      ‘You know that when his heroes are campaigning he doesn’t give them fish to feast on, even though they are by the sea in the Hellespont, nor boiled meat either. Instead he gives them only roasted meat, which is the kind most easily available to soldiers, for it’s easier nearly everywhere to use fire alone than to carry pots and pans … [The philosopher goes on to make other connections:] Nor, I believe, does Homer mention sauces anywhere. Indeed, aren’t even the other athletes aware that if one’s body is to be kept in good condition, one must abstain from all such things?’

      ‘Yes and they do well to be aware of it and to abstain from them.’

      ‘If you think that,’ Socrates continues, ‘then it seems you don’t approve of Syracusan cuisine, or Sicilian-style dishes.’

      ‘I do not.’

      ‘Then you also object to Corinthian girls for men who are to be in good physical condition … and Attic pastries … I believe that we would be right to compare this diet … to the kinds of lyric odes and songs that are composed in all sorts of modes and rhythms.’¹³

      The modern banquet with its cakes and hetaeras is contrasted with the heroic feasts of the Iliad. The conspicuous absence of fish from these antique scenes and from sacrifice as well is perhaps connected, inasmuch as the sacrificial rituals of the classical period were often self-consciously based on the Homeric model. Put together, the structures of exclusion carve out a space for fish as something peculiarly secular and distinctively, decadently ‘modern’.

      It is this absence of heroic gravity that produces the bathetic humour and mock epic irony of the classical period. The caricature and self-parody which seems to infect descriptions of fish-lovers and fish-loving has an eye not on our future, but on their past, looking back across the gap that yawns between the Homeric age and the classical present. The eulogies of fish in epic language and hexameter rhythms, which are such a feature of Middle Comedy and writers such as Archestratus and Matro, get their sense of bathos from a clash of tone between the heroic form and the fishy content.¹⁴ The very names of fish were unheroic and their presence in these inappropriate contexts was unavoidably ironic. The effect must have been in some respects like a recitation of modern brand-names, Daz and Persil, for instance, or Weetabix and Coca-Cola in the language and rhythms of Shakespeare. In particular, comic poets seem to have kept in mind the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy in the dramatic festivals, the one placed firmly in the modern world, the other confining itself to the age of myth. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that fourth-century comedy is characterized both by its spoofs of mythological tales and its preoccupation with fish. By parodying tragic forms, by setting up a heroic context and then infiltrating it with incongruous and anachronistic images from