Читать книгу Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens - James Davidson - Страница 13

One version of the vice of opsophagia, then, relates to carefully balancing the elements of diet to keep staples staple and everything else decorative. Plutarch’s version on the other hand more straightforwardly says opsophagia is love of fish. How can these two rather different versions be reconciled? Whom do we trust to translate for us, Plutarch the eminent antiquarian or Xenophon, a reliable witness, surely, of the language of his own time?

To resolve this dispute we need to take another detour, to another controversy and another part of the ancient world, the sea of Galilee in the reign of the emperor Tiberius. An unlucky night is at last drawing to a close, revealing on the water’s surface a boat, with plenty of fishermen aboard but no fish. In the breaking light a figure can be made out on shore. He asks if they have caught anything. They answer that they have not. He advises them to cast the net on the right-hand side of the boat. They follow his instructions and find their nets full, so full in fact that they cannot bring the catch on board and have to tow it ashore. When they reach the land, they find that the stranger has already started cooking a breakfast of bread and fish. They daren’t ask him who he is because they now know it must be the risen Christ.

This is the tale of the miraculous draught of fishes, as told by John. The story itself occurs with slight variations in Luke as well and raises many points of interest for Bible scholars and theologians. What concerns us here, however, is not theology but philology. John uses two different words for fish, first, as we would expect, ichthus (which by the logic of the acronym – Iesous CHristos THeou Uios Soter [Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour] – made fish a secret sign of Christian credence in the first centuries after Christ and a symbol of Christian pride in our own), but when the fish are brought to be eaten John uses a different word, opsarion, a word which occurs five times in John and nowhere else in the New Testament. This idiosyncrasy of vocabulary has led to some bold conclusions about the author. For John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, the word properly referred to cooked fish and was proof that the evangelist, usually considered the latest of the gospel-writers, was on the contrary the earliest, a witness of the things he described, being none other than John the son of Zebedee, one of the twelve disciples, a fisherman and trader in fish. Only a professional, Robinson implies, would bother with such trade distinctions.

A. N. Wilson, in a more recent biography of Jesus, took this observation as proof that new things can still be discovered in the text of the Bible. He clarified the Bishop’s rather allusive argument by suggesting that by ‘cooked fish’ this professional fishmonger was referring to something like a bloater or smoked fish.²⁸ Disappointingly, however, there is nothing technical about John’s vocabulary. ‘The feeding of the five thousand’ is not about to become ‘the miracle of the kippers’. Opson together with its diminutive opsarion were by this period perfectly commonplace words for fish, not smoked, and not necessarily cooked, but certainly in dire danger of being, since they corresponded to ichthus as pork does to pig, referring to fish as food. In fact it is from opsarion, and not ichthus, that the modern Greeks get their own word for fish, psari. This explains why Plutarch thought an opsophagos was simply a fish-lover. It proves nothing about the identity or profession of his near contemporary St John other than his fluency in the currencies of Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman Empire.²⁹

That one word could mean ‘anything we eat with bread’ and also simply ‘fish as food’ caused misunderstandings among generations of Greek readers down the centuries, of which the disagreement between Plutarch and Xenophon over opsophagia is only one example. The historian Diodorus of Sicily, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, read Thucydides’ description of the three cities, representing the three pillars of diet, granted by the Great King to Themistocles for going over to the Persian side, but understood something rather different. After commenting on the productivity of Lampsacene vineyards and the fecundity of the wheat-fields of Magnesia he couldn’t resist adding an explanatory footnote to the choice of the city of Myus for his opson: ‘it has a sea well-stocked with fish’, although the city was by that time many stades inland.

It is clear, then, that opson could mean simply ‘sea-food’ already by the first century BCE. The question which exercised ancient students of the language was how much earlier than this the usage first appeared, and in particular whether it counted as good classical Attic Greek. To push it back a couple of centuries seems straightforward. Some modern scholars have argued convincingly that Plutarch took his definition from Hegesander of Delphi, a Hellenistic source of the second century BCE, and some Egyptian papyri attest the use in the third century, but are there any earlier passages where opson means fish? Are there any classical authors in the fourth or even the fifth centuries who use opson like John the Evangelist? Never with greater urgency was this important question addressed than during the rise of Atticism in the reign of Hadrian and his Antonine successors.³⁰

In the second century CE educated men from all over the Roman Empire were growing philosophical beards and trying to write, to speak, even, the kind of Greek thought to have been used in classical Athens five or six hundred years earlier. At this time there was prestige and money to be made out of being a man of letters. An imperial chair of rhetoric was set up at Athens and rival grammarians and lexicographers from every province fought for the right to sit on it by discharging eulogies at the royal family and recriminations against each other. In this climate Atticism became a burning issue and rival camps sprang up of extremists and moderates. While this often bitter pedantry may not be to our taste, it was not without benefit to posterity, and a large number of the fragments on which this book is based survive simply because someone writing centuries later cited them as evidence for the classical purity of his vocabulary. Needless to say, thanks to its complex and confusing history, opson and its derivatives became something of a cause célèbre in the Atticist debate.

Pollux of Naucratis, a moderate, was said to be of limited talent as a speech-maker but blessed with a mellifluous delivery which seduced the emperor Commodus’ ear and won him the professorship at Athens some time after 178 CE. His Onomasticon, or Book of Words, which survives in an abridged and interpolated form, was a collection of Attic vocabularies grouped by topic, including thirty-three terms with which to abuse a tax-collector, and fifty-two terms useful in praising a king. When he came to list words to do with the fish-trade he didn’t let himself fret about it too much: ‘fishmongers, fish-selling, fish, fishies, opson’ His critic and rival for the emperor’s favour, Phrynichus ‘the Arab’, a scholar whose standards of Attic purity were so high that even some of the classical authors failed to make the grade, was contemptuous of such laxity. He wrote his own lexicon of Attic in thirty-seven books: ‘not fish,’ he says in a gloss on opsarion, ‘although people today use it like that.’ Athenaeus, like Pollux, was from Naucratis. His Banquet of Scholars was composed c. 200 CE and takes the form of a dinner attended by certain luminaries of the period, including the physician Galen and the jurist Ulpian of Tyre. The banqueters alternate between consuming food and talking about it, managing also to fit in learned disquisitions on sex, decadence and crockery. This discourse in turn is interrupted by a meta-discourse which comments on the conversation and on the appropriateness of the words in which it is conducted, all carefully supported with the citation of classical authorities. The diners make great efforts to talk in the most authentic Greek possible and jump on one another with a vicious pedantic energy if they think they have spotted something too modern. Inevitably, the subject of opsarion crops up: ‘A huge fish was then served in a salty vinegar sauce, and someone said that all fish [opsarion] was at its tastiest if served in this way. At this Ulpian, who likes to collect thorny questions, frowned and said, “… I can think of none of the authors ‘at source’ using opsarion.” Now most people told him to mind his own business and carried on dining,’ says Athenaeus. However, one member of the company, a character known as Myrtilus of Thessaly, rises to the bait and proceeds to catalogue the use of opsarion as fish in various Attic comedies of the fifth century and later, including Pherecrates’ Deserters, Philemon’s Treasure, and Anaxilas’ Hyacinthus the Whoremonger.

Myrtilus’ appeal to actual usage should have been enough to answer the question once and for all. But unfortunately the problem could not be resolved by a survey of classical texts, because the answers they gave were not consistent. To be put against the comic poets cited by Myrtilus, for instance, were Xenophon, and above all mighty Plato, a prince among prosateurs and the greatest authority for the strict Atticists. Although he wrote later than some of the authorities cited by Athenaeus, he seems to have been completely unaware that opson, not to speak of its numerous derivatives, could mean fish. What accounts for such a discrepancy in the vocabulary of these classical contemporaries? How is it that a usage which was bandied about quite happily in the theatres never made it into the groves of the Academy? One solution is provided by examining the influence of etymology on Greek ideas about language. Another, by examining Plato’s attitude to fish.

From an early period the Greeks manifested a great interest in language in general and etymology in particular. This concern with where words came from was not simply a casual preoccupation with the history of language. Etymology, which comes from etymos ‘truth’, was believed to give access to a word’s authentic meaning. Modern lexicographers are profoundly suspicious of this approach: ‘Etymology may be valuable in its own right,’ writes Sidney Landau, ‘but it tells us little about current meaning and is in fact often misleading.’³¹ Nevertheless, an interest in where words come from retains a powerful hold on our collective imagination and in newspaper columns, classrooms and dinner-parties a careless speaker will often be upbraided for an error of usage, by being reminded of its derivation.³² ‘Such a view of etymology’, notes the critic Derek Attridge, ‘implies the belief that the earlier a meaning the better, which must depend on a diagnosis of cultural decline … or a faith in a lost Golden Age of lexical purity and precision.’³³ Nowadays, etymological folk are content to trace words back as far as Latin and Greek, leaving this lexical age d’or no more than an inference. In antiquity, however, the putative original and pure state of language was the subject of a certain amount of speculation. Herodotus records the famous experiment of the pharaoh Psamtik to discover the oldest language by isolating two babies from human communication at birth and listening for the first sound to emerge spontaneously from their mouths. That utterance, it turned out, was bekos, which meant nothing in Egyptian, but was a word for bread in Phrygian, which was thus awarded the distinction of first language. Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue of that name postulates a single prehistoric inventor of language, who assigned signifiers not arbitrarily but with superhuman insight into the true nature of things. Socrates in the same dialogue imagines language having its roots in nature and the body. According to this theory anthrōpos (man) was derived from man’s characteristic upright posture, ho anathrōn ha opōpen (‘the one who has seen what he has seen, by looking up’). Chrysippus the Stoic went even further in search of the natural origins of language and claimed that in pronouncing the word for self, ego, the lip and chin pointed to the speaker, thus bringing word and meaning into immediate and intimate identity in a single original articulate gesture.³⁴

But this golden age, where signifier and signified enjoyed so perfectly honest a relationship, so pristine a unity of purpose, was not to last. A hero’s offspring may fall far short of his father’s heroism, notes Socrates in the Cratylus, but he will still be entitled to inherit his name. Under the influence of the etymological fallacy the history of words is no longer a neutral recording of changes in usage, noting diachronic differences without ascribing differential value, but instead a genealogical narrative, a story of strays wandering further and further away from the garden of Eden, deviants whose distance from original and true meaning is measurable in terms of dilution, distortion and error. This makes of writing much more than a straightforward medium of communication. An ideological element creeps in. Texts can be used not merely as a means to communicate most efficiently according to the most generally accepted contemporary understanding, but as a restorative of language, leading words back to their roots, closer to their original authenticity, to their ‘proper’ prelapsarian truth.

The researches of Wilhelm Schulze and Friedrich Bechtel at the turn of the century suggested that the most plausible origin of opson was from a word like psōmos meaning a ‘mouthful’ or a ‘bite’ plus a prothetic o, indicating ‘with’. The most recent etymological dictionaries, considering even this a little reckless, give its derivation as ‘obscure’ and ‘nicht sicher erklärt’.³⁵ In antiquity, however, philologists were less circumspect and confidently traced opson back to words relating to cooking, especially from hepso, ‘boil’, a derivation which was widely accepted until the end of the nineteenth century, and which still survives as the ‘proper’ meaning in some modern dictionaries (thus drawing A. N. Wilson and Bishop Robinson off the track of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes). For the earliest explicit statement of this etymology we are indebted once more to Athenaeus, but it looks as if it was already known to Plato in the classical period. Apart from the circumstantial evidence of his own usage – in his work opson most often refers to a cooked dish – he draws attention to this etymology in the discussion of the diet of primitive civilization. Socrates, we remember, has just been reprimanded for ‘forgetting’ to give his ancient citizens any opson. He retorts that ‘they will indeed have opson: cheese and onions, olives and vegetables, ‘such things as there are in the countryside for boiling, they will boil’ (hepsēmata, hepsēsontai). With this bizarre terminology, Plato is pointing to a true meaning for opson as ‘something boiled’ at the time of the misty golden age of language formation.³⁶

If it was the ordinary fate of words to slip their moorings and wander casually into error, what happened to opson must have seemed the very pinnacle of luxurious degeneration. There have been many theories in recent times to explain how opson came to mean ‘fish’, but the simplest as well as the most convincing account was provided by Isaac Casaubon’s notes on Athenaeus, published in 1600. He suggested it was short for opson thalattion (sea-food), a more obviously comestible term than ichthus, and also more inclusive, appropriate for those delicacies of the deep like crustaceans and molluscs whose inclusion in the category of fish was sometimes considered problematic. Ancient scholars, however, seem to have been quite unaware of this neat process of linguistic shift. Instead, the coinage was presented as a triumph comparable to Homer’s triumph in the canons of literature: ‘Though there are many poets, it is only one of them, the foremost, whom we call “the poet”; and so, though there are many opsa, it is fish which has won the exclusive title “opson” … because it has triumphed over all others in excellence,’ as Plutarch puts it.³⁷

Plato himself, along with many other philosophers, was far from sharing this opinion, and seems on the contrary to have disapproved strongly of his contemporaries’ taste for poissonerie. This is implicit in the Republic where he carefully elides sea-food from the golden age feast and where, in the discussion of the fish missing from Homer, he connects the eating of fish with perfume and hetaeras and all the degenerate paraphernalia of the modern banquet. In addition, at least two Hellenistic authors knew of a story in which the philosopher reproached another member of the Socratic circle, Aristippus, for his fish-consumption. According to Hegesander’s version, ‘Plato objected to him returning from a shopping-spree with a large number of fish, but Aristippus answered that he had bought them for only two obols. Plato said he himself would have bought them at that price, to which Aristippus replied “Well, then, in that case, my dear Plato, you must realize that it is not I who am an opsophagos, but you who are a cheapskate.”’³⁸

For such ascetics, the use of opson to mean fish took on a rather different meaning. It was not so much a triumph as a naturalization of vice, a perversion of language as morally objectionable as when we use ‘drink’ – ‘I need a drink’ – ‘No! A real drink!’ – as a reference to alcohol or ‘smoke’ for ‘smoke cannabis’. To assume that when someone mentioned opson they were referring to some kind of seafood, the finest and most expensive of delicacies, must have seemed to Plato, who thought about these things, a quite enervated assumption. After having carefully removed fish from the category of opson when discussing golden age diet he was not going to allow it into his semantic field.³⁹ Morality and usage were too closely connected. Ancient authors have long been suspected of being unreliable witnesses of the world they affect to describe. In some cases they are not better witnesses of the language they affect to describe it in.

The definition of opsophagia that Xenophon puts into the mouth of Socrates can now be seen for what it really is: not a straightforward discussion of meaning, but an attempt to impose one particular meaning and one particular method of finding meaning to the exclusion of others. It is extraordinary that in a discussion of the vice of opsophagia, fish, which had long before become the opsophagos’ favourite food (no matter how he was defined), is never mentioned. Just afterwards the memorialist records another remark of Socrates: ‘In the Attic dialect,’ he used to say, ‘they call sumptuous banqueting “having a bite to eat.”’⁴⁰ Xenophon was not about to make the same mistake.

Socrates’ apparently idle question, directed obliquely at the young man he was trying to embarrass and redirected by Xenophon at us, has stimulated a whole range of answers down the centuries in the work of Plato, Plutarch, Athenaeus, Phrynichus ‘the Arab’, Pollux the lexicographer, and modern classicists such as Casaubon, Passow, Kalitsunakis and Liddell Scott and Jones. They do not agree with one another and the question cannot be described as settled even today. It seems a very dry debate, terribly pedantic and rather hard-going, exactly what a reader fears perhaps when she opens a book on classical Athens. Worst of all, it may seem irrelevant. Most people in classical Athens would have recognized the vice of opsophagia when they witnessed it, though the accused might have denied the charge or someone else might have disputed what exactly it was in this kind of eating that made the epithet applicable. In many cases there was nothing to debate about: ‘Another fish, proud of its great size, has Glaucus brought to these parts,’ says a character in Axionicus’ play The Euripides Fanatic, ‘some bread for opsophagoi.’ A big word, perhaps opsophagein meant different things to different groups of people, especially perhaps to different levels of society. Words do not have fixed and unitary meanings and it distorts one’s understanding of a text to treat them as if they do. If this is true today, it must have been even more true of classical Athens. In a world that was still free of the tyranny of dictionaries and public education systems, the meaning of words would have been generally quite slippery and quite difficult to tie down.⁴¹

I do not intend to devote too much space in the rest of this book, trying the reader’s patience with this kind of philology, but far from being dead or dry or irrelevant, this debate over words gives access to the very heart of Greek desires. Just as psychoanalysts can discover the key to traumas in a slip of the tongue, the fish conspicuously missing from the texts of Xenophon and Plato testify to the real danger that lay in appetites. Ancient texts do more than inform us about ancient desires. They do more than provide us with samples of the ancient discourse of desires. Ancient desire itself is in the text, repressed perhaps, but still present. In their hesitations and omissions our authors reveal a struggle in the very composition of their prose, an ongoing battle with dangerous passions that threaten all the time to consume them and their readers.