Courtesans & Fishcakes

I mentioned this in a post on another thread, but I thought it was worth its own headline. Last summer, I randomly picked up a book for a couple of dollars at a used bookstore in Rhode Island called "Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens" by James Davidson

I am reading five books at the same time now and this is my "nightstand" book so I am only a third of the way through, but I must say the more I read the more extraordinary I find it, especially as it reveals a lot of hidden or otherwise overlooked slang that fleshs out references in the ancient Greek literature.

(For instance, in Aristophanes' "Acharnians", a man from Megara dresses his daughters as piggies to sell them. What I never knew but Davidson reveals is that "piggies" are slang for genitalia, so the wicked humor makes much more sense)

It focuses on food, drink and sex in the culture in such a way that it unwraps multiple layers or complexity and exposes a cultural core that no other previous work revealed for me. I would add that you need some kind of exposure to ancient Greece in the classical age for this to make sense to you, but if you have some kind of foundation you will learn so much more!

Highly recommended!

The amazon review info is most descriptive:
http://www.amazon.com/Courtesans-Fishcakes-Consuming-Passions-Classical/dp/00609...

Amazon.com Review
Desire is a dangerous thing, and the relationship between the citizens of ancient Athens and their desires was a complex and troubled one. James Davidson's Courtesans and Fishcakes is a brilliant and kaleidoscopic examination of daily life in classical Athens, and the life he reveals is simultaneously more alien and more familiar than we might have imagined. From fish-guzzling gourmands to the ambiguous eroticism of vase paintings, the cradle of Western culture is artfully, and frequently amusingly, anatomized. Davidson believes that many historians, under the influence of Foucault, are guilty of imposing modern views of desire, and particularly sexuality, on Greek culture, resulting in a simplistic interpretation of what was an extremely complicated issue. He refutes the prevailing opinion that sex in Athens was a simple binary opposition of penetrator and penetrated, drawing on a remarkable number of sources to show how sexuality was a slippery commodity rooted in intricate social negotiations, a characteristic shared with many other objects of desire, from eels to undiluted wine. Davidson sometimes assumes a little too much knowledge on the part of his audience--some basic information about the size of the Athenian population would have been helpful--but in spite of this Courtesans and Fishcakes is both accessible and provocative, offering a fascinating portrait of the private and public lives of ancient Athenians.

This sounds most interesting... (says the girl who has 4 books on the go). I'm a fan of the culturally-aware approach to history. I achieved the 'impossible' mark of 93 in an ancient history exam by having a cultural analysis of the Judeo-Roman conflict than a simply historial one... Undergrad was fun.
Anyway, this is a book for the 'to read list'. (See Stan, I am getting into more Greek stuff! lol.)

That's great Stevie ...

One of the reasons why so many people hate history or the classics is that they had terrible teachers in elementary or secondary schools who never connected all these "facts" and "names" and "dates" with the culture that spawned all those significant factoids the poor kids were forced to memorize out of context. Which really pisses me off. (I know, don't hold back, tell you how I really feel ...lol)

I first got interested in history, and especially ancient history, because I see those old stone faces as the great-grandfathers of my civilization, warts and all. As for the Greek stuff, I loved Herodotus and especially Thucydides, but it is Aristophanes that put flesh on these long dead guys and gals for me. That's why I love the new Loeb translations with the actual wicked dialog intact, even if we can't figure out everything it implied. The "Courtesans & Fishcakes" book takes it another step, because if we can truly imagine them eating and drinking and fornicating, they really come alive once more, and in many ways still reflect upon us like a shadow on a mirror, 2500 years later ...

Yes, the book has alit on my side table. It stares. It attempts to seduce me, but I've got this book on Percy Fawcett I have to finish. He disappeared in the Amazon looking for a lost empire.

You're doing a great sales job, Garp ;)

not that I need another book on my list, but what's the Percy Fawcett book, Pam?

It has the unlikely title of The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

It sounds 'trashy', and it is an easy read, but I'm finding it interesting. Col. Fawcett was a member of the Geographical Society of London. Before that, he served in India. His adventure was one of THE phenom of his day. Lots of press. He and the society were convinced there was a 'lost' empire hidden in the Amazon. Yet, with all his experience, he vanished.

btw, if you are not adverse to some discussions of poetry, the book I read on Walt Whitman and his family during the Civil War is excellent. Learned alot about Walt and his works, and alot about the Civil War on the ground level. Walt didn't serve in the war --he was busy in the hospitals-- but his brother George was in quite a few horrid battles.

wow ... sounds like my kind of book -- and be sure to read The River of Doubt by Candice Millard for another adventure in the Amazon, this time with Teddy Roosevelt -- also a wild ride

Courtesans and Fishcakes is a wonderful book. I'm a sucker for good social history. It also gave me background when I read Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland, who talks about the epicurian Romans and their fishponds. Along the same lines, I'd recommend 1700: Scenes from London Life by Maureen Waller.

I have Rubicon on my long list. Holland's Persian Fire was absolutely brilliant. So glad to hear you liked Courtesans and Fishcakes -- it is kind of an obscure book but it offers such an awesome slice of ancient Greek life ...

Those two Holland books are two of my favourites :-)

Love it when someone can write history with the diction of a novelist !

Apparently Davidson has a more recent book called The Greeks and Greek Love that unfortunately has been much less well received than Courtesans and Fishcakes ... the reviews make me think I'll skip this one

I loved The Greeks and Greek love. It made me laugh out loud at times and it is full of information e.g. about age-groups, which makes other things make sense. It is at times a bit discursive, though I enjoyed that. The style is often lively and idiomatic. Do try this book when you have time: it is fun as well as erudite.

There was an interesting article in Whitby's Sparta titled, "Dining Groups, Marriage, Homosexuality" by Anton Powell. You can find an excerpt at Googlebooks: http://tinyurl.com/7g7ooz

And though I have no recollection of the following article at this moment there's: The Women of Sparta by James Redfield.

The Classical Journal, Vol. 73, No. 2, (Dec., 1977 - Jan., 1978), pp. 146-161 Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296868

Just wanted to note that I just completed The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America – Eli Sagan -- this is a great political bookend to Fishcakes' social history of the Greeks. While Sagan sometimes stretches his psychoanaltical theories too far to suit the historical facts, this book is packed with great information. There is also some scary similarities to our own culture that will make you squirm. Read it!

Gads, I'd love a look at every one of these. Hmmm. I turn 61 this month. Maybe my relatives will be looking for a gift idea!

With thanks to Terence Lockyear of South Africa, another review of Davidson's new and shocking (shocking, I say) reappraisal of love in Classical Greece, a review prepared for the Washington Post by Michael Dirda on the publication of the American edition, which is newly titled, apparently, to allay the publisher's fears that Americans are too queasy to purchase a book which includes the shocking term (shocking, I say) "homosexuality".

THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World, by James Davidson. Random House. 789 pp. $45.00

*
Michael Dirda: A Breakup With Tradition. The Washington Post. Thusday, 18 June 2009
*

Enthralling if overlong, "The Greeks and Greek Love" is written in part as a counterblast to Kenneth Dover's classic "Greek Homosexuality" (1978), which has been deeply influential in contemporary cultural studies. Dover argued that same-sex relationships among males in ancient Greece focused on sodomy, and that the submissive role was deeply humiliating. By contrast, the aggressive or dominant partner could freely engage in any amount of episodic sex without serious consequences to his career or reputation.

For Davidson, a professor of classics and history at the University of Warwick, this model leaves much to be desired and overlooks one important fact: actual love, the devotion of a couple to each other. He stresses that Dover -- and his followers, who included Michel Foucault -- proffered a vision of eros that ignores affection and true partnership. "By equating being in love with having sex, by confusing Greek sex with Greek Love, a courting couple with a couple in a relationship, Dover not only sexualized passionate eros, but made homosexual relationships look intrinsically impermanent, and by the same token trivial." Though Davidson never says it outright, "The Greeks and Greek Love" tacitly validates modern same-sex marriage, just as Dover's older study now seems to reflect the pre-AIDS era of promiscuous casual sex.

In the first section of his book, Davidson focuses on the meaning of Greek erotic terminology and Athenian sexual mores. His starting text is "The Symposium," Plato's classic dialogue on love. In particular, he focuses on the speeches of Pausanias, who describes the elaborate Athenian courtship ritual between admirer (erastes) and admired (eromenos). Here Davidson overturns the typical view of Greek love as a kind of pedophilia, an older male (the erastes) forcing his brutal attentions on a young boy (the eromenos).
ad_icon

In fact, a family's sons were carefully protected in Athenian society, and it was taboo for any unrelated man even to talk privately to them. Instead, sanctioned love affairs focused not on the pubescent but on 18- or 19-year-olds, young males who were neither boys nor full-fledged adults. Davidson dubs this group "striplings." As puberty seems to have set in four or five years later than it typically does today, these striplings would still be attractively beardless -- Greek men didn't trim their facial hair -- and at the acme of their masculine beauty. Their devotees were generally only a few years older than they were and often behaved with the giddiness of a modern fan club. Rather than being aggressors, groups of infatuated erastai (plural of erastes) would essentially worship a youthful heartthrob from a distance, writing poems, sighing heavily and frequently offering gifts.

In this Greek system, Davidson explains, eros ran in one direction: The besotted admirer, who "just can't help himself," did all the work while the hard-to-get beloved maintained his distance and apparent indifference. Still, it was ultimately the eromenos's decision whether to favor any particular man. For the Greeks, such favoring (charizesthai) had to avoid even the hint of quid pro quo or commodification: To exchange sex for money or political advantage was prostitution, and that taint would wreck an entire life. Everything instead should be built on a kind of gracious giving. With luck, philia, "intimate love," a true bond, might result. All in all, the course of same-sex love was highly formalized, usually culminating in rituals that look a lot like marriage ceremonies. Quite often, Davidson concludes, Greek homosexuals led their entire lives as committed and faithful couples.

In the middle section of his book, Davidson surveys and analyzes some of the literary and mythological models of same-sex relationships available to Greeks of the 5th century B.C. Among them are Achilles and Patroclus, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Zeus and Ganymede (whose name gave us the word "catamite"), Heracles and his traveling companion Iolaus, and Alexander the Great and his minister Hephaestion. Here, too, Davidson underscores that differing "homosexualities" existed in the various Greek city-states: Elaborate two-month-long abduction rituals in Crete, the Sacred Band of Thebes (a warrior elite consisting of male couples) and austere Spartan sexual protocols, including a bizarre form of lovemaking in which the younger partner remains swaddled from head to foot in his cloak.

In his final chapters, Davidson sums up his understanding of Greek love and attempts to trace its origins. He notes, for instance, that the gymnasium or training ground seems to be a common background element in vase paintings. He suggests that when applied to men, the Greek word "kalos" (beautiful) probably didn't mean prettiness, so much as the well-muscled "physical splendor" appropriate for a great warrior. He underscores that from a civic viewpoint, an erotic bond between two men could strengthen -- or damage -- the state by cutting across the usual loyalties to clan or class.

Davidson tentatively concludes that the template for Greek love might be traced back to the Bronze Age and, in particular, to chariot warfare. This last was organized as a two-man operation, consisting of a driver and a spearman, who needed to work closely, indeed intimately, together. Perhaps this tradition partially explains the frequent analogy comparing the amorous soul to a chariot yoked to unruly horses.

Davidson can be delightfully unruly himself, mixing high and low styles, supporting his serious scholarly points with humorous and even campy flourishes. Take, for instance, his portrait of Helen of Troy in her later years:

"Over twenty years after she was seduced and got carried away by Paris, Helen is nevertheless no Norma Desmond: a little ashamed of all the heroes who died for her, to be sure, but bitter, surely not, and she's still got it -- whatever it was she had -- wonderfully charming and mysterious, quietly self-confident, and ever so slightly from another planet."

James Davidson chose the title for his book with care. It really is about love, about long-term philia rather than just temporary lust. As he says with epigrammatic forcefulness: "Those who care only for sex give homosexuality a bad name."

Michael Dirda -- mdirda@gmail.com -- writes each Thursday in Style.

washingtonpost.com

Fishcakes was wonderful. While my TBR list may be too overwhelming at this point to add this Davidson book, his interpretation of male-to-male relationships in the classic period seems far more accurate than those that preceded it. All of my studies seem to suggest that he is correct in that there were vast varieties of homosexual love among the Greeks and it was not so clearly defined -- nor so clearly dependant upon dominant/submissive roles -- as in later Rome.

Garp83, in other words, Greece, like pre-modern Japan was more interesting than the Sotadic Zone as described by Burton. While that is not the subject for my books, you might enjoy a comparison with what you will find in my Woman Without a Hole. I must confess to reading few of the books about the ancients, though I did read and marvell at Martial's Epigrams. Some of the Japanese material is rather sad, but the wakashu remind me of what i like most about modern gay culture though the relationship of the wakashu and none-wakashu (straight?) males is different from that of gays and straights in Usania as the Japanese straights generally were what we now call "bi" . . . but, all that aside, the quirky is the quirky and if the ancient past is not only a foreign country but exotic, you might like much of my work touching on japan, where you can find plenty of fishcakes of various types, one including mammals (dolphin) i am afraid, but the other, the name of which i forget mixes fish and some sort of potato that blows up like a marshmellow when heated.

#16.

It's always surprised me when 'intelligent' people tend to expect a narrow range of emotion or relationships within a population. To think that homosexual love amongst the Greeks would be any one type seems simple-minded to me.

I think the book sounds fascinating.

Twice in the last week I found myself randomly referring to info I got from Courtesans and Fishcakes For those who have not yet read it, if you have any interest in classical Greece you owe it to yourself to find the book and the time to read it. Following that, a nice complementary bookend would be Sagan's The Honey and the Hemlock