Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens

THE SYMPOSIUM

The most formal context for the consumption of wine in the Greek world was the drinking-party or symposium, a highly ritualized occasion and an important crucible for the forging of friendships, alliances and community in ancient Greece, an almost perfect example in fact of the anthropologists’ commensal model of drinking in which socializing is paramount. Its practices can be pieced together from a number of accounts. The space in which it took place was the ‘men’s room’, the andrōn, a small room with a slightly raised floor on all sides, which makes it one of the most easily identified spaces in the archaeology of the Greek house. This ledge provided a platform for the couches, which usually numbered seven, sometimes eleven, and occasionally as many as fifteen. Each couch could take two people, reclining on their left sides. The arrangement was more or less a squared circle but the seating was not for that reason undifferentiated. The circle of drinkers was broken by the door, which meant that there was a first position and a last and places for host, guests, symposiarchs, honoured guests and gate-crashers. Wine, song and conversation went around the room from ‘left to right’, that is, probably, anti-clockwise. The arrangement was less a static circle of equality than a dynamic series of circulations, evolving in time as well as in space, with the potential for uncoiling into long journeys, expeditions, voyages.9 Within the little andrōn the drinkers could travel long distances.

The symposium occupied a space perfectly commensurate with the walls. The atmosphere was correspondingly intense and intimate. ‘Nothing takes place behind the drinkers; the whole visual space is constructed to make sightlines converge and to ensure reciprocity.’10 The sympotic space conspired with the effect of the alcohol to create a sense of entering a separate reality. The managers of modern nightclubs and casinos make sure there are no windows or clocks to remind their clientele of the time-zone outside. In the symposium a similar severing of ties to the extramural world was effected with a repertoire of images and discourse peculiar to itself, reflecting the symposium and reflections of the symposium en abîme. In the men’s room they would recline and drink from cups decorated with images of men reclining and drinking from decorated cups; they would recite sympotic poetry and tell anecdotes about other drinking-parties in other times and other places. They never need stray from the sympotic themes of love and sex, pleasure and drinking. In fact, it could be said that the symposium for the period of its duration, symbolically constituted the world.

A bizarre story told by Timaeus of Taormina illustrates graphically the sense of separation between the world within and the world without the drinking-party:

In Agrigentum there is a house called ‘the trireme’ for the following reason. Some young men were getting drunk in it, and became feverish with intoxication, off their heads to such an extent that they supposed they were in a trireme, sailing through a dangerous tempest; they became so befuddled as to throw all the furniture and fittings out of the house as though at sea, thinking that the pilot had told them to lighten the ship because of the storm. A great many people, meanwhile, were gathering at the scene and started to carry off the discarded property, but even then the youths did not pause from their lunacy. On the following day the generals turned up at the house, and charges were brought against them. Still sea-sick, they answered to the officials’ questioning that in their anxiety over the storm they had been compelled to jettison their superfluous cargo by throwing it into the sea.

The story belongs to a rich Greek tradition of marine metaphors for the sympotic community.11 The high sea represents the boundlessness of wine, the obliteration of points of reference. The metaphor is captured with characteristic economy inside a cup of the archaic painter Exekias. He shows Dionysus, relaxed and triumphant on a boat decked out with bunches of grapes and the irrepressible branches of a vine, having turned the tables on his pirate abductors who swim around the vessel transformed into fishes. Normally the interior decoration of a kylix is reserved for a small central tondo, but here the red-painted sea has burst the banks of its confinement and laps the edges of the cup in vine-like exuberance, just as the drinking-party washes against the walls of the andrōn. On the boundless sea of wine the company floats free from the boundaries of reality and off into the deep. It is not surprising that in another context, among the Etruscans of Italy, the symposium was associated with the rituals of death.

The solid section of the dinner was concluded by the removal of tables. The floor was swept of the shells and bones that had accumulated during the feast and water was passed around for the guests to wash their hands. The guests were sometimes garlanded with flowers at this point and anointed with perfumed oils. The symposium itself began with a libation of unmixed wine for the Agathos Daimōn, the ‘Good divinity’, accompanied by paeans sung to the god. This was the only occasion on which a taste of undiluted wine was permitted and reflects the atmosphere of danger that permeated the evening’s carousal. The banqueters were embarking on a dangerous voyage. According to the historian Philochorus, the ritual toast of unmixed wine was instituted along with the other drinking customs by Amphictyon, a legendary king of Athens, as a ‘demonstration of the power of the good god. Moreover, they had to repeat over this cup the name of Zeus the Saviour as a warning and reminder to drinkers that only when they drank in this way [i.e. mixing the wine with water] would they be safe and sound.’ The libation was made out of a special cup called a metaniptron, which was passed around among the guests. By election, or by some other means, a symposiarch was selected to preside over the mixing and the toasts.12

It was a peculiar custom of the Greeks, not shared by other ancient wine-drinking cultures, to add water to their wine. The two were blended in a large mixing-bowl known as the krater. The water could be cold or warm, and snow was sometimes used to chill the unmixed wine in a psykter (wine-cooler), or even allowed to melt directly into the bowl. According to Theophrastus, in his own time it was fashionable to pour the wine in first and then dilute it, a procedure he considers more dangerous than adding wine to water to bring it up to strength, imagining, I suppose, that the idea of ‘watering down the wine’ was conducive to a stronger blend than ‘flavouring or strengthening the water’.13 The swirling motion of the liquids as they were blended together is reflected in the name for one kind of mixing-bowl, the dinos or whirlpool.

There was much dispute about the correct mixture. Athenaeus records a number of characters in Attic comedies arguing over the proportions. The majority of fragments refer to a mixture of half and half, but where the context is clear it seems this is supposed to designate a particularly excessive and greedy kind of drinking. A character in Sophilus’ play The Dagger, for instance, describes wine so blended as unmixed, akratos. Even a mixture of one-third wine could be considered to go against custom, while a quarter was too weak. The dilution which seems most acceptable from the comic fragments lies somewhere in between at two-sevenths, that is five parts water to two of wine. The resulting liquid could have been as potent as modern beers and consumed in similar quantities. The wine and water are considered to be somehow competing with each other, a poison and its antidote. Even a notoriously heavy drinker, like Proteas the Macedonian, described in the account of Caranus’ lavish banquet, ‘sprinkles a little water’ superstitiously before downing six pints of Thasian in one go.14

Once the wine had been mixed it was distributed by a slave, first ladling the wine into an oinochoē or jug and then pouring it into each cup in turn. The symposiarch would decide not only the measures of water and wine, but also the number of kraters to be mixed. A good decent symposium would be confined to three. Dionysus on stage in a play of Eubulus announces: ‘Three kraters only do I propose for sensible men, one for health, the second for love and pleasure and the third for sleep; when this has been drunk up, wise guests make for home.’15 The number of kraters could be set beforehand or decided as the symposium evolved. Plato’s Symposium begins with the guests’ deliberations about how they are going to drink. Since they are still suffering from the previous night’s carousing, moderation is in order. The discussion implies that they will all be drinking the same and need to agree beforehand how much. Apart from the number of kraters and the strength of the mixture, they could vary the number and size of toasts, the size of drinking cups and the frequency of rounds. With such means at his disposal the symposiarch could effectively dictate the pace of drinking, leaving some to complain of forced or ‘compulsory’ drinking. At public gatherings, officials called oinoptai, or ‘wine-watchers’, were appointed to make sure all drank the same.16

The picture of the classic moderate drinking-party which emerges from all these passages must not be seen as a mirror on Greek dinnerparties, held up to themselves by the Greeks for the benefit of posterity, but as a symptom of anxiety about how to drink properly. This anxiety was well founded. Disturbances of the proper rhythm of drinking can be observed at all levels of the ritual. For a start, the drinkers may not finish with the third krater, and the well-ordered symposium, even with its rituals intact, could spiral out of control, its machinery functioning no longer to check excess, but to gather drunken momentum. Dionysus in Eubulus’ play goes on to describe what happens if the drinking continues beyond the three kraters he considers advisable: ‘The fourth krater is mine no longer, but belongs to hybris; the fifth to shouting; the sixth to revel; the seventh to blackeyes; the eighth to summonses; the ninth to bile; and the tenth to madness and people tossing the furniture about.’ Hurtling furniture seems to have been a common manifestation of the symposium’s final stage of madness. Disruption could also come from the wrong mixture: ‘If you exceed the measure’, says the speaker in a comic fragment, ‘wine brings hybris. If you drink in the proportion of half and half, it makes for madness. If you drink it unmixed, physical paralysis.’17

Despite the risk, akratos, neat wine or strong wine, was sometimes consumed. This could be achieved only if the structures of orderly drinking were dispensed with, if the sympotic machinery of dilution and circulation that took the wine from the jars and psykters where it was kept and cooled into the neutralizing krater and then out into the ladle, the oinochoe or jug, and finally the cup, was interrupted. One comic character indicates his resolve to get drunk by calling for all the sympotic paraphernalia to be removed, except what he needs to reach his goal. Another refers to men drinking directly from the ladle. More straightforwardly, a determined drinker could simply reach out for the psykter of wine before it had been mixed with water. A character in Menander’s Chalkeia thought it was a modern habit: ‘As is the custom nowadays, they were calling out “akratos, the big cup!” And someone would wreak havoc on the poor sods by proposing a psykter for a toast.’18

The most famous example of this ‘modern’ practice comes from Plato’s Symposium. The drinking-party in Agathon’s house has thus far been exemplary. The drinking has been moderate, the symposiarch has not been forcing people to drink toasts, and the speeches have been moving around the room in turns. At this point glorious Alcibiades arrives in a state of high intoxication. He refuses, at first, to join in the rules of the symposium and elects himself symposiarch in order to force them to catch up quickly with his own level of inebriation. Leading from the front he proceeds to drink akratos out of the psykter and then gets Socrates to do the same. Before long, however, Eryximachus, the legitimate symposiarch, reasserts his authority and Alcibiades is socialized, brought into the group and into the conversation. Towards the end of the dialogue, however, there is a second disruption of komastic revellers who invade the gathering and force the guests to drink large quantities ‘in no kind of order’ en kosmōi oudeni. With the end of drinking order the symposium itself dissolves.19

COMMENSALITY

‘There is another correct interpretation of drinking 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