James N. Davidson

Although I love ancient Greece, I am about sick of fish and floozies after this. Actually this is a well researched sociological take on Greek society viewed through the lens of food and women. To the Greeks, too much fish consumption was comparable to addiction and made one prone to do all sorts of unacceptable things. The number of ways women could be categorized, to keep them under control and in their place, boggles the mind. Sex was dissected into proper and improper sorts with rule, show more etiquette and consequences for violators.It would have been hard to keep up with. It makes one think the Greeks are the source of many of our modern woes. show less

There is nothing new under the sun. About a month ago, in a thread chronicling the adventures of Governor Spitzer, the following editorial comment was quoted:


"I suspect that what makes a prostitute worth $5,500 an hour is that she costs $5,500 an hour."


In this book, author James Davidson describes the economics of hetaerae in Classical Athens as a sort of conspicuous consumption; if you could afford one of the highest priced ones, you had it made.


I’ve been used to books about classical show more Greece that discuss warfare and art and politics; this one is different in that it talks about day-to-day activities: eating, drinking, and sex. The Athenians took “moderation in all things” quite seriously. This made it kind of tricky for the upper class: you had to demonstrate to your friends that you could throw expensive symposia with Chian wine and fancy fish dishes and lots of flute girls and cithara boys; at the same time you had to keep the democratic populace from becoming too suspicious of your wealth. (If you were not rich enough but still wanted to be convivial, there were “bring your own bottle/fish/flute girl/philosopher” symposia). The Athenian state financial system was rather bizarre by our standards – there were no income or property taxes. Instead, wealthy – or presumed wealthy – citizens were selected by lot and required to finance a religious festival or a trireme. If the lucky winner protested that he didn’t have enough, the antidote was the antidotis; another Athenian who had been called upon for public finance and paid could request the defaulter to swap property. Apparently this always worked; at least there’s no evidence of anybody taking the offer (this implies that Athenians had a pretty good idea of what their neighbors were worth). This system may have contributed to the popularity of wine, women, and song: most wealthy Athenians had relatively modest physical property – estates and clothing and such; instead their wealth went to the symposium/potlatch – buying real estate would have just advertised it whereas with drinking parties you could at least hope to be unnoticed (there was even a Greek word – katapepaiderastekenai – meaning “to have wasted an estate in affairs with boys”. This ought to be useful the next time you want to deliver a deadly insult without the recipient having a clue what you're talking about).


There’s a lot more to this book than the little I’ve mentioned here; Davidson is an amusing writer while being very scholarly, and goes into considerable detail on Athenian law and politics as they relate to his subjects. There’s a surprising amount to be learned, and much that throws light on the “higher” elements of Athenian culture – especially the comic plays and law courts. (A warning: Davidson quotes Aristophanes and other Greek authors literally, rather than with the usual euphemisms you see in most English translations, and there’s lot of four-letter words. Do not give this book to your twelve-year-old to help with a school assignment on ancient history unless you are prepared to answer some interesting questions). show less

Courtesans and Fishcakes is a really fascinating, lively and original look at the world of Ancient Greece. Davidson looks at the social implications of desire, and how desire mediated through physical things—food, drink, sex—created tensions and conflict within classical Athenian society. He rebuts Foucault's contention that the fear of penetration was a major stimulus in the Athenian psyche, positing instead that it was a fear of desire—unleashed, unrestrained, uncontrollable—that show more the average Athenian constructed as the biggest threat to the healthy life of the individual, the oikos, the polis. I found his theory very interesting, particularly his refusal to reduce sexuality to a zero-sum game of dominator/dominated, and his examination of how the hetairai, the courtesans of the title, negotiated the space between public and private. There's something there to come back to, I think.

Where I did have a little trouble with what he was saying was his attempt to reconstitute traditional scholarly views on socio-economic class tensions by saying that degrees of luxury were available to everyone, thus negating the existence of an 'upper' class. While it's true to say that we can't map 19th or 20th century preoccupations with class tensions onto the largely agrarian world of ancient Attica, I don't think that means that such tensions were absent—particularly when I can't remember Davidson acknowledging that the sources from which he worked were all written by men, and almost exclusively by men with the means and leisure to support their writing. show less

As a Classicist, I loved this book as in his introduction Davidson brilliantly talked about how difficult it can be to try and figure how things were and the choices scholars make between types of evidence. I would recommend that introduction to be read by anyone curious about the study of Ancient daily life as it aptly presents the complications and hierarchies that exist in the discipline. The book itself is a good balance of details to satisfy historians and a playful tone that makes it show more accessible to another reader. I would recommend this book to anyone trying to understand the culture that brought democracy into its place in the world. show less