Unlike beef or mutton, fish was not a sacrificial or religious
food, and could more be enjoyed for its own qualities. Its
consumption became a hallmark of urban sophistication. In
this excerpt from Courtesans and Fishcakes, classical
scholar James Davidson scours the ancient texts
to explore the piscatorial passions of the Greeks.
There was a banquet and people were talking and, as so often
in accounts of banquets at this period, Socrates was there.
The topic was language: the origin of words and their true
meanings, their relationships with other words. In particular,
according to Xenophon, who describes the scene in his Memoirs
of Socrates, they were talking about the labels applied to
people according to their behaviour. This was not in itself
an uninteresting subject, but failed nevertheless to absorb
Socrates' complete attention. What distracted him were the
table-manners of another guest, a young man who was taking
no part in the discussion, too much engrossed in the food
in front of him. Something about the way the boy was eating
fascinated Socrates. He decided to shift the debate in a new
direction: "And can we say, my friends," he
began, "for what kind of behaviour a man is called
an opsophagos?"
Sole Food
If Plutarch had been present (and Plutarch would have given
anything to be present had five centuries not intervened)
the question might have been a non-starter. For Plutarch is
quite categorical: "and in fact, we don't say that
those, like Hercules, who love beef are opsophagoi...nor those
who, like Plato, love figs, or, like Arcesilaus, grapes, but
those who peel back their ears for the market-bell and spring
up on each occasion around the fish-mongers." An
opsophagos, according to this ancient authority at any rate,
was someone with a distinct predilection for fish.
"But if you go to the prosperous land of Ambracia
and happen to see the boar-fish, buy it! Even if it costs
its weight in gold, don't leave without it, lest the dread
vengeance of the deathless ones breathe down on you; for this
fish is the flower of nectar." The Greeks were fond
of fish. Fondness, on second thought, is rather too moderate
a word for such passion. What the literature of pleasure manifests,
time and time again, is something more intense, a craving,
a maddening addiction, an indecent obsession. The flavour
of this yearning is easily sampled in the work of Archestratus
of Gela in Sicily, from whom the eulogy of the boar-fish is
taken. Another passage from the same work advises readers
on what to do if they come across a Rhodian dog-fish (emissole?): "It
would mean your death, but if they won't sell it to you, take
it by force...afterwards you can submit patiently to your
fate."
Archestratus acquired a certain amount of notoriety for his
mock-heroic hexameters rhapsodising food, but his work, variously
known as "Gastronomy, Dinnerology" or "The
Life of Luxury" , was by no means untypical of the
discourse of gourmandise. What should be noted is not so much
the extravagance of the language used to describe the fish,
as the fact that in a work about the pleasures of eating in
general, reference is made to almost nothing else.
The Greeks, to be sure, recognised as delicacies some foods
which had nothing to do with the sea: some birds and other
game (especially thrushes and hares), various sausages and
offal (sow's womb was particularly revered), some Lydian meat
stews and various kinds of cake, but these were exceptions.
The edible creatures of the sea seem to have established a
dominance over the realm of fine food in classical Greece
that scarcely fell short of a monopoly....
