Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. James Davidson
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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.27
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.28 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.29
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.30
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