Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. James Davidson
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lie is part of a pattern we find in other authors who spend time and effort defending Spartan institutions, their effeminate long hair, their fancy cloaks dyed Tyrian purple. A whole host of other sources, moreover, seem to contradict Critias directly, representing Spartan cups as the kind of cups used for the most degenerate kind of drinking: strong wine, greedy swigs, drinking solely to get drunk as quickly as possible. Critias is clearly participating in a debate defending the Spartan reputation for asceticism in the face of the quite different reputation acquired in Athens by their cups.
These debates over Sparta and over the right way to drink, carried on by many different authors over a long period of time, are like super-discourses, a kind of generalized conversation carried on within Athenian culture, of which Critias’ extraordinary defence of Spartan cups is merely a particular exemplar. These ideal and repetitive debates are, for some cultural historians, the real object of historical investigation, and individual texts mere instances.
Historians not only use texts as windows, sometimes they assume that is their purpose too, as if the Greeks wanted to give us a view on the ancient world, to let posterity see what they were like, as if the real audience is not the audience sitting in the law-courts or the theatre, but us. Very occasionally, this view is fair enough. Thucydides wanted to put down the most accurate record of the war he lived through and intended his history to be a ‘possession for all time’ which includes us, even though he may not have been thinking quite so far ahead. People produce images and texts for all kinds of reasons, for beauty, for art itself, to make a living, to commemorate, to amuse, to create an atmosphere, as therapy and so on. It seems fair to say, however, that in Critias’ case it is the debate about Sparta that causes him to put pen to paper. He is intervening in a controversy. He is a propagandist, a pamphleteer. The debate, the problematization of Sparta, or of Spartan cups, comes first. The texts are symptoms of that controversy. This way of looking at our sources leads to some strange conclusions: the more people talk about something, the more contentious that subject was, the less of a consensus there was about it. Far from reflecting the way the Greeks normally spoke, texts are often arguing uphill, insisting on a point of view that few of their contemporaries would share. The text is produced to change minds. By the same argument, the most obvious and unquestioned things may never make it into texts at all. We hear very little, for instance, of how the Greeks ate their food, because it involved a set of banal practices that no one considered worthy of remark. In the case of appetites, we hear much more about dangerous activities than about everyday consumption.
Often, then, what looks like the most promising evidence, addressing a question directly, turns out to be the least trustworthy. When an orator stops in mid-speech to tell his audience the difference between wives, concubines and courtesans, we should be immediately on our guard. When a philosopher provides us with a useful definition of what a gourmand really is, we should resist the temptation to copy it into our dictionaries. Foucault himself seems to have forgotten this useful principle in his own study of sexuality, which is overwhelmingly dependent on philosophical and prescriptive texts which set out to tell him the answers. He seems to have thought that even if these sources were unreliable witnesses of what went on, they were good representatives of Greek concerns with sexuality. They were not. Foucault’s study of Greek sexuality has very little on women at all and gives the impression the Greeks were much more interested in boys. Any examination of comic fragments, vase-paintings and Attic oratory, however, shows this impression is quite false, a Platonic mirage. Philosophers are often useful, devoting more space to pleasure and working towards a deeper analysis, but they feature rather less in this book than in other studies of Greek attitudes and when they do appear, some context is sought to measure the angle and spin on what these tricksters are saying.
The shift from using texts as windows to using texts as artefacts in their own right has rescued the study of ancient pleasure from endless arguments about reliability and the ‘rhetorical topos’ or cliché. Private life has by its nature fewer witnesses than battles and political debates and there are fewer checks on lies and misrepresentations. The discourse of private life on the other hand is eminently public. Much of our evidence comes from central areas of debate, the theatres and law-courts, from the hill of the Pnyx itself where the Athenian Assembly met. The audiences it was supposed to amuse and persuade were numbered in their thousands. Moreover, in this context, statements gain meaning instead of losing it when they are found repeated elsewhere by other authors. Instead of dismissing such things as mere commonplaces that mean nothing apart from the speaker’s hostility, admiration or contempt, we can put them together, making connections, working out their mechanisms, illuminating patterns of debate. We can even construct little narratives of pleasure with their own implied beginnings and their own augured ends. We can try to see if our author is relating a casual consensus or casually trying to defend a sticky wicket and, thanks to Athenaeus, the conclusions we draw about what Athenians talked about and wrote about will be more reliable, since the statements have come from many different authors and have been exposed to a wide audience. We know next to nothing about Plato’s audience, by contrast, and he may be, and sometimes clearly is, a testament only to his own (very interesting) self.
We can, however, sometimes go too far with discourse and start fetishizing it as a new reality. Foucault and his followers often run into trouble on three counts especially. Although he is interested in ancient debates and not some single ‘ancient view’, the debate is often conceived too narrowly and rigidly. What the Greeks said about pleasure is much messier and much more varied than what you would expect from Foucault. Secondly, on the basis of this narrow and rigid idea of discourse, human history has been divided into discrete ages (often making sense only in France) or epistemes separated by world-shattering intellectual revolutions that open up great chasms in time. Each of these epistemes is viewed as a crystal that must be shattered before a new episteme is crystallized again in a quite new age. Originally the theory was applied only to the category of knowledge and used to account for a culture’s peculiar blind-spots and fantasies. In his later work on sexuality, however, and in the work of his followers, it was applied more generally. Greek civilization, according to this interpretation, is an irretrievably alien culture, constituting a separate sealed world with its own peculiar possibilities for experience. Finally, in fetishizing a culture’s representations of the world in this way, Foucault and his followers sometimes seem to forget about the world itself, which is still waving through the window, as if what a culture says is, is, on some important level, as if the Greeks walked around in a virtual reality they had constructed for themselves from discourse.
One very popular theory about the Greeks, for instance, showing the influence of Freud and de Beauvoir as well as Foucault, claims that the Greeks divided the world up into two parts, Them and Us. Us being the adult male citizens who wrote all the texts, Them being the others or Other, slaves, women, barbarians and so on who didn’t. Foucault unfortunately incorporated this Manichaean view into his history of sexuality. With Us cast as the penetrators, Them the penetrated. This absurd oversimplification predictably produces very banal self-fulfilling results. That slaves are like women, that women are like slaves, that slaves have automatically lost their phalluses, and are all always metaphorically penetrated by their masters, that everything is whatever the adult male citizen says it is. While it is true that the Greeks often talked about the world in binary terms as polarized extremes, this was simply a way of talking and thinking about things (and not the only way), while the terms of the opposition might change all the time. Sometimes they talk about Greeks versus Persians, sometimes about Persians versus Scythians, and the representation of what the Persians are will be transformed accordingly. Likewise, sometimes they talk about women in terms of an opposition between common prostitutes and wives. In the next sentence, however, the terms of the polarity might have changed. The distinction is now between flute-girls and courtesans, or concubines and hetaeras. This Black and White way of arguing does not reflect a Manichaean view of the world.
There are two main dangers in approaching the Greeks. The first is to think of them as our cousins and to interpret everything in our own terms. We are entering a very different world, very strange and very foreign, a world inconceivably long ago, centuries before Christ or Christianity, a century or so before the first Chinese emperor’s model army, a world indeed without our centuries, or weeks or minutes or markings of time. And yet these Greeks will sometimes seem very familiar, very lively, warm and affable. Occasionally we