Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens

Athenaeus’ talks of ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘liberal’ (eleutherion) behaviour, and this emphasis on class (in its broadest sense) also finds echoes in earlier literature. Alexis makes the statement that ‘no man who is a wine-lover can be of low character (kakos). For twice-mothered Bromius [Dionysus] doesn’t enjoy the company of coarse men and a life of no refinement.’ A similar sentiment is found expressed at the beginning of Wasps where the audience is trying to guess the nature of jury-loving Philocleon’s vice. One suggests he is a wine-lover (philopotēs) and Xanthias replies, never, since that disease is a ‘disease of worthies’ (chrēstōn). Towards the end of the same play Philocleon’s sophisticated son Bdelycleon orders the slave to get dinner prepared so that they can get drunk. His low-class father objects that drinking leads to bashing-in of doors, violence and fines. ‘Not if you are in the company of gentlemen’ (kaloi k’agathoi), replies his son. At this point the audience is probably expecting something along the lines of Athenaeus’ remarks about how true gentlemen know how to moderate their drinking with the refinements of conversation, but Bdelycleon’s mind is running along a different track. There will be no less violence, but once all the damage has been caused, the gentlemen intercede with the victim for you, or you yourself come up with some witty story, one of Aesop’s amusing fables or some tale of old Sybaris which you learned in the symposium; and so you turn it into a laughing matter and he forgets about it and goes off.24

TAVERNS

These remarks remind us that although the symposium has been treated as the classic context for drinking in Greek society as late as the fourth century, it carries over from the archaic period associations with the lifestyle of one particular group within society, the aristocracy and their emulators. As Oswyn Murray observes: ‘However much the fifth-century democracy might try to provide public dining-rooms and public occasions for feasting, the symposion remained largely a private and aristocratic preserve.’ The lingering connotations of elitism are quite clear in the final scenes of the Wasps, in the awkwardness with which an Athenian Everyman, a dikast, like Philocleon, approaches the symposium: ‘to the fifth-century Athenian audience, the symposion is an alien world of licence and misbehaviour. ‘25

Those beyond the aristocratic pale had to get their liquid refreshment elsewhere, in the tavern or kapēleion, a far more demotic and promiscuous space than the private and selective andrōn. This well-attested institution does not seem to have been given as much scholarly attention as it deserves. After the reference-filled columns of Hug’s brief entry in Pauly-Wissowa’s panoramic encyclopedia of the ancient world, it is hard to find any detailed study and few bother even to refer to it. To some extent this neglect is a direct result of the prominence accorded the symposium and the anthropological model of commensality in accounts of Greek drinking. In contrast to the symposium, the kapēleion looks out of historical place, foreshadowing the consumerized, individualized drinking which ought to be the prerogative of modern times. In addition there are some philological questions that sometimes cause problems. A kapēlos can be both a retailer in general and a taverner in particular, although in comedy and oratory, when it is used without qualification, the latter sense can almost always be assumed.26

These taverners seem to have sold wine, vinegar and torches to light the way home at night and offer protection from cloak-snatchers. In some of these establishments, it seems, you could have something to eat as well. The kapēloi began as wholesalers and continued to sell wine in bulk to those who could afford to entertain at home. But they also broke the bulk, a practice known as ‘half-pinting’ (kotulizein), and served smaller quantities of wine with water to be drunk on the premises. In Gorgias Plato mentions one particular kapēlos, called Sarambus, whose skill at ‘preparing’ (paraskeuazōri) wine he compares with the work of Athens’ finest baker and Mithaecus, a Syracusan cook, reputed to be the Pheidias of the kitchen. Some translators treat Sarambus as simply a seller of wine, and translate ‘prepare’ as ‘provide’, but the fact that he is put alongside creative characters like a baker and a chef suggests that Sarambus is more than a simple retailer. Plato is talking of his skills as a taverner, and in fact it is precisely this passage that the lexicographer Pollux uses to demonstrate that in classical Attica kapēloi also mixed the wine. Plato, he says, is praising Sarambus for his oinourgia, his ‘winesmanship’. What the oinourgia of a good taverner consisted of in actual fact is open to speculation; honest measures of good wine, perhaps, from an amphora not long opened, strained of debris, blended with clean, chilled water, maybe a little perfume, served in fine cups with some bar-food, some tragémata (desserts) perhaps or hales (savouries) as an accompaniment. There is evidence for the suppression of such establishments in Thasos at least and we don’t hear much of taverns before Aristophanes, but in his comedies they appear as an already well-worn feature of the urban environment and it would be dangerous to argue from silence that taverns were a late-fifth-century phenomenon, supplanting the older more traditional aristocratic symposia as the fourth century progressed. The two institutions of drinking continued to exist side by side for a long time and they had probably coexisted for some years before they turn up in our sources.

There are enough references in all manner of different texts to indicate that taverns were widespread and popular. In Pompeii they reached a density that compares with the frequency of bars and pubs in modern cities. An assessment of their distribution in Athens must of necessity be rather more impressionistic. But take, to begin with, the laconic remark which Aristotle in the Rhetoric ascribes to Diogenes the Cynic: ta kapēleia ta Attika phiditia (‘taverns are the refectories of Attica’). The impact of the facetious comparison lies in the conjunction of two starkly opposed institutions: the communal dining-halls of Sparta, the epitome of a conservative collective, archetypes of elite commensality, membership of which effectively defined citizenship, and Athenian taverns, a typically democratic efflorescence, quintes-sentially commercial and apparently plebeian. But behind the sarcasm of Diogenes’ comparison there lies an observation about the popularity of taverns in Attica. Just as the common messes feed and water the entire citizenry in Sparta, so the whole population of Attica can be found of an evening thronging the kapēleia,27

Diogenes’ observation is confirmed by the frequent references in comedy and forensic speeches to ‘the neighbourhood kapēleion, offering a picture of bars spread widely throughout the city. So common a feature of the cityscape were they that the cuckold Euphiletus, justifying his murder of Eratosthenes in cold blood at the beginning of the fourth century, notes that he and his friends were able to buy torches for their expedition late at night from ‘the nearest kapēleion’ so that all could fully witness his wife’s adultery before her lover was despatched. Apart from these literary sources, kapēleia feature frequently in curse tablets, lead-letters commissioned from magicians and deposited in infernal postboxes, usually graves or crevices, conjuring Hermes and Persephone to spell-bind their enemies. One tablet in particular from an unsuccessful rival, or an impoverished alcoholic, vividly confirms the picture portrayed in comedy and court speeches of Athens with kapēleia on every corner: ‘I bind Callias, the taverner and his wife Thraitta, and the tavern of the bald man, and Anthemion’s tavern near […] and Philo the taverner. Of all these I bind their soul, their trade [ergasia], their hands and feet, their taverns … and also the taverner Agathon, servant of Sosimenes … I bind Mania the bar-girl at the spring, and the tavern of Aristander of Eleusis.’ The ‘kapēleion of the bald man’ seems to have been a common tag for a well-known tavern which crops up again in an inscription, a tavern of which perhaps Callias and Thraitta were the owners or staff. That a number of these tavern-keepers were slaves is indicated not only by mention of their owners, but also by their names. Thraitta (Thracian woman), for instance, is sometimes used almost as a synonym for slave-girl. The fragment of Alexis’ Aesop mentioned above refers to the practice of selling wine from carts, and some of these kapēleia may have been nothing more than this, conveniently situated by a spring perhaps to enable the wine to be mixed with cold water and drunk there and then. Other more solidly founded bars had wells or cisterns on the premises.28

A vase in a private collection, currently on loan to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is almost certainly an illustration of a kapēleion. The mouth of the buried cistern or lakkos is behind the youth who asks for ‘trikotylos’, cheap wine sold at three obols a chous. An oinochoē or pitcher hangs behind him in case he wants to drink it on the premises. He is either opening the amphora or tasting wine with a sponge, which may symbolize thirst, or greed for wine. In the other hand he carries a bag of money to pay for it. The cup may have been destined for a symposium, juxtaposing hospitality with the market-place by reminding the symposiasts how the wine they are drinking got there and allowing the symposium’s plebeian counterpart into the confines of the andrōn to show how aristocratic it is, or perhaps it was itself destined for a bar indicating that the kapēleion was also perhaps capable of sealing itself off from the world with an imagery of endless self-reflexion.

In the early 1970s excavators in the Agora unearthed a building of the early fourth century BCE which looks very like one of these taverns, adjacent to, or incorporating within it, some kind of eating-place. In ‘room six’ of the complex they discovered a well which having run dry was used for rubbish and filled with the debris of plates, fish-bones (of course) and a large number of amphora fragments revealing that, apart from the local Attic wine, Mendaean had been poured, along with Chian, Corinthian, Samian and Lesbian. In among these shards of coarse ceramic they found a large number of drinking cups of various types, some of a rather high standard: ‘–they suggest that the establishment catered to a clientele of some quality and some indication of the power of that wine and the popularity of the shop is possibly to be inferred from the extraordinary breakage of which our well preserves the record.’29

Like fishmongers and other traders, kapēloi seem to have been held in low esteem by the general population. In one play Theopompus the playwright compared the Spartans to barmaids (kapēlides) because after their victory in the Peloponnesian War they gave the Greeks a taste of freedom, and then disappointed them with vinegar instead. Blepyrus in Aristophanes’ Wealth mistakes the wretched personification of Poverty for the local barmaid who ‘cheats grossly’ in her half-pint measures. Again in Thesmophoriazusae the herald includes among the public curses imprecations against ‘the taverner or the barmaid who cheats without shame on the full legal measure of the choēs or kotylō. It is not long before kapēlos and its cognates comes to denote hucksterism or trickery in general; honest barmen were correspondingly prized.30 The nervous measure-watching atmosphere of the kapēleion makes a striking contrast with the generous equality of the symposium.

It seems quite clear that most of our sources (representing something far short of a cross-section of society) see the kapēleia as a feature characteristic of democratic and commercial cities, and ascribe the popularity of such establishments to the ‘baser’ elements of society. This, for instance, is the historian Theopompus’ tirade against the people of Byzantium and Chalcedon, taken from book eight of his Philippica:

The fact that they had been practising democracy for what was by now a long time together with the fact that their city was situated at a trading post, not to mention the fact that the entire populace spent their time around the agora and the harbour, meant that the people of Byzantium lacked self-discipline and were accustomed to get together in bars for a drink. And the people of Chalcedon, before they came to share with the Byzantines in their government all used to pursue a better way of life. But when they had tasted Byzantine democracy they fell to decadence and from having been the most self-controlled and moderate in their daily life, they became drink-lovers and squanderers.

Later the historian Phylarchus, echoing Diogenes’ observation about Athens, noted that the Byzantines virtually took up residence in taverns. In Thasos, on the other hand, breaking the bulk and selling by the kotylē was illegal, a measure intended, it seems, to outlaw taverns altogether.31

According to Isocrates the pamphleteer, only a certain type of person would allow himself to be seen at one of these establishments. In a eulogy of the ancient aristocratic council of the Areopagus, for instance, he looks back with nostalgia to the way young men used to behave in the good old days: ‘No one, not even a servant, at least not a respectable servant, would have been so brazen as to eat or drink in a kapēleion. For they cultivated dignity, not buffoonery.’ The same theme is repeated with some elaboration in the Antidosis:

You have brought it about that even the most respectable [epieikeis] of the young men are wasting their time in drinking and assignations [sunousiai], and idleness and childish games … whereas those who are more base in nature spend their days in the kind of degenerate pastimes which not even a decent servant would have dared to pursue in former times. Some of them chill wine at the Nine Fountains, others drink in kapēleia, there are some who play dice in the gambling-dens and many who loiter around the place where the flute-girls are trained.32

Isocrates was not alone in his prejudices: In his speech Against Patrocles, the orator Hyperides, a contemporary of Demosthenes, records that ‘the Areopagites barred anyone who had breakfasted in a kapēleion from going up to the Areopagus’. This was, of course, as much as anything, an attempt to stop drunken deliberations, and it seems likely that when our sources talk of people drinking during the day it is to the kapēleia that they are referring.33 There seems to be an attack on the demagogue Cleon’s morning attendance at these watering-holes of the Agora before a debate in the nearby Assembly – if not the actual bar unearthed by the archaeologists then one very similar – contained in the Paphlagonian’s boast at Knights: ‘I who can consume hot slices of tuna, drink a chous of neat wine and then go and screw the generals at Pylos.’

Isocrates allows us to set up an opposition between two kinds of drinking, the potoi (sympotic drinking) of the most ‘respectable’ (epieikēs) and the tavern drinking of those ‘worse in nature’. Clearly, elements of social prejudice are in operation in his distinction between coarse low-class buffoonery (bōmolochia) and decency (epieikeia) as the reference to the ‘servant’ indicates. But we should not give the orator’s nostalgic fantasy more credit than it deserves. Even with the limited information at our disposal we can see there were ranks among the taverns, running from high-quality kapēleia like theone dug up in the Agora, whose patrons could get hold of the best wines from the best producers, served in good ceramic ware by highly-regarded barmen like Plato’s Sarambus through to the small stalls owned by the characters we encounter on the curse-tablets, some of which perhaps consisted of nothing more than a slave-girl and a cart by a spring. The clientele reflects this range. According to the rhetorical sources, the taverns are places where you could meet a member of the Areopagus, or Aeschines the Socratic, or Euphiletus and his friends, picking up torches on their way to kill Eratosthenes. In comedy they are places well known to men like Blepyrus in Wealth or slaves in Lysistrata, and to women of all levels of society, the citizen women of the Lysistrata, Thesriophonazusae and the Ecclesiazusae as well as a nurse in Eubulus’ Pamphilus. In the tavern as in the andrōn, wine was drunk mixed, but without all the ritual and regulation of the well-ordered symposium: ‘As for me – for there happened to be a large new kapēleion across the road from the house – I was keeping my eye on the girl’s nurse, for I had ordered the barman to mix me a chous [six pints] for an obol and to accompany it with the biggest kantharos he had.’ Wine in the tavern was mixed for the individual in an individual vessel, with an individual cup to drink it out of. The elaborate rituals of sharing from the kratēr which are such a conspicuous feature of the symposium, have no part in the commercial environment of the tavern. Aristophanes uses the symposium as a metaphor for community threatened by unwelcome outsiders, like War or the friends of Ariphrades. The kapēleion on the other hand, he uses as an allegory of cheating, the swindling taverners out to exploit to the fullest extent their clients on the other side of the bar. In the kapēleion are to be found those who had no part in the symposium: ‘des femmes, des esclaves, des barbares.’ It seems, therefore, to fulfil a role as the symposium’s Other, on the margins of the Athenian community of citizens, a place where people drink ‘in no kind of order’ as Plato observes of the drinking which disrupts and dissolves his own Symposium. The tavern is a place where wines are identified by their price, where drink is commodified and severed from social ties, a place where drink is for getting drunk, a place where ancient drinking comes to look most like the drinking we apparently do today.34

But this is to ignore certain characteristics of this commercial drinking which shine through, even though the evidence is so scattered. First of all, the bars are so often ‘local’. They nestle snugly into the neighbourhood. The nurse only has to pop across the road to her kapēleion, as do so many others from cuckolded Euphiletus to Blepyrus in the Wealth, and there she finds someone to buy her a drink. Blepyrus in that play thinks he recognizes in the goddess Poverty the cheating barmaid from his local and there is certainly an expectation that customers and clients would know each other and their drinking habits. This is a long way from anonymous drinking: ‘There is a taverner in our neighbourhood; and whenever I feel like a drink and go there, he knows at once – and he only knows – how I have it mixed. I always know that I’ll be drinking it neither too watery, nor too strong.’ The bonds betwen barmen and their regulars are reflected in the practice of drinking on tick. Athens was a city in which borrowing was very common. Ready use of credit is often seen as an indication of a highly developed capitalist economy, but in many societies, and in particular at Athens, it seems to have more in common with pre-money economies based on gift-exchange, a transaction which shifts the burden of trust away from the quality of the coinage and back to personal acquaintance. The practice of ‘prodo-sin pinein’ fatally compromises the impersonality of drinking in a tavern, tying up the free-flowing promiscuous exchange of commodities with bonds of debt and trust. It is a sign of the depths to which insolvency has brought Aeschines the Socratic, that even the local kapēloi have stopped advancing him credit.35

The distinction between symposium and kapēleion, then, was one of class and culture rather than of socialization. The tavern was differently socialized rather than unsocialized and if it was the site of those excesses whose debris so impressed the archaeologists, its reputation at Athens was not worse than that of the symposium. In fact, in the popular imagination it figures, if anything, as less of a threat to public order than the aristocratic drinking-party. For this, of course, was a democratic city with a radical reputation. Non-Athenians like Theopompus and Diogenes or the government of Thasos looked on taverns very differently.

To a surprising degree the Greeks anticipate modern debates about drinking as a drug or as a social catalyst. They were nervous drinkers and shared the anthropologists’ anxiety about the threat wine presented to socialization, agreeing with Brillat-Savarin that the discipline of conversation must restrain it. One important aspect of the Greek problematic of wine finds few modern parallels, however, focusing neither on the community of drinkers nor on the drink, but on something in between.

CUPS

Some of the most surprising texts on the subject of drinking in antiquity are those fragments in poetry and prose in praise of Spartan drinking habits composed by the Spartan-loving revolutionary oligarch, Critias of Athens. In his Elegies he contrasted Spartan drinking habits – each man from his own cup, no toasts passed around and, he insists, no drunken excess – with Athenian practice. In a similar work, The Constitution of the Spartans, he elaborated his praise of Spartan institutions in prose with an encomiastic examination of the smallest details of their daily life from their footware to their crockery: ‘Laconian shoes are the best; their cloaks are the most pleasant to wear as well as being the most useful; the Spartan kōthōn is a cup most appropriate for military service and easily transportable in a kit-bag. It is a cup for soldiers, because it is often necessary for them to drink water that is not clean: the liquid inside a kōthōn cannot be seen too clearly, and the cup has ridges so that it retains any impurities.’

This fragment of Critias is the first in a strange series of rationalizations penned by the supporters of Sparta’s peculiar conventions. Xenophon, for instance, tells us that Lycurgus devised red cloaks for the Spartiates because he believed this costume had least of all in common with a woman’s dress. He also permitted men past their first youth to wear their hair long, not for the sake of vanity, but because he thought it would make them look taller, more gentlemanly, more terrifying. Aristotle in his Constitution of the Spartans returned to the same theme. Red cloaks were inherently masculine. Their sanguinary dye accustomed the Spartans to depise the flow of blood. Plutarch had a slightly different explanation: the crimson colour was designed to disguise from the enemy the fact that they had been wounded. In the Rhetoric, again, Aristotle gives a Veblenian elaboration of Xenophon’s views on long hair: ‘it is the mark of a gentleman, for it is not easy to perform a plebeian task with long hair.’37

It is not difficult to see that this exegesis of the semiotics of Spartan fashion is rather defensive in tone, the self-conscious forging of a myth. The writers protest too much, and the reason for their defensiveness is not hard to find: the habits they describe look rather like luxurious practices to the Athenian eye. This is most obvious with the custom of wearing the hair long, a vogue that, outside the boundaries of Laconia, aroused considerable suspicions, drawing charges of effeminacy and enervation and bringing to mind paragons of long-haired vice like the fictional profligate Pheidippides in Aristophanes’ Clouds or, on the very streets of Athens, infamous Alcibiades. Similar connotations of luxury hover around other items of Spartan fashion. Laconian shoes are fine pieces of footwear, the shoes of gentlemen in contrast to the felt slippers of the poor. The phoinikis too, the scarlet cloak with its expensive vermilion dye, evokes extravagance to an outsider’s eye.38 In democratic Athens the whole get-up would look like something very far from asceticism. The attachment of the Spartan epithet to the paraphernalia of a rich and opulent lifestyle was a continual rebuttal of those citizens of oligarchic tendency who tried to emulate the Spartan way of life, holding it up as an example of moderation and restraint.