Eels Tomorrow, but Sprats Today

Letters

Vol. 19 No. 20 · 16 October 1997

From James Davidson

I feel I must take issue in the strongest possible terms with Peter Parsons’s view (LRB, 18 September) that the Greek obsession with fish is a mirage created by the peculiar obsessions of the anthologist Athenaeus writing at the beginning of the third century CE: ‘How would British society look if its historians focused on an anthology of literary references to cod and caviare?’ The implication that Athenaeus was concerned only with seafood or that he had a fishy agenda is simply false. His work concerns all the pleasures of the flesh and indeed he devotes a little space to the merits of sow’s womb and smoked pig’s knuckles.

My book was mainly devoted to explaining the role of fish (and wine and sex) in Greek discourse, thinking that the phenomenon itself was too obvious to elaborate in detail. After many years of denial I had the impression that classicists were finally facing up to the truth. It is no good trying to blame it all on Athenaeus. It is time to put fish back at the heart of the study of Greek culture.

In fact, my argument did not depend on counting the references to fish in surviving fragments. The point is that when characters in comedy talk of banquets or shopping or cuisine in general they end up talking almost exclusively of fish. It is not that fish looms so large in Greek comedy, it is that fish dominates the category of gourmandise. The idea that Athenaeus has carefully filleted these fragments, taking out most of the extra-marine items and leaving a little offal to disguise his propagandistic project is much too paranoid. Moreover many of these fishy chefs are characters in the comedies and it is clear that fishy shopping expeditions and preparations for these fishy banquets must have played a part in the plot of many plays.

Secondly, a love of fish is commonly used to attack prominent figures. Demosthenes’ attack on Philocrates for betraying Athens to Philip in order to indulge his love of poissonerie is paralleled by similar attacks on Hyperides and Cleon. In the spring of 421 BCE all three of the comedies in competition at the festival of Dionysus attacked Aeschylus’ nephew Melanthius for his devotion to fish. Athenaeus does not in fact quote any of them, but one, Aristophanes’ Peace, happens to survive. It describes Melanthius and his brother as ‘skate-hunting harpies, fish doom’. A contemporary, Archippus, wrote a play in which the chorus of fish offered to come to terms with humanity and to abstain from the flesh of those lost at sea, so long as Melanthius was handed over to them in chains.

My third justification for noting an apparent Greek obsession with fish is the intensity of the language used to describe them and the jokes which suggest the most passionate desire. Eels are commonly described as goddesses or beautiful maidens. A ‘boar-fish’ is described as the ‘flower of nectar’. The splendours of the fish-stall are utter torture – ‘but if one of them smiled at me, I would pay all that the fishmonger asked of me.’ Thieves, tax-dodgers and traitors cannot resist spending their ill-gotten gains on tuna-steaks and eels even if it means giving themselves away. When the market bell rings, a lyre-player loses his entire audience but one. He thanks him for putting art above seafood. The man immediately runs off. It turns out that he was simply a little deaf. There are numerous such passages in hundreds of ancient authors whose main concern is not with food at all.

Finally, there is what we might call the metadiscourse of fish, which amply confirms the impression of fish-madness. Plutarch tells us that fish is described as ‘the dish’ because it has triumphed over all others at the table and the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus complains that modern Greeks are only interested in discussing which fish is best at which time of year. Fish moreover is a key theme in Greek self-definition, distinguishing the decadent present from the meaty heroic past, the civilised city-dweller from the fishphobic peasant and the fish-loving Greek from the fish-worshipping Syrian and Egyptian. Most bizarre of all were those numerous savages at the ends of the earth who held up a mirror to Greek habits, eating nothing but raw dried fish which they ground into flour to make fish bread and fish-cakes or fodder for their animals.

A modern anthologist of cod and caviare would have a job matching that lot.

James Davidson
University of Warwick