Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens

Critias’ elaborate defence of the Spartan cup falls into the same apologetic category. This too was a suspicious object. Spartan drinking, without the lively conversation, the toasts and the passing of the cup which characterized well-ordered drinking at Athens, looked rude, ill-mannered and dangerous to Critias’ audience. The Spartan way of drinking from one’s own cup, in silence, bore most resemblance to the transgressive and competitive drinking-to-get-drunk of Choes, the feast of the Pitchers. The cup was itself a symbol for the wrong kind of drinking, as Aristophanes made explicit in his lost play The Banqueters. The play centres on the activities of a man’s two sons, one of them a model of self-control, the other utterly dissipated in every field. An illustration of this dissipation is provided by his drinking habits; no moderate measure for him, no gentle sipping from shallow vessels between anecdotes, but ‘Chian wine from Spartan cups’.39 The kōthōn, in an Athenian context, far from being an attribute of the rugged asceticism of soldiers, stands for the worst kind of vinous indulgence practised by urban degenerates. The reason for the cup’s infamy seems clear. It was the wrong shape.

The Greeks enjoyed a rich and varied array of cups in all manner of shapes and sizes. There are indications that it was customary to progress from small cups at the start of the symposium to larger ones at the end. The Scythian Anacharsis, who represents for the Greeks something akin to the naive wisdom of the eighteenth-century’s ‘noble savage’, thought this very odd. Why drink from small cups when you’re empty and from big cups when you’re full? At the drinking-party described by Xenophon in his Symposium one of the guests, breathless from an impromptu dancing performance, tries to hurry things along and asks for ‘the big cup’ to quench his thirst. The host concurs and asks for big cups all round; the others are thirsty too, not from dancing but from laughing at his performance. Predictably, however, Socrates, who is a guest at an alarming number of attested symposia, intercedes and speaks in favour of ‘small cups sprinkled frequently, so that we will be seduced into reaching a state of amusement, instead of being forced by the wine into drunkenness’. The moderate drinking practices of the well-ordered symposium call for moderately-sized cups. Drinkers who are getting serious about drinking, on the other hand, typically ask for a big cup, or a bigger cup to show they mean business. The woman in Pherecrates’ Corianno goes so far as to bring her own well-sized vessel along, rejecting the little kyliskē hopefully offered to her.40

It is important to observe that in the literature big cups are almost always deep cups. The vessels to which they are opposed are flat, shallow, saucerish things. A fragment from a play of Pherecrates makes this relationship between size and shape quite clear. In his play Tyranny, which seems to have been a fantasy of women seizing power on the lines of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, he describes the women’s control of men’s drinking as follows:

Then for the men they had cups made which were flat, nothing but a base with no sides, and room for not so much as a cockleful, like little ‘tasters’; for their female selves, on the other hand, they had deep cups made, cups like wine-transporting merchantmen, well-rounded, delicate vessels that bulged out in the middle; cups designed with far foresight for maximum consumption and minimal accountability. The result? Whenever we charge them with drinking up the wine they reproach us and swear that they have had no more than a single cup. But this single one is greater than a thousand cups.

A similar contrast is made by Epigenes in his play Heroine: ‘But the potters don’t even make kantharoi nowadays, you poor chap, not those fat ones; they all make these low-lying elegant things instead … as if it were the cups themselves we were drinking rather than the wine.’41 The size and shape of the vessels represented a difference in the manner of drinking. Deep cups meant deep drinking, long draughts knocked back from fat vessels, bottoms-up; shallow cups in contrast were drained more elegantly, tilted slightly and sipped frequently between dialectical contributions.

Typical of these vessels of depth was the bat-eared goblet of the Boeotians and Etruscans, the kantharos: ‘Let’s put out into the deep; into the kantharos, boy, pour it, by Zeus, into the kantharos,’ says a comic character to his slave. A huge kantharos is what gets the nurse drunk in Eubulus’ Pamphilus (she drains it dry in one go), and it is a kantharos that Hermaiscus is seen knocking back in Alexis’ Cratias. It is no surprise, then, that it is this cup above all that Dionysus keeps by his side, that, indeed, becomes so closely associated with the god of wine as to constitute an attribute.42

The horn-shaped vessels called rhyton and keras belong to the same capacious category. A fragment of Epinicus describes three cups of legendary capacity, all of them rhyta. One holding two choes, approximately twelve pints, is known as the elephant tusk, to be drunk, apparently, in one go. At least one other source refers to such a vessel; it may be more than a figment of comedy’s hyperbolic imagination. Drinking-horns share the kantharos’ symbolic associations with Dionysus and his retinue, indicating in particular a primitive or barbarian approach to drinking. Often, it seems, they were filled with akratos. One striking image from a vase of about 500 BCE shows a foreshortened symposiast dressed up for drinking like a Scythian, a huge drinking-horn silhouetted against him in the foreground. When someone in a comedy asks for a drinking-horn or even for ‘cups deeper to drink from than drinking-horns’, it is clear that the well-ordered Greek forms of drinking are being ushered out of the door. A striking illustration of this comes from the plastic vases, ceramic cups moulded into figures. The cups come in a variety of forms, but never assume the features of the white males for whose lips they were intended, a striking exception that François Lissarrague in his study of the imagery of the symposium thought significant: ‘there are no gods except for Dionysus and Heracles; instead one finds only women, both male and female blacks, Asians and satyrs … It is as if the anthropology of such moulded vases was meant to define the opposite of the Greek drinker and to hold up to him all the things that he was not.’43 It is no coincidence that the cups most often used for refashioning into the form of these notoriously immoderate drinkers are the cups of immoderate drinking, the kantharos and the horn being particular favourites for makeover.

Drinking-horns presented something of a problem for moralists. For if, as the philosopher Chamaeleon of Heracleia insisted, in his treatise On Drunkenness, big cups were an invention of modern decadence and did not exist in earlier times, how was it that the rhyton was an attribute of the heroes of the past? The philosopher had an answer for this objection. The artists represent heroes with large cups, so that it will be seen that their characteristic rage is due not to their temperamental nature, but to their inebriation.44

Other rather more obscure shapes share the reputation of the kantharos and the rhyton. The kumbion was a deep vessel shaped like a boat, a favourite shape of one notorious drinker in the fourth century, known as Euripides. Another deep cup called lepastē was associated with the verb laptō, which Athenaeus glosses as ‘to drink in one go’. A fragment of Pherecrates has a character offering one to the thirsty members of his audience suggesting they swig it like Charybdis. Elsewhere, we find it emptied by old women, and used successfully to charm Lysander when a kōthōn had failed. One of thesedeep cups is actually called a ‘breathless cup’, because its contents were drunk down without a breath.45

Despite the competition, it is Critias’ kōthōn that comes to stand par excellence for deep drinking at Athens. It shares many of the features of those deep cups associated with Dionysus and his followers, emptied in single draughts. A kōthōn referred to in a play of Alexis could hold about two pints. In a painting described by Polemon in a fragmentary ecphrasis from his To Adaeus and Antigonus, Dionysus is seated on a rock accompanied by a bald-headed satyr holding a kōthōn. A woman in Theopompus’ Stratiotides describes the customary way this cup was drained: ‘I, for one, would be prepared to stretch back my throat to drink from the neck-twisting kōthōn.’ Most commentators suggest that this comic drama played on the consequences of the fantastic scenario of women in the army, and there seems to be more to the kōthōn, s military connection than special pleading on the part of Critias. They are found in the hands of soldiers in Archilochus’ early archaic Elegies, and in Aristophanes’ late-fifth-century Knights. However, contra Critias, the liquid most likely to be discovered inside was not water but wine. There has been some debate over what the Spartan cup actually looked like. Many have been misled by Critias’ description to look in vain for a vessel with an elaborate folded-over rim to catch impurities. But the fragment refers more simply to ambōnas, meaning ‘ridges’ or ‘ribs’. At least one vase, shaped like a stout mug or tankard, has been discovered with kōthōn actually written on the base, and it now seems clear that this shape satisfies most of the literary references. By Critias’ time at the end of the fifth century they were being made with vertical ridges all the way round. Normally such ridging was simply decorative, an attempt to make ceramic ware look like silver, but on the kōthōns the ridging is often found on the inside too, apparently a rather pointless exercise that would only weaken the fabric. Some students of vases have suggested this could only be explained as an obsession with imitating metalware taken to counter-productive extreme. But Critias explains it much better. What is the point of having ridges to collect the lees unless you have them on the inside?46 If such vessels are rarely mentioned in modern accounts of Greek drinking it is because they do not fit the image of the classic elegant sympotic cup, looking more like a medieval tankard. Beazley, the great connoisseur of Greek pots, preferred to leave them nameless, classifying them (despite their lack of a pouring-spout) with jugs.

We are now in a position to subvert Critias’ special pleading and to restore to the kōthōn its normal connotations. It was a very useful cup for scooping, not from streams of mountain water, but from vats of wine as described with such relish by Archilochus. Its contents would be less visible than in an ordinary flat sympotic cup, not to disguise the dirtiness of the water drawn from mountain streams, but simply because it was a deep cup made for deep drinking. The ridging was suitable not for catching Critias’ river-dirt but for saving the swigger from getting a mouthful of lees and all the other bits and pieces left in ancient Greek wine. It may have started as a military cup, but it seems to have found its way into the symposium at an early date.47 There it will have stood alongside the keras and other deep cups as a challenge to the orderly blending and distribution of the wine. The kōthōn, with its characteristic single handle does not look like a cup made for sharing.

From the name of this cup the Greeks generated the noun kōthōnismos and the verb kōthōnizein which first appear in the fourth century. They refer to ‘deep drinking’: ‘je vide la grande coupe’ is how a French commentator begins the conjugation of this interesting verb. The physician Mnesitheus wrote a treatise in the form of a letter around the middle of the century, suggesting that in certain circumstances kōthōnismos could be good for you, like an emetic or a purgative. He gives three main points to bear in mind when engaging in such drinking: ‘not to drink poor wine or akratos, and not to eat tragēmata [dried fruits and nuts and other desserts of the second table] in the middle of kōthōnismoi. When you have had enough, don’t go to sleep until you have vomited more or less. Then, if you vomit sufficiently go to bed after a light bath. If, however, you weren’t able fully to purge yourself, use more water and completely immerse yourself in a warm tub.’48 This kind of drinking had probably always gone on, but it wasn’t until the fourth century that the culture of kōthōnismos caught the attention of the orators and moralists.

Demosthenes, according to Hyperides, considered it a particular vice of the young. He described them as akratokōthōnes, a remark that subsequently became notorious. The parasite known as the Lark demonstrated the wit that excused his gate-crashing by connecting Demosthenes’ remark to his notorious readiness to accept bribes, accusing the orator of a kind of metaphorical hypocrisy: ‘This man who calls other men akratokōthōnes has himself drained the big cup dry.’ Such drinking seems to have been social and competitive and may well have taken place in a sympotic context, although it transgressed so many of the symposium’s rules. By the early third century kōthōn means a cup no longer, but a drinking-bout, or drinking-party. Two kinds are mentioned, sumbolikos and asumbolos, with and without contributions, the former requiring each participant to bring his own wine, the second providing an open bar. When Lycon the Peripatetic arrived as a student in Athens in the early third century he made great progress in acquiring knowledge of these p.b.a.b. parties as well as the rates charged by each of the city’s courtesans.49

As Demosthenes’ coinage indicates, the kōthōn was associated not simply with slugging deep draughts, but with drinking strong wine. This is something it had in common with other deep cups. The notion of ‘depth’ is the key to the problematic of drinking at Athens, enabling us to draw up a division along two axes. One kind of consumption emphasizes the horizontal plane: the wine is blended expansively with water; it is sipped slowly from smaller shallower cups; there are as a result more rounds, more of those processes of circulation and distribution which make the symposium such a bonding experience; words join water in diluting the wine whose proper role is to facilitate conversation. In this shallow form of drinking the emphasis is not on the wine but on the company of drinkers joined around the kratēr, protected from the power of liquor by a whole theatre of mitigation, and the distracting play of discourse and representation. Wine is effectively flattened and rendered negligible. This is the wine of commensality, of Brillat-Savarin and the anthropologists.50 Opposed to this is the degenerate consumption of the vertical axis, the wine of Baudelaire and the alcoholists: the wine is akratos, thick, three-dimensional and strong; the cups are large and deep; drinking is long and breathless. Wine can reassert its primacy and, in the stampede to inebriation, the niceties of social interaction get trampled underfoot. Here wine is no longer a catalyst of conversation. It is a drug once more.

PART II DESIRE

III WOMEN AND BOYS

THE ORATOR APOLLODORUS is attacking Neaera, a prostitute, in court. He digresses, for a moment, on the uses of women in Athens: ‘Hetaeras we keep for pleasure, concubines for attending day-by-day to the body and wives for producing heirs, and for standing trusty guard on our household property.’1 Ancient literature contains no shortage of attempts by ancient men to put ancient women in their proper sexual place, and a whole lexicon of labels and terms with which to do it: ‘two-obol woman’, ‘ground-beater’, ‘flute-girl’, ‘companion’, ‘wage-earner’, ‘wanderer’, ‘wife’. The very act of naming was an important part of policing women and women’s sexuality. According to the laws of Syracuse, for instance, the great Greek city on the southern tip of Sicily, a woman was forbidden from wearing ‘gold ornaments or gaily-coloured dresses or garments with purple borders unless she admitted she was a common prostitute’.2 Apollodorus’ neat three-kinds-of-women statement has been particularly influential among modern historians and is sometimes cited as a straightforward account of female roles in Athens. It is far from that, however. The speaker himself shows a remarkable level of inconsistency in conferring his titles on Neaera and the whole thrust of the speech is that such distinctions are easily flouted, enabling Neaera’s daughter, ‘a common whore’ (pornē), to infiltrate the ranks of decent citizens by marrying the King Archon, even presiding with him over the most ancient rites in the city’s religious calendar and risking the wrath of the gods. As the great French classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant comments, the author’s ‘remarks in this … speech indicate better than anything both the desire to establish a clear demarcation … and at the same time the impossibility of so doing’.3

Other writers are no more helpful than Apollodorus, frequently applying several different terms to the same woman, and thus confounding their own taxonomies. This ambivalence is at the very heart of the vocabulary used to describe women’s roles. Gunē, wife, can also mean more generally ‘woman’ (cf. French femme), and was sometimes used for a concubine or mistress. The more normal word for a woman in that kind of informal relationship was hetaera, but that could equally well designate a woman of independent means and high fees, or, at the other end of the scale, a slave-girl working for a madam. It is hardly surprising, then, that despite the survival of numerous ancient definitions, attempts to establish clear demarcations between the different categories of women in Athens (to distinguish wives from concubines [pallakai] and concubines from ‘courtesans’ and ‘courtesans’ from ‘common whores’ [pornai]) are highly problematic, and consensus rarely survives for more than a generation. Most recently, many scholars have become impatient with this inconsistency on the part of ancient writers. Ignoring Vernant’s advice they have concluded that one division alone can be made with some confidence, one division that really mattered: the division between Wives and the Rest. The other distinctions represent nothing more substantial than a rich vocabulary with which men could express varying degrees of contempt for the women they used.

This ‘two-types’ model in works on women in antiquity has had a devastating effect on the career of the courtesan or hetaera who has moved from a position at centre-stage in earlier accounts of prostitution to near invisibility in more recent ones. In the early years of this century, when such subjects as Women and Sex were first considered worthy of attention, the hetaera exercised a strong fascination on male historians. She was represented as a sophisticated lady, a cultured woman of the world, witty, philosophical and flirtatious. In these earlier, idealized treatments a strong distinction was made between high-class courtesans and the pornai, the lower-class prostitutes of the brothels and the streets, who alone represented the ‘bad’ kind of prostitution. Charles Seltman, for instance, writing in the 1950s, maintained:

The framework of social life in Athens was not far different from that of Paris up to 1939. There were brothels, mainly for foreigners of all sorts, licensed under the laws of Solon as far back as the early sixth century BC. The licensing was done to prevent brawling in the streets. Later street-walkers living under the care of a ‘Madame’ began to appear. All this, of course, is the same as in any Mediterranean city today, a world-wide misfortune. But hetaeras were certainly in a very different class; often highly educated women, foreigners from other Greek states and cities, earning a living sometimes in commerce, business girls, bachelor girls, models.4

That the hetaeras who associated with the leading men of the period, who engaged Pericles and Alcibiades in droll conversation, also sold their bodies for sex, was an uncomfortable fact, readily pushed into the background.

The new accounts of women in antiquity, however, influenced by feminist attitudes to prostitution, have reacted strongly against this picture, treating it as an attempt by male fantasists, ancient and modern, to romanticize an inherently obnoxious institution. Women had two roles available to them: the wife or the prostitute; there was no room for any equivocating ‘courtesan’ in between.5 Eva Keuls, for instance, in a chapter entitled ‘Two Kinds of Women. The Splitting of the Female Psyche’, remarks:

If the sexual conduct of the respectable woman is restricted to marital intercourse while the corresponding male is permitted to be promiscuous, it must of necessity follow that the female population is divided sharply into two classes: those who have limited sexual contacts in the course of a lifetime, probably far less than their physical nature could accommodate, and those who have sex in great abundance, far more than they could possibly experience in a meaningful way.6

This initially rather radical idea has now settled comfortably into the mainstream of ancient studies: ‘Athenian society perfected a quite precise double standard,’ claims one textbook, ‘which did not involve contradiction, or subterfuge, but rather relied on a clear separation between two categories of women who were not to be confused: legitimate wives (or potential legitimate wives) and all other women.

The first were the chaste mothers and daughters of Athenian citizens; the second were open to free sexual exploitation.’7 In this version of the position of women at Athens there are only two very starkly contrasted groups, almost mirror-images of one another. They are connected only by the hydraulic operation of male heterosexuality, the prostitutes providing release for the pressures produced by the chaste seclusion of decent women, relief for the sexual frustrations of men not yet married, or forced to marry women whose only attractions were a large dowry or an influential family. She is a sexual substitute for the wife, a body-double or, in the words of a recent German study, an ‘Ersatzfrau’.8

Under the influence of this transcendental distinction between Wives and the Rest the old distinction made between courtesans and ‘common whores’, hetaeras and pornai, has become obsolete. They both fall more or less happily now into a single modern category. They are all prostitutes.9 At the same time, important intervening terms like the Athenian hetaera and the concubine have been elided, forgotten or ignored as if all Athenian women were chastely married or about to be, and all hetaeras were foreigners speaking in strange dialects with funny accents. These need not trouble the two-women theory. Either they are ‘paradoxical’ exceptions whose existence ‘paradoxically’ confirms the basic truth of the doctrine or they are put into the even more fuzzy class of ‘pallakai’ and classed with wives or hetaeras depending on convenience. There are, to be sure, not many references to these native-born courtesans and concubines (they will have found it easier than most to fade into decent obscurity), but they certainly existed, providing an important bridge between Wives and the Rest and muddying masculine distinctions.10 One cannot help thinking that this dogmatic distinction is a way for scholars to avoid dealing with prostitution altogether and helps to account for the astonishing lack of research in a subject which sits at the intersection of two of the biggest growth areas in modern classics, the study of women and the study of sexuality.

Instead of two stark groups of women and one great undifferentiated mass of sex-workers I want in the next couple of chapters to emphasize the diversity and complexity of the sex market in Athens and to re-establish the importance of the hetaera. There were numerous gradations between the miserable life of the streets and the comfortable existence of the most successful courtesans, quietly encroaching on the territory of the legitimate family and causing consternation to Apollodorus and his fellow-citizens. To talk of ‘mistresses’ and ‘courtesans’ may risk glamorizing, romanticizing or exoticizing a life that was in most cases nasty, brutish and short and there are dangers in reconstructing a kind of hierarchy, but, on the other hand, historians are providing no compensation for the wretchedness of ancient women’s lives by lumping all ‘bad girls’ together. Moreover, the sex market in Athens was not just about the exploitation of women. Men were sexual commodities as well as consumers and although male sex-workers were, I think, nowhere near as numerous as their female counterparts, they did take on very similar roles in the city, making prostitution more than a straightforward gentler issue.