James Davidson begins Courtesans and Fishcakes by noting that "the Greeks were very fond of fish;" he ends by suggesting that fish played a significant role in "the invention of ideas of freedom and democracy and that the concept of fishcakes holds a clue to the ancient understanding of civilisation itself." 

Some claim. And as Davidson himself hastens to point out, experts in his field are not immune to a certain historical hubris, unable to resist lauding their subject as a hitherto neglected but now critical niche. Davidson, a young lecturer in ancient history at Warwick University in England, appears more forgiving when the subject relates to such basic human activities as eating, drinking, and sex. Which is just as well.

On one level, Courtesans and Fishcakes is an exhaustive guided tour of classical hedonism from fishmarkets, drinking dens, and brothels to the perhaps more rarefied atmosphere of the symposia. Topping the cast list in these places are celesbrated slaves to the pleasure principle: Melanthios, who yearned for a neck as long as a heron's so he could feel the exquisite mouthfuls of fish as they passed down his gullet; Philoxenos, who swallowed a three-foot octopus and nearly died of dyspepsia: Aristotle's anonymous alcoholic, who put eggs under his mat and sat on them and drank continuously until they hatched.Yet Courtesans and Fishcakes is also an elegantly articulated treatise on what the Greeks said and thought about pleasure.