James Davidson - Courtesans and Fishcakes - The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens

The philosophers’ efforts to neglect, elide or reduce opson to the status of a vacuum are evidence of a profound nervousness about the whole category. The dangerous supplement threatens to divert eating away from sustenance and into pleasure, and even to usurp the place of bread as the bedrock of existence. It is this anxiety that explains why Socrates is so disturbed by the young man’s table manners at the banquet with which we began. By taking no bread or only a little, the opsophagos threatens to invert the dietary hierarchy and allow simple sustenance to be diverted into pleasure. The error of the opsophagos lies not in eating opson , as everyone else does, but in living off it.

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 Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. 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 Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

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 Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.