Sex, Lies and Fishcakes

When we talk about the “ancient Greeks,” we really mean the “ancient Athenians.” Scratch the surface of the Hellenic ideal, and it’s almost always classical Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC that you find lying underneath: the architecture of the Parthenon, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the “invention” of democracy, the tragic drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Occasionally Athens’ great rival and antitype gets a look: Sparta, with all its anti-intellectualism, its unbending social hierarchy, its rigid--and, for a time hugely successful--militarism. (In fact, up until the middle of the last century, Sparta was, for obvious reasons, a much firmer favorite with the European elites than the dangerously radical, democratic Athens.) And if you move a little later to the third and second centuries BC, there is the huge Greek city of Alexandria too--founded on the Nile delta by Alexander the Great, home of the greatest library of the ancient world and a busy school of literary production that almost rivaled classical Athens.

But of the hundreds of small independent city-states that made up the “ancient Greeks” of the classical period (before, that is, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander gobbled up their independence into the first version of world empire), we know very little indeed. Athenian literature (combined with few surviving documents mostly inscribed on stone) gives us a faint impression of their sheer variety: some almost as democratic as Athens; others about as ingeniously oppressive as Sparta; still others happily, or unhappily, making do with their old kings and aristocrats, apparently unaware of all the political revolutions round about; some (like Corinth) close to the vanguard of art and fashion; others quaint little backwaters. We know so little about any one of these that we could never write their “history” (unless it were to be about 90% fantasy). The safest course when dealing with the “ancient Greeks” has always been to shut your eyes and dream of Athens.

Of course, the Athenians quite literally wrote themselves into history. Thucydides, the 5th century Athenian historian (and general) described and analyzed what he claimed was the greatest war the world had ever known--the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which lasted on and off from 431 to 404 BC. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In writing about the Peloponnesian War, he made it the greatest conflict ever (and the only classical Greek war whose narrative we can even begin to reconstruct in any detail--apart from the Greco-Persian wars of the earlier 5th century recounted by the historian Herodotus). Likewise, in terms of political comment, theory, pamphleteering and satire, the Athenian drive to write the politics of their city had the inevitable effect of making their political arrangements (and especially their democracy, which in its most radical form was actually relatively short-lived and bitterly contested) one of the most important models for future generations.

Predictably too, later Greeks (as well as the Romans, who were the effective masters of the Greek world from the end of the 2nd century BC) were drawn to write and rewrite the history of Athens. Much of our “information” about classical Athens comes from this later process of rewriting. So, for example, the main “source” for the life of Pericles, who was (or so many would claim) the greatest Athenian statesman of the 5th century BC, is a biography written more than five centuries later by Plutarch, a Greek living in the Roman Empire. It is not “just” a biography, of course, but part of a much wider, and much more agenda-ridden, cultural and historical project: to define a place for Greece in a world where Roman domination was the brute political reality. It is, in other words, biography with a very strong ulterior motive. Typically, like most of Plutarch’s “Lives,” the biography of Pericles is paired with that of a Roman--in this case Fabius Maximus, who successfully masterminded Rome’s campaign against Hannibal. Part of the reader’s game is to compare life with life: Which do you prefer, the Greek or the Roman? And on what grounds?

Athenian history, even as it was being written in the ancient world, was a complicated palimpsest; version upon version, each one rewritten in new circumstances, in the light of a new political and cultural agenda. Far from being an irritant (“Why don’t we just have a simple story?”), these layers of history-writing are among the things that give modern classical studies its distinctively modern tone. There are, and can be, no “flesh and blood” characters in the classical world, no simple stories, only a series of different and competing representations. Ancient history is, and must be, a history of representation; nothing, in fact, could be more postmodern.

Those who write about the classical Greek (Athenian) world for the “general reader” are faced, then, with two choices: either to share with their readers the complex representational processes that underlie any story we might want to tell or to stand loftily above such debates, to speak with authority and not to “worry” the nonspecialist with the problems of what we cannot know or, more to the point, with the fragility of what we think we do know. Christian Meier, in “Athens,” opts firmly for the latter course and for all the oversimplifications that must follow.

Meier’s aim is to trace the rise of Athenian democracy from the war with Persia at the beginning of the 5th century BC to the defeat of Athens by Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War. (That story underlay Thucydides’ “History” too--as he blamed Athens’ democracy and democratic politicians for its defeat by Sparta.) This involves Meier in some brisk sociological theorizing and vague references to Greek “psychic energies” but ultimately brings him down to the kind of selective admiration of Athenian politics that you would expect in a book entitled “Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age” (significantly, perhaps, the original German title was more guarded, or more appropriate to modern German politics: “Athens: A New Beginning in World History”).

Athenian democracy is given the usual hearty pat on the back with only a few paragraphs devoted to, say, its dependence on slave labor and an altogether too-kind treatment of the Athenians’ vicious exploitation of their overseas empire, which (in the 5th century BC at least) went hand in hand with their democracy. The trial and execution of Socrates, enacted by the democratic government of Athens just after the end of the Peloponnesian War, is glossed over as “a blot . . . best understood as an overreaction.” (It would have been more consistent, at least, to suggest that Socrates, who had some extremely nasty anti-democratic pupils and some arguably treasonable views himself, was an understandable candidate for the death penalty.)

But worse than this is Meier’s repeated and explicit conflation of Athenians with Greeks at large; it is a particularly extreme version of the standard equation (Athenians = Greeks) and one whose dangers Meier, as a professional ancient historian, should well have understood. He entitles one chapter simply “The Greek Way” and refers blithely to such things as “the Greek path toward democracy”--a generalization that would have horrified the thousands and thousands of oligarchs all over Greece whose lives were devoted to ensuring that their cities were untouched by anything approaching “popular” politics. (In a book in which such wild generalizations reign, it is not surprising that the Romans emerge as parodies of dullness; Greeks were smart and reflective, while “the Romans paid little attention to the basic insecurity of life.” Really?) Meier gets away with this largely because he refuses to explain how his story is constructed (rather like a mathematician giving you the answers to problems without showing how he worked it out). It is history by assertion, not by argument; trading in certainties (because that’s what the public is supposed to want), instead of the much more interesting uncertain and fragile ambivalences that really make up ancient history.

The three pages of bibliographical notes make this point as clearly as anything. Here Meier runs through the major “sources” without any hint that, for example, Herodotus and Thucydides were writing half a millennium before Plutarch and with wildly different axes to grind, and he offers a small selection of further reading, almost all of it cited in German editions (even when there is a perfectly serviceable English translation, or occasionally when the book was written in English in the first place). This is the “teacher knows best” style of history writing and sadly will open up the ancient world and its debates to almost no one.

James Davidson, by contrast, in “Courtesans and Fishcakes” celebrates the very processes by which his history is constructed. Also aimed at the “general reader,” the book is a study of sensory pleasure (from food to sex) in what Meier would call the “golden age” of Athens. Davidson is concerned with Athenian enjoyment--or rather (and he is careful to make this distinction) with the representations of pleasure, the commonly held rules of what could or could not be enjoyed, and the ways in which the classical Athenian understanding of bodily appetites informed the public political processes of the city, as much as the private lives of its citizens. (Why, how and on what terms, for example, could accusations of loose living be used in political debate?) It is all done with a seductively light touch and a clever sense of self-irony. “The concept of fishcakes,” he writes in his final chapter, “holds a clue to the ancient understanding of civilization itself.” It says a lot about the book’s persuasiveness that, by that stage in the argument, we glimpse, if only for a moment, in what sense such a bizarre claim might be true.

This is a very different image of classical democratic Athens from the one we are used to. The traditional line, taking its cue from Thucydides himself, has always been to emphasize the luxury of Athenian public display (the almost vulgar lavishness of the Parthenon, for example) in contrast to the austerity of the private life of even its most elite citizens. Davidson turns that picture on its head, reminding us about the centrality of bodily pleasure throughout the Athenian body politic. Their democracy was founded on an economy of enjoyment: Socrates, after all, is best remembered not in an austere classroom but philosophizing till dawn, while those around him drank themselves under the table.

Davidson himself has a few irritating axes to grind: In particular, he crudely oversimplifies Michel Foucault’s work on the history of ancient sexuality and then (not surprisingly) demolishes it. But his great virtue is to respect the intelligence of his readers. The first chapter offers an analysis of the culture of eating in Athens and focuses on a single Greek word, opsophagos, which sometimes means (and sometimes doesn’t) “fish eater” (hence the point later about “fishcakes”). It was a brave gambit to spend so many pages on what might seem a linguistic nicety, particularly in a book intended for those who know no Greek. But it pays off brilliantly, gradually drawing the reader into the complex social, cultural and political coding of Athenian eating habits--and showing how important those habits were. There could be no better “popular history” than this.