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SIREN FEASTS
Cheese, wine, honey and olive oil — four of Greece’s most familiar contributions to culinary culture — were already well known four thousand years ago. Remains of beehives and of cheeses have been found under the volcanic ash of the Santorini eruption of 1627 Bc. Over the millennia, Greek food has diversified and absorbed neighbouring traditions, yet retained its own distinctive character.
Siren Feasts is the first scholarly social history of food and gastronomy in Greece. It traces this unbroken tradition of fine food and wine from classical times, through Rome and medieval Europe, to what we eat and drink today. The focus is on the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods. Andrew Dalby shows how an understanding of the food and gastronomy of ancient Greece provides a useful background to reading Greek comedy and lyric poetry. His innovative study also includes discussion of the first specialist writers on food, such as Archestratus and Philoxenus.
Siren Feasts is comprehensively illustratcd, and source material is quoted in English throughout. It is invaluable and engaging reading for all students and teachers of Greek history, and anyone who is interested in the gastronomic tradition of Greece.
Andrew Dalby trained as a classicist and linguist and is now Librarian of the London Goodenough Trust for Overseas Graduates. He is the winner of the 1996 Sophie Coe Prize in Food History.
PREFACE
This is the book that I wanted to have beside me when I began to study the social history of Greece. The food and entertainment of the classical Aegean are rich fields for research, endlessly fascinating in themselves, indispensable background for all who study the ancient world, important to anthropologists and to students of later Mediterranean history; yet no one in this century has set out to guide others to what is known and to provide a starting-point for further research.
Beginning with an exploration of the dining and drinking of the classical Aegean, we shall gradually expand the enquiry to earlier and later times, concentrating on two questions. What did Greeks eat? How did gastronomy and food writing develop among them?
It is a big subject. The sources of information are disparate, and no specialist commands them all. I begin from the classical written evidence. But in reading modern papers on aspects of classical social life, one soon becomes aware that their authors could be led astray by mistaken assumptions as to what went before and what came after: that is one reason why the plan of this work includes a second chapter on the food of the prehistoric Aegean and a last chapter sketching some Byzantine and modern developments.
On some of the topics that are dealt with here, every modern scholar seems to have written something. Others, such as the development of Greek gastronomy and gastronomic writing, have scarcely been touched. The level of detail, and the closeness of argument, in the present book must therefore vary. I may be thought to have spent too long on the food writers and authors of recipe books. The reason is that reliable information about them cannot be found conveniently gathered elsewhere.
The references given in the end notes (pp. 212-66) are limited in number and carefully selected. I have tried to keep in mind the needs of readers in other fields equally with those whose main interest is Greek history and literature. Both kinds of references, those to ancient texts and to modern scholarship, will, I hope, be useful to both kinds of readers.
From the huge modern literature on Greek social history, and on the history and archaeology of food, references are generally given here only to recent outlines or definitive treatments. In these, as a rule, full bibliographies will usually be found. References have also been given to some modern commentaries on classical texts, in cases where the editor has usefully brought together parallel passages and thus assisted the study of a particular word or aspect of behaviour. For full details of works cited, see the bibliography (pp. 267-86).
References to ancient texts are, wherever possible, to standard text divisions to be found in most modern editions and translations: some guidance will be found in the index of ancient and medieval sources (pp. 287-96). With the availability of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae on CD-ROM, classicists will soon no longer need or expect in works of this kind exhaustive references to the use of a particular word. My aim is to save readers’ time by selecting those references that will help to put a topic in context or otherwise assist its understanding.
Since Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists remains the largest fund of source material on the subject and will be more accessible to many readers than the expensive standard editions of fragmentary authors, a reference — in square brackets — has been given to the Dezpnosophists whenever a cited text can be found there. These citations follow the standard reference system for Athenaeus, the page numbers of Casaubon’s 1597 edition: Casaubon’s page numbers are repeated in the margins of nearly every subsequent edition. As there is a great difference between the coherence and reliability of the full text (which survives for most of books 3 to 15, as will be explained in Chapter 8) and of the late Byzantine epitome, the distinction is here signalled by citing the former as ‘Athenacus’ and the latter as ‘Epitome’.
Those who use the English translation of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists by C. B. Gulick in the Loeb Classical Library text of Athenaeus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927-41), and indeed those who use English translations of other texts cited, will often find that their translators’ views on points of detail differ from mine. The translation of classical Greek texts is not an exact science. The many points of uncertainty signalled in the course of the present work help to show why. I have generally tried to translate quoted texts just as they appear in the manuscripts, if the manuscript text will bear a meaning, for modern conjectures have (to say the least) uncertain status as evidence.
The Greek index (pp. 297-309) serves as a supplement to the text. Under most names of foodstuffs, in the Greek index, will be found the scientific Latin term for the plant or animal concerned. English, modern Greek and Turkish equivalents have also been given where possible.
In this book I have not tried to convert ancient lists of ingredients, or cookery instructions, into recipes for modern use. For this see The classical cookbook by Sally Grainger and myself (British Museum Publications, forthcoming)!
The transliteration of Greck that is adopted here retains the accents (tonal accent in classical Greek, word stress in later forms of the language) because of their special importance in word history.
Italics have not been used for botanical names, as is customary, in order to distinguish them clearly from classical Latin names.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I must first acknowledge the help of an ancient author. With all his digressions, for which modern scholars in so many fields are grateful, Athenaeus in the Deipnosophists put together a record of researches very similar in intention to mine. I hope the more explicit and obtrusive structure necessary in what is intended to serve as a handbook does not destroy the fascination of the subject on which he and I have worked.
I have had the advantage of seeing most of the papers which will by now have appeared in Food in antiquity (Exeter University Press), 1995, a volume which carries forward the study of many topics discussed here: I am grateful to the editor, John Wilkins, for letting me see them in proof.
Begun simply as a leisure activity, the work that follows became the first half of my Ph.D thesis (Birkbeck College, University of London, 1992). I am grateful to Jane Rowlandson, who supervised it; to Lin Foxhall and Robin Osborne, who examined it; to Gerald and Valerie Mars, Feyzi Halici and Harlan Walker, under whose respective auspices some of this work was presented to the London Food Seminar, the International Food Congress and the Oxford Food Symposium; and to Alan Davidson, who published my first notes on Philoxenus and Hippolochus and has also allowed me to reproduce illustrations by Soun Vannithone and others that were originally made for his Mediterranean seafood (Penguin). I want to thank Caroline Davidson and Richard Stoneman without whom this book might well not have been published; Joanne Snooks, Vicky Peters and Sarah Conibear, whose hard work has brought it nearer the heart’s desire; and Maureen, Elizabeth and Rachel, who have lived with it as well as with me for all this time.
I am grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright illustrations: Alan Davidson (Figures 11, 13, 14 and 23); Rena Salaman (Figures 6, 31, 35 and 36); Professor R. B. Barlow (Figures 22, 25 and 26); Agence Photographique, Réunion des Musées Nationaux (frontispiece and Figures 3, 18, 20, 21, 28 and 30); Ashmolean Museum (Figure 19); the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Figure 29); the Martin von Wagner-Museum, Universitat Wirzburg (Figure 1; photo: K. Oehrlein); and Spink & Co (Figures 16 and 24).
THE WAY THESE PEOPLE SACRIFICE!
The food and gastronomy of Greece are part of the background to the history of the country, a history that demands the attention of all who are interested in the sources of their own civilisation. Greek gastronomy is also the direct ancestor of the much better known food culture of Rome. Thus it stands at the origin of much in modern European food and cuisine.
This book tells two stories in parallel. It is a history of the foods that have belonged to the Greck menu; it also explores how traditions of cookery and food appreciation developed, for the first time in Europe and with very little precedent anywhere in the world, in the special environment of the Aegean shores.
Little will be said here of political history. The appearance of new foods and new methods of cookery has usually nothing to do with politics but much to do with trade; it usually comes from the interchange of peoples and ideas. We shall see that many foods now well known in Greece and Turkey have a history in the region longer than either the Turks or the Greeks themselves.
It is necessary to set the scene by saying something of the social context in which these foods were eaten. This can most easily be done by sketching the meals and entertainments of classical Athens, the best known and best recorded of all ancient Greck societies. The best known — yet in spite of the wealth of classical literature, some aspects of the private life of classical Athens are anything but clear.
We can begin from an important, quite newly available, literary source of the end of the fourth century Bc. Before the rediscovery of Menander’s Bad-Tempered Man there was not one extended description of a family meal in the literature of classical Greece: the earliest otherwise, four centuries later and of questionable realism, is the one in Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean Oration. The study of this Athenian comedy therefore brings about a small revolution in modern views of Athenian family life — and it entails the reinterpretation of some literary evidence that has long been known.
The ‘New Comedy’ of Athens has in the past been all too unfamiliar.
Not one complete play was transmitted from Byzantine to later European scholarship. Moreover, the original nature of the genre was effectively obscured, for later readers, by the gradually developing imitations of it that have successively charmed audiences in republican Rome, in Renaissance and in modern Europe. With twentieth-century discoveries of papyri, the known corpus of plays of Menander, the greatest playwright of the New Comedy, has been growing.”
At the centre of our study are the personal, individual, domestic and family contexts of Greek food. This perspective will in itself result in some surprises. Little will be said here of dinner at the town hall; little of dinners of clubs or brotherhoods. The real importance of such events in classical daily life is hard to grasp, for we know little of them except that they occurred. We shall see something of dinner at a hetaird’s, a ‘courtesan’s’; we shall see something of pardsitoi, a concept sadly confused by dramatists and by the antiquarians of the Roman Empire.
We highlight not the commonwealth of citizens but the well-detended private house. And the reality visible through Athenian authors’ depiction of their own contemporary experience is less hospitable and more defensive than might be assumed. Athenians locked their house doors (Demosthenes, Against Euergus and Mnesibulus 35-8) and locked the tower that formed the ‘women’s quarters’, the gynaikonitis, of a country farm (ibid. 53-5). The locked doors of Athens were opened on the householder’s orders. To force them open, most particularly in his absence, was a shocking act. At least one Athenian, appealed to by his neighbour’s slaves to help deal with burglars, ‘did not think it right [to enter] when the householder was not there’ (ibid. 60). These doors were opened to his family, of course. They were opened to his friends, his ‘equals’, when they came to dine and to drink. They were also opened to some who had something to offer in exchange for their food, the dancer, the musician, the prostitute, the poet, the philosopher, the joker, the flatterer.
THE UNEQUAL FEAST
In Menander’s Bad-Tempered Man a festive day in the life of a whole family is to be enacted — the central sacrifice and feast are to be imagined just out of view. But one half of this domestic life is passed over almost in silence. The mother of the hero, Sostratus, is not named; she apparently speaks briefly two or three times, though that is far from certain. Speaking or not, she crosses the stage from the Athens road to the central shrine and is lost to the audience’s sight. Her daughter may or may not be with her. The ‘bad-tempered man’s daughter speaks once from her doorway: she is not named. The least anonymous women in the play are two slaves. One has a speaking part, but even she is not named until very late in the action (931). Another, silent, comes in for a male slave’s abuse: ‘she’s good for nothing except screwing — and blaming me when we’re caught’ (461-3).
The silence that veils almost all the women’s activities, and even their names, does not impugn the realism of the play. There is plenty of evidence that many Athenian women’s lives were secluded from the observation of strange men, so that a plaintiff, complaining of trespass, could speak of intrusion on ‘my sister and my nieces, who had had such a modest life that they were shy of being seen even by relations’ (Lysias, Against Simon 6). They went outdoors rather seldom, and if outdoors they were not to be ‘seen’, still less accosted, by men.’ Moreover, they were publicly named by their relationship to a man and not by their own personal names: ‘A woman who goes out of the house ought to be at the stage of life at which those who meet her do not ask whose wife but whose mother she is’, not, at all events, what her own name is (Hypereides fragment 205 [Stobaeus, Florilegium 74.33]).° So it is that we hear something of Sostratus’ mother and his sister; but we see them only briefly, and cannot be sure of their names. Athenian plays, like nearly all Athenian literary works, were dialogues among men: male depictions of a male world.’
Women melt into the background of the Bad-Tempered Man. But if we dare to focus on this background, there is much to be seen. The centre of the day is a sacrifice at a country shrine of the god Pan, a sacrifice naturally followed by an open-air meal and jollity. For Greek sacrifice, not unlike feast days in many other religious systems, was at the same time a religious observance, an occasion for enjoyment and an opportunity for meat-eating. An acid comment on this by the eponymous bad-tempered man, Cnemon, happened to be known from a quotation by Athenaeus before the full text of the play was rediscovered: “The way these vandals sacrifice! They bring couches, wine-jars — not for the gods, for themselves.... They offer the gods the tail-end and the gall-bladder, the bits you can’t eat, and gobble the rest themselves’ (Menander, Bad-Tempered Man 447-53). Editors of Athenaeus and of the fragments of comedy, unable to understand or believe that the circumstances were essentially those of a picnic, in printing this fragment had customarily removed the reference to the fetching in of couches.*
Every detail of this sacrifice — when it was to take place, where and to whom, what was to be sacrificed — all these decisions are in the dialogue explicitly attributed to women and slaves in spite of the women’s near invisibility. Such decisions are clearly central to a household’s life: they also involve considerable expense (in the purchase of a whole sheep, in the hire of a cook, and no doubt in arrangements to be made at the shrine). The sacrifice itself takes place, to no one’s apparent concern, before the free men of the house have put in an appearance. Sostratus and his father are content to turn up late and eat their lunch. One is not surprised, then, to find that Callippides (who must make the formal decision) is the last to hear of Sostratus’ hopes of a wedding, long after the slaves and the women know all about it.
Let us retrace the leisurely progress of the fictional sacrifice and meal. Sostratus’ mother, unusually enthusiastic for the kind of piety that entailed country sacrifices, had decided on the event and its location after a dream.” The family slave Getas had been sent to hire the indispensable mdgeiros ‘sacrificer-cook’ — and presumably to select the sheep. Sicon (the mdgeiros) and Getas arrive first at the shrine:
These comings and goings are skilfully interwoven as a backdrop to the main plot (Sostratus’ falling in love with the bad-tempered Cnemon’s daughter), but they can hardly be used as evidence for social history without examining their overall realism. It is necessary to the plot that Callippides should arrive late; Sostratus, by the one really unlikely coincidence in the play — or rather, thanks to the arrangements of the god Pan — turns up just when he is expected though he had not even known the location of the sacrifice. But the salient point is that both of them were expected to arrive long after the women. The women came later than expected too, but they were certainly expected to arrive after the single slave and the mdgeiros who had appeared first to prepare the scene. It seems reasonable to conclude that such staggered arrivals, for a family sacrifice, would not be wholly abnormal, otherwise Menander would have offered more in the way of motivation or excuses.
SEPARATE CIRCLES
When did the women eat? So little is said that is relevant to the question in any other classical Athenian context that one is reduced to making the most of a single meagre hint. Gorgias, invited by Sostratus to the sacrificial meal, answers that he must see to his mother first. There is no dramatic reason to delay Gorgias’ presence at the shrine; hence this seems to be a piece of realism. So why, since Gorgias’s slave could be invited to eat, could his mother not be invited too (616-19)? Women lunched with other women, after all.'° The best answer is that the women are by now supposed to have finished their meal: they arrived earlier than the men, were present at the sacrifice and ate straight afterwards. The women’s meal was followed by the men’s — itself staggered, but only because Callippides was late and it would have been impossible to invite Gorgias’ mother to the men’s meal. Thus Getas can say (568-70) with the advantage of recent observation that the women would not dream of sharing their meal: they had then just eaten, and without any guests.
The hypothesis that the women’s meal and the men’s meal were separate can now be set against other Athenian evidence on men, women and their food.'' This demands careful interpretation. ‘Married women do not go out to dinners with their husbands, nor do they care to dine with men of other families’ (Isacus, On Pyrrbus’ Estate 14): this remark by a litigant forms part of a demonstration that a certain Phile was promiscuous. One could read it as evidence that respectable women did not eat outside their own households. The most convincing interpretation, however, is that family festivity could involve both men and women, but that the sexes formed separate groups, sometimes with different timetables. The separateness appears most clearly from a quotation from Euangelus’ Unveiled in which the bride’s father reminds the cook: ‘I told you, four tables for the women and six for the men’ (Euangelus 1 [Athenaeus 644d]). This is said to be a late text, of the third or even the second century sc. But already towards the end of the Bad-Tempered Man, when all has been resolved, Sostratus can say to his father: “There must be a good drink for us now, dad, and an all-night wake for the women.’ ‘I know better — the women’ll drink, and we'll be kept awake all night!’
All-night festivity really was particularly associated with women.” Indeed, it is central to the plot of Menander’s Arbitrators that the flute-girl Habrotonon attended the Tauropolia, a women’s all-night festival, with a party of respectable women and played to accompany the girls’ dancing (451-85). But whether or not the women’s celebrations on the present occasion were expected to last all night, the picture of festivities for the two sexes going on side by side is finally confirmed by Sicon’s boast at the very end of the Bad-Tempered Man: ‘Up there I got ready a symposium for the men.... {Getas] spread a semicircle of rugs on the ground, I did the tables: that’s my proper job? ... ?m a mdgeiros, remember... and someone tipped bearded old Exios'* into a deep jug, mixed with the streams of the Nymphs [water], and drank toasts with the men in their ring, and another with the women; and it was like pouring it into sand.’
THE OFFICIATORS
Those who constructed the menu of a meal, and who put it into effect, considered another set of demands besides those of the host and his guests. They themselves were also participants. Hence Sicon can promise Getas, ‘Tl feed you properly today!’ (423-4), and a cook no doubt made the same promise to himself. The unreasonably large number and size of meat and fish dishes at Athenian dinners described in dramatic and other poetry, as in similar descriptions from other times and places, make sense only if it is considered that there were others in the household, even beyond host, guest, waiters and cooks, who also had to be fed. On occasion these others laid claim to the best of the food, as did the mother of one dutiful courtesan who was entertaining a rival:
Gnathaena was once at dinner at Dexithea’s, and Dexithea was putting almost all the dishes aside for her mother. ‘By Artemis, woman’, said Gnathaena, ‘if I’d known this would happen I'd have had dinner with your mother, not with you!’ (Machon [Athenaeus 580c])
Like Penelope and her maids, perhaps, who cleared up in Odysseus’ house after the men had had their meal, and like the womenfolk of the transhumant Sarakatsani of modern times,'* those of the household would more normally have had to make do with what was left uneaten. No wonder Getas, in the Bad-Tempered Man, disliked the idea of unexpected guests: What did you say? You’re going to go off and invite some people in to lunch? Bring three thousand as far as I’m concerned. I always knew there wouldn’t be a taste for me: how could there be? Bring them all... .
Female household slaves, whether or not required to wait at dinner, evidently might share in the enjoyment. Sicon reports the end of the same celebrations thus: ‘And one of the maidservants, sodden [with wine], shading the bloom of her youthful face, broke into dancing steps, hesitating and trembling with shyness, and another joined hands with her and danced’ (950-3). In a less idyllic context, Antiphon’s speech, On a Case of Poisoning (1.1420), tells the story of a slave concubine, frightened of being sold into prostitution, accompanying her owner from Athens to Piracus for a sacrifice to Zeus, and putting what she thought was a love philtre in his wine after the sacrificial meal. But few texts allow us to picture the involvement of domestics in their masters’ celebrations: slaves, like women of the household, were generally neither heard nor seen.
What of the entertainment, the musicians and dancers and indeed the prostitutes to be found especially at men’s drinking parties? No surviving anecdote suggests any interest in whether they ate, or indeed whether they spoke. This applies equally to the erotic dancers of Xenophon’s Symposium (2.1) — not a word of dialogue is given to them, nor does any character in the dialogue address them, though their act is the centre of prolonged discussion — and to the servant girl Lais, later to become a famous hetazra, brought by Apelles to a drinking party (Polemon [Athenaeus 588c]). Yet, hardly aware of the fact, men did see them eat. Why else should the typical foods linked to women, in one allusion after another, be the very foods that men chewed with wine at a symposium such as eggs, nuts, roasted pulses and fruit? Why should it be hinted, by one comic playwright after another, that women liked to drink neat wine? For it was at the moment of the libation of neat wine, when the main business of eating was already over and all there was to eat was dessert, that women were admitted to a men’s drinking party.’
Service at purely domestic meals might well be the duty of a female slave or of a wife, and one recalls Aristotle’s remark that ‘the poor, having no slaves, must use their wives and children as servants’ (Politics 1323a4). But the evidence leads firmly towards the conclusion that at any wider or more formal celebration involving men, the servants were male slaves of the host household, even when the entertainment took place elsewhere.'* When there was a sacrifice to be undertaken, and meat to be eaten, they worked as a rule with a hired mégeiros.'’ For a modest household giving an unaccustomed party, two additional hands might well not be enough. A comedy mdgeiros therefore could expect to be told ‘how many tables you’re going to set, how many women there are [the right kind of answer to these questions is given in the fragment by Euangelus already quoted], what time dinner will be, if ’'m to bring along a trapezopoids, if you’ve enough crockery in the house, if the oven’s indoors’ and so on (Menander, Samian Woman 287-92). It was not only crockery that could be hired. So could the trapezopoios himself, the ‘table-maker’, ‘who will wash the dishes, prepare the lamps, make libations [etc.]’ as another comedy fragment conveniently specifies (Antiphanes 150 [Athenaeus 170d]).’° If there was to be no trapezopoids, the same work was shared between mageiros and domestics.
It is worth considering what was the status, for the time being, of those who served at meals. Were they as subordinate as in the modern stereotype of a slave or scullion? Or were they as proud and mighty as in the Athenian comedy stereotype of a learned, professional, boastful cook??! We can find our way to an answer if we examine the relations between mageiros, domestics and patron in surviving comedy dialogues. The cook is naturally respectful to his temporary employer even while delivering a lecture on nutrition, addressing him as ‘father’ and showing no resentment at his abrupt interruptions. No less clearly the cook claims seniority over domestics, who must for the occasion work to his direction, so that Sicon addresses Getas as ‘boy’ (i.c. ‘slave’). But there is a certain balance and a certain negotiation between cook and slave, for the skills and knowledge of both were required to avoid mishaps for which both could be blamed; it was not always true that ‘when the cook gets it wrong, the flute-player’s slapped’ (Eubulus 60 [Athenaeus 381a]). And it might well have been the household slave, rather than his master, who had gone to the appropriate section of the market to hire the cook. It does not matter here whether the typical Athenian mageivos was Athenian-born or foreign, slave or free. Why did it matter so much to Athenaeus (658e-662d) and the commentators on whom he drew? It puzzled them precisely because their own stereotype of classical Athens could hardly accommodate slaves who went to market to hire free men.
In the work of cooking, the mdgeiros gave the orders. In the act of sacrifice his role was central.” ‘No one has injured a mégeiros and got away with it: our trade is somehow sacred. You can do what you like to a trapezopoids’, said Sicon in the Bad-Tempered Man (644-7). One must not, of course, assume that sacrifice could not be carried out without a mdgeiros. At Eumaeus’ farm, and clsewhere in the epics, and in the wilds of Euboea in post-classical times, no mageiros was needed.** Nor was he needed anywhere, strictly, for any householder could carry out the ritual of sacrifice inseparable from the eating of fresh meat. In towns, however, circumstances became different. An animal for sacrifice would probably have to be bought: it might well not be wholly consumed and the remaining meat could best be sold at market.*> The madgeiros was the man to deal with both ends of this transaction as well as to look after the messy business in the middle.
The mdgeiros himself chose the trapezopoios if one was wanted: this and many other clues show that he watched over the whole presentation of the meal. In the Euangelus fragment, for example, instructions about the tables are given to the same interlocutor, surely a mdgeiros, as instructions about the food. A host sometimes inclined to leave these details to others. In Plato’s Symposium, at any rate, “Agathon’ boasts of keeping his hands
‘Well, boys, bring the rest of us our meal. Set things out entirely as you please, since there is no one supervising you — a thing I have never done - imagine you have invited myself and the others to dinner, and serve so as to win our praise.’
(Plato, Symposium 175b)
Circumstances would probably often dictate, as they did in the background to the Bad-Tempered Man, that the particular animal to be sacrificed, the animal that would provide fresh meat, would be selected by the mdgeiros, or by slave and madgeiros together: but many a comedy exchange demonstrates how tight a negotiation between host and cook (if not sometimes between guest and cook) decided the choice of fish and the completed menu.
One knew in advance if one wanted a cook. Entertainment was not necessarily so completely planned. At one extreme was the host who arranged everything. Circumstances might then alter. In Plato’s Symposium (176e) guests wish to talk seriously, and Socrates suggests: ‘I think we should tell the flute-girl’* (who had just arrived) to go away and play to herself, or — if she prefers — to the women inside.’ The proposal is pertinent because they could not simply send the flute-girl home: she had been hired by their host, so must now be given some job to do even if it was only to ‘play to herself’. By contrast an embarrassing host sketched in Theophrastus’ Characters (20.10), not having cared to commit himself to the expense in advance, offers to send out to the brothel for a girl if his guests say the word. In between lay a market for touts who looked for signs of feasting and drinking and called to offer the services of their performers, apparently earning free food and drink for themselves into the bargain. Such was Stratocles, ‘master of the rout’, who provided two whores at the Attic Dinner described by Matron [Athenaeus 134d—137c]. Such was the unnamed Syracusan proprietor of the two entertainers at the Symposium narrated by Xenophon (2.1):
When the tables had been taken away and they had poured a libation and sung a paidn ‘hymn’, a Syracusan joined the revel. He had a good flute girl and a dancing girl who could do acrobatics and a very pretty boy who played the lyre and danced very well, and he made money by exhibiting them like a sideshow.
These touts were not so very different, after all, from the men who lived by providing entertainment themselves at dinner, like the gelotopoids, ‘joker’ described by Xenophon in the same narrative (1.11-15): Philippus the joker knocked at the door and told the servant to announce... that he had come with all the equipment needed to eat someone else’s meal.... ‘Lie down, then’, said Callias, ‘my guests are full up with seriousness, as you see, but perhaps rather short of humour.’
As they ate Philippus tried to make a joke — to do the job that he was always invited to dinner to do. There were no laughs, and he was clearly upset. A bit later he tried another joke. They did not laugh at that either, so he stopped eating and lay there with his head covered. ... ‘If laughter has vanished from the Earth, my business is ruined, The reason I have been invited to dinners is to make the guests cheerful by laughing at me. Why would anyone invite me now???
Philippus and his fellow gelotopoioé have evidently something in common with the pardsitoi,’* ‘fellow-eaters’, who appear to have gone in for flattery and self-mockery more than for conscious humour. Athenaeus collected a mass of information on pardsitoi in fourth- and third-century Bc Athens, one of whose distinguishing features, as with the habitual beggar and errand-runner of the Odyssey (18.6), is that ‘the young men’ had a nickname for them.” Good-looking pardsitoi - defined as diners-out at someone else’s expense — who had no identifiable entertainment skills to offer might be suspected of paying for their meals with sexual services.*° But a pardsitos was, quite simply, one who ate with another without the ability or intention to return the invitation: thus a wellintentioned parent can say “Melesias, here, and I dine together, and the youngsters parasite? with us’ (Plato, Laches 179c), meaning no more than that they are privileged to share their fathers’ meal. The really powerful, such as the monarchs of fourth-century Macedonia and the later Greek world, were reputed to dine surrounded by kolakes, ‘toadies’, parasites who offered flattery as their meal-ticket.”!
Slaves for sale, and men and women looking for work, were to be found in the agord, ‘market-place’ and were bought or hired there. Cooks, for example, were hired in the section called mageireion, or so a later source asserts.” It is probably right to assume that in some neighbouring district one found dancing-girls and flute-girls for hire. A comedy slave, at any rate, claimed to have been sent into town to find both cook and flute-girl for a country banquet.
MEAL TIMES AND EATING PLACES
Families often must have eaten at home, but only the briefest descriptions are to be found. If sacrificing and eating fresh meat, families might eat at shrines: this is the kind of meal with which we began, and here the BadTempered Man is the principal source of evidence. Men formed dining clubs which could assume political importance: evidence for them comes from historical sources and occasional inscriptions, but there is no full description of such a dinner? The state acted as celebrant at general religious festivals and as host for entertainments at the town hall, the prytaneion; phratriai, ‘brotherhoods’ of citizens, also held communal meals. There is evidence from inscriptions as well as literature for such events, but no descriptions.
Workers, soldiers and those engaged in some communal activities ate away from home, these ‘working’ meals sometimes being provided for them. There is external evidence, but scarcely anything in the way of a description, of such meals.** Travellers who could not call on acquaintances had to cat at inns. Some members of a household spent the whole day away from home, taking food with them if there was to be no communal ration. Xenophon, for example, observed that it is improper for a man to spend his days at home.** Women, household slaves and children then certainly ate independently of their menfolk. Women lunched with one another, as we have seen, though respectable women did not go out to dinner in the evening.
Meal times are variable, but a midday meal was usually called driston, ‘lunch’ — this is what Callippides was late for - and an evening meal deipnon, ‘dinner’. The latter was perhaps typically the biggest meal of the day, and for some the only meal.*”
Families who were sacrificing, especially if celebrating such an event as a betrothal or wedding, but on other occasions too, invited guests to their meal. Men of the socially approved age — one could be thought too young to court a hetaird or keep a concubine and too old to woo a boy*® pursued courtship by entertaining. Men entertained male guests at home, and might also celebrate some public achievement, athletic or political, with a sacrificial dinner or a party for friends. Hetairat, and other women not of the proper status to be citizens’ wives, might be guests at such entertainments, at home or at a shrine. These were evening and night activities: a dinner might become a drinking party, a pdtos, or one more elaborate and organised, a symposion, or a dinner or drinking party might lead, by way of the riotous revelry of a kémos, to another elsewhere, or to the serenading of a lover, with the aim of being admitted for supper and further drinking. These varieties of revelry are the subject of several well-known, lengthy narratives. But dinner parties and drinking parties were surcly (in Athens as in most societies) less ubiquitous than their frequent occurrence in memoirs and fiction would suggest: they are certainly seldom mentioned in the forensic speeches.°?
Overall the emphasis of surviving evidence is probably thoroughly misleading. Public and municipal entertainment, the subject of many recent studies, is not a concern of this book. But even on the domestic level there were meals that were suitable subjects for literature — men’s entertainments, largely — and meals that were not. Private, family meals and ‘working’ meals are almost absent both from literature and from documents.”
When no strange men were in the house, women need not retreat to ‘women’s quarters’: they could Junch at leisure, indoors or in a courtyard." But the classical Athenian house, and the conviviality within it, were very inaccessible to the uninvited visitor. Women at home were invisible to lawabiding outsiders.*? House doors were commonly locked, and interiors divided into several rooms. One of these was the andrén, the ‘dining room’ (etymologically ‘men’s room’): it was in this room, customarily, that men entertained others to meals and drinking parties at home. Its ground plan was laid out to accommodate a certain number of couches around the walls. Andrénes can be recognised archaeologically by the location of the door (always off-centre), by the length of the walls (so many couch lengths plus one couch width) and often by floor details recognisably linked to the intended placing of couches and tables. They were onepurpose rooms, more clearly so than any other room in normal houses; how frequently they were used is quite unknown. Women of respectable Athenian households did not come into contact with male guests and had no reason to enter the andron when it was in use. In all the narratives of men’s dinners and symposia from the fifth and fourth centuries there is not one certain indication of the presence of a woman of the household, and there are several explicit signs that they were clsewhere.
Similar rooms to these androénes are found in certain municipal buildings, which are thus identified as prytaneia — places for municipal eating — and in buildings at shrines.** But many country shrines had no buildings, and certainly vase-paintings suggest that open air meals, otherwise resembling meals in dining rooms, were quite imaginable; a few literary references, scattered in time and place, and one or two paintings from Pompeii, imply that an awning (often translated ‘tent’) might be a regular amenity.”
The high Greck dining couch was a specialised piece of furniture. It is a standard feature of vase-paintings of banquets and must have been standard in the purpose-built dining rooms just described. On the vase-paintings, with few exceptions, the rule is one diner per couch: a second person on a couch will be a woman (or occasionally a beardless young man) often offering the male diner some more or less intimate service or performing it. But not all lived in such style as to own a house with a room dedicated to dining; not all could have afforded to own all those couches. The less well-off, when they entertained, are perhaps more likely than the rich to have done so at shrines, and to have taken rugs and cushions with them, as depicted in the Bad-Tempered Man. The fashion for dining on high couches, when there was a large number of diners, was possibly never as widespread as the vase-paintings would encourage us to imagine. Many may have continued to sit to eat, as they must have done municipally in the tholos, the ‘round house’ at Athens.** The much more informal arrangement of dining in a semicircle, stibds, outdoors or indoors and sometimes on a raised dais, can be discerned in a number of texts of the classical period and was certainly the usual rule later.**
At any rate, some — sometimes — reclined on couches to eat and drink. The first suggestion of it in literature comes from Alcman (19 [Athenaeus 111a]) in seventh-century Sparta: ‘seven couches and as many tables crowned with poppy-seed bread, with linseed bread and sesame bread and, for the girls, buckets full of honey sweets’, yet even by the later fifth century the custom of reclining was not quite taken for granted. One remembered, from Homer, that heroes had sat to eat. In comedy and satyr play the contrast between reclining and sitting, the play of class and etiquette, was an excellent source of humour. ‘Recline and let us drink, and make a test of it at once: are you the better, or am I?’ said Heracles as slave to Syleus his purchaser (Euripides fragment 691),‘” and there is clowning in Aristophanes’ Wasps when an unpolished father is taught to recline by his more fashionable son.**
Thus we know that at Athenian dinner parties the guests were limited in number. It is easy to count the couches that would fit in the purposebuilt dining rooms of Attica and indeed of other Greek towns, whether private, municipal or religious: that was exactly how the size of a reception room was customarily measured. Seven couches was a common size; five to eleven couches was the usual range, or in other words hardly more than twenty participants — though admittedly there was a sixth-century fifteencouch room at Megara and a fifth-century seventeen-couch room in the Propylaea at Athens.*” The intimate scale was part of the nature of Greek dining and entertainment, and was built in architecturally, for in the larger of known dining rooms the layout would have produced the effect of two to four groups dining or drinking simultaneously. A fourth-century poet confirms the picture: ‘Philoxenus ... describes the following kind of preparations for dinner: “A pair of boys brought in a shiny table for us, and another for others, and others brought another, until they filled the room” ’ (Philoxenus b.1-2 [Athenaeus 146f]). At Athens there was at one time a legal limit on private parties of thirty guests. The only larger gatherings there were open-air public festivities, for example, the sacrifices, accompanied by feasting in the agord, that were offered by the general Chares after a victory in 353 Bc.>! Hellenistic monarchs were more lavish: dining rooms in the Macedonian palace at Vergina accommodated up to thirty-one couches, while Alexander the Great travelled Asia with a hundred-couch dining tent.”
EATING AT HOME
We have accepted that on family occasions men and women celebrated in separate circles. It is highly pertinent that the sexes were separated during Christian worship until recently in Greece, as in some other countries (and yinekonitis, originally ‘women’s quarters’, is the name of the women’s part of the church, as already noted by Du Cange (1688)). But discussions of the segregation of the sexes in ancient Greece tend to stumble over the domestic life of the poor. In a one-room house, without slaves, can such rules exist? That they can is best shown by way of a modern parallel. J. K. Campbell reported of the Sarakatsani shepherds of northern Greece:
Even in the extended family household husband and wife do not cat together. The men eat first, the women of the household afterwards. No portion of a cooked dish (prosfdi) is set aside for the women, who must satisfy themselves with whatever is left by the men; this is often very little... . Only sometimes in the intimacy of the elementary family may the husband, wife, and children sit and eat together.*
The meagre ancient Athenian evidence is quite conformable to this. A householder might normally eat in the women’s quarters of his own house when without guests (the idea of permitting a male dining companion to enter the women’s quarters could be compared to sacrilege).>* There he would expect to be waited on, whether by a slave or by his wife: “And the little woman says nice things to me, brings me a barley-puff, sits down beside me and goes, “Have some of this! Try a bit of this!” I enjoy all that’ (Aristophanes, Wasps 610-12).°°
This is all very clearly visible on funerary reliefs, on which a reclining man attended by a seated woman may be in turn attended by standing children and slaves. This iconographic commonplace, to be found in Greece from the seventh century Bc and so suggesting that the fashion of reclining at meals goes back to the time of the Homeric epics even though there is no hint of it in the texts of those poems, has antecedents and analogues elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.® In these reliefs the central figure is always a man - and one notes that the dead man himself was regarded as the ‘host’ of his own funeral banquet, at least in a later view — while a woman, in what appear to be analogous memorials to women, was pictured seated at her own tomb, a female attendant offering food on a platter.>”
Such scenes were somehow private; they scarcely ever intrude into literature. We see a shadow of them, before the classical period, in Odysseus’ intimate last meal with Calypso: They came to the hollow cave, the goddess and the man together. Well, he was sitting there on the chair from which Hermes had got up, and the nymphe put out every food for him, to eat and drink, that mortal men eat; she was sitting facing godlike Odysseus, and house-girls put out ambrosia and nectar for her; and they set their hands to the food laid out ready. (Odyssey 5.194—9)
We see a reflection of them, too, in a domestic dinner described in a much later text, Lucius or the Ass (2).
SYMPOSION AND SERENADE
We have seen in a quotation from Xenophon’s Symposium that at a certain moment the tables were taken away, a libation was offered and a paidn sung. This moment was widely accepted as marking the division between dinner and drinking party. A scene from the comic playwright Plato’s Laconians (71 [Athenaeus 665b-c]) makes all clear:
‘Have the men finished their dinner already?’ ‘Almost all.’ Very good. Why don’t you run and bring out the tables? I’ll go and get the water.’ ‘Tll sweep the floor. After I’ve poured their libations I'll set up the kéttabos. The girl had better have the flutes at hand and be warming them up ready. Now go in and pour the perfume for them, Egyptian and iris, and then I'll give each of the guests a wreath. Somebody make up some fresh-mixed wine.’
‘It’s mixed.’ ‘Put the incense... .’ “‘There’s been a libation and they’re getting on with the drinking. They’ve sung a skdlion. The kottabos is coming out. Some little girl with flutes is playing a Carian tune for the drinkers: I saw another with a harp, and she was singing an Ionic song to it.’
Sympésia, the formal drinking parties that appear to have played such a large role in the intellectual life of Athens, were occasions for masculine enjoyment — and for sexual pursuit outside marriage. There are vasepaintings of all-women symposia,” but these paintings (in which the women are naked) have come under reasonable suspicion of being male fantasies. If Socrates’ suggestion about the flute-girl, quoted on p. 10, was seriously meant, he was not suggesting that a female symposion, parallel to the men’s, was taking place in his host’s women’s quarters; rather he was assuming that his host’s own womenfolk, respectably tucked away, might welcome musical entertainment similar to that enjoyed by men.
The sympésion itself was wholly comparable to the classical literature in which it figured so ubiquitously. Both were conversations among friends, as was clear to the Socrates of a later anecdote: When Aristophanes presented the Clouds, scurrilously abusing Socrates, a neighbour asked him: ‘Aren’t you angry at being satirised in that way?’ ‘No, [’m not’, he said. “The theatre is a symposion, and I am [taking my turn as] the butt.’ (Bringing Up Children [traditionally attributed to Plutarch] 10c)
In the rounded entertainment that was an Athenian sympdsion the wine was only one feature. Music was contributed by flute-players, harpists and others, or by the singing of the guests. Poetry, lyric, elegiac, perhaps epic, was likely to be recited at symposia. Some was written for no other purpose, including the skola, ‘drinking songs’, of which an anonymous collection survives from classical times; and we recall again the pazan sung at the commencement of the sympésion described by Xenophon. The recital of verse could take the form of a competition: and there were other party games, including the ever-popular koéttabos, illustrated on so many vascpaintings, at which with a flick of wine from a not quite empty cup one tried to dislodge a precariously balanced target.”
The wine was, however, a principal feature: wine that, after the initial libation, was mixed with water in proportions decided by the host to ensure the desired inexorable progress of inebriation in his guests. For the release of inhibitions that gocs with drunkenness was the aim of the sympésion. Here behaviour, though it obeyed rules, did not obey the same rules as outside. Criticisms, insults, satire, dangerous political opinions were neutralised by the laughter of the moment and (one hoped) the forgetfulness of the following day.
The release of inhibitions embraced sex as well as other human concerns. The drinking parties depicted on Athenian vases of the sixth and fifth centuries may be intended as pictures to laugh at, as programmes for imitation or as documents of objective reality; whichever of these purposes may be uppermost in the artists’ minds, they have shown us that sexual acts were easily imaginable as part of the festivity of a drinking party, and the literary evidence does not gainsay it. ‘Bring water, bring wine, boy, bring us flowery wreaths, and I will throw a punch at Eros’ (Anacreon 51 [Epitome 782a]).
Depending on circumstances, waiters and other domestics might find themselves precariously spectators. Here a comic Dionysus angrily imagines a continuing exchange of roles, his slave Xanthias as master, himself as attendant: “Yes, wouldn’t it be funny if my boy Xanthias was lolling about on Milesian rugs, screwing a dancing-girl, and suddenly wanted the po, and I was just watching him and getting a hard on, and he noticed me, the villain, and took a swipe at my jaw and knocked my front teeth out?’
(Aristophanes, Frogs 541-8)
If the festivities went on all night, attendants might find more opportunities for participation, or so a witness claimed at the prosecution of Neaera:
Chionides and Euthction testify that they were invited by Chabrias to dinner at Cape Colias to celebrate his win in the chariot race, and saw Phrynion (here present) at dinner there with the defendant Neaera; they themselves and Phrynion and Neaera fell asleep there, and they observed men getting up during the night to go to Neaera, including some of the waiters, who were Chabrias’ slaves. (Apollodorus, Against Neaera 34)
There are many varieties of revelry. For every anecdote of an all-night sympésion there is a matching story of a kémos, of nocturnal wanderings that begin at one revel and end at another. Late in the night in which Agathon had celebrated his tragedy’s success with a dinner and sympdésion, in Plato’s fictionalised narrative, there was a knocking at the outer door, very noisy, as if it were komastat: a flute-girl could be heard. ‘Go and see, boys’, said Agathon, ‘and if it is anyone we like invite them in. If not, say that we have finished drinking already.’
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