LITMIR.BIZ

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had been poured, along with Chian, Corinthian, Samian and Lesbian. In among these shards of coarse ceramic they found a large number of drinking cups of various types, some of a rather high standard: ‘–they suggest that the establishment catered to a clientele of some quality and some indication of the power of that wine and the popularity of the shop is possibly to be inferred from the extraordinary breakage of which our well preserves the record.’²⁹

      Like fishmongers and other traders, kapēloi seem to have been held in low esteem by the general population. In one play Theopompus the playwright compared the Spartans to barmaids (kapēlides) because after their victory in the Peloponnesian War they gave the Greeks a taste of freedom, and then disappointed them with vinegar instead. Blepyrus in Aristophanes’ Wealth mistakes the wretched personification of Poverty for the local barmaid who ‘cheats grossly’ in her half-pint measures. Again in Thesmophoriazusae the herald includes among the public curses imprecations against ‘the taverner or the barmaid who cheats without shame on the full legal measure of the choēs or kotylō. It is not long before kapēlos and its cognates comes to denote hucksterism or trickery in general; honest barmen were correspondingly prized.³⁰ The nervous measure-watching atmosphere of the kapēleion makes a striking contrast with the generous equality of the symposium.

      It seems quite clear that most of our sources (representing something far short of a cross-section of society) see the kapēleia as a feature characteristic of democratic and commercial cities, and ascribe the popularity of such establishments to the ‘baser’ elements of society. This, for instance, is the historian Theopompus’ tirade against the people of Byzantium and Chalcedon, taken from book eight of his Philippica:

      The fact that they had been practising democracy for what was by now a long time together with the fact that their city was situated at a trading post, not to mention the fact that the entire populace spent their time around the agora and the harbour, meant that the people of Byzantium lacked self-discipline and were accustomed to get together in bars for a drink. And the people of Chalcedon, before they came to share with the Byzantines in their government all used to pursue a better way of life. But when they had tasted Byzantine democracy they fell to decadence and from having been the most self-controlled and moderate in their daily life, they became drink-lovers and squanderers.

      Later the historian Phylarchus, echoing Diogenes’ observation about Athens, noted that the Byzantines virtually took up residence in taverns. In Thasos, on the other hand, breaking the bulk and selling by the kotylē was illegal, a measure intended, it seems, to outlaw taverns altogether.³¹

      According to Isocrates the pamphleteer, only a certain type of person would allow himself to be seen at one of these establishments. In a eulogy of the ancient aristocratic council of the Areopagus, for instance, he looks back with nostalgia to the way young men used to behave in the good old days: ‘No one, not even a servant, at least not a respectable servant, would have been so brazen as to eat or drink in a kapēleion. For they cultivated dignity, not buffoonery.’ The same theme is repeated with some elaboration in the Antidosis:

      You have brought it about that even the most respectable [epieikeis] of the young men are wasting their time in drinking and assignations [sunousiai], and idleness and childish games … whereas those who are more base in nature spend their days in the kind of degenerate pastimes which not even a decent servant would have dared to pursue in former times. Some of them chill wine at the Nine Fountains, others drink in kapēleia, there are some who play dice in the gambling-dens and many who loiter around the place where the flute-girls are trained.³²

      Isocrates was not alone in his prejudices: In his speech Against Patrocles, the orator Hyperides, a contemporary of Demosthenes, records that ‘the Areopagites barred anyone who had breakfasted in a kapēleion from going up to the Areopagus’. This was, of course, as much as anything, an attempt to stop drunken deliberations, and it seems likely that when our sources talk of people drinking during the day it is to the kapēleia that they are referring.³³ There seems to be an attack on the demagogue Cleon’s morning attendance at these watering-holes of the Agora before a debate in the nearby Assembly – if not the actual bar unearthed by the archaeologists then one very similar – contained in the Paphlagonian’s boast at Knights: ‘I who can consume hot slices of tuna, drink a chous of neat wine and then go and screw the generals at Pylos.’

      Isocrates allows us to set up an opposition between two kinds of drinking, the potoi (sympotic drinking) of the most ‘respectable’ (epieikēs) and the tavern drinking of those ‘worse in nature’. Clearly, elements of social prejudice are in operation in his distinction between coarse low-class buffoonery (bōmolochia) and decency (epieikeia) as the reference to the ‘servant’ indicates. But we should not give the orator’s nostalgic fantasy more credit than it deserves. Even with the limited information at our disposal we can see there were ranks among the taverns, running from high-quality kapēleia like theone dug up in the Agora, whose patrons could get hold of the best wines from the best producers, served in good ceramic ware by highly-regarded barmen like Plato’s Sarambus through to the small stalls owned by the characters we encounter on the curse-tablets, some of which perhaps consisted of nothing more than a slave-girl and a cart by a spring. The clientele reflects this range. According to the rhetorical sources, the taverns are places where you could meet a member of the Areopagus, or Aeschines the Socratic, or Euphiletus and his friends, picking up torches on their way to kill Eratosthenes. In comedy they are places well known to men like Blepyrus in Wealth or slaves in Lysistrata, and to women of all levels of society, the citizen women of the Lysistrata, Thesriophonazusae and the Ecclesiazusae as well as a nurse in Eubulus’ Pamphilus. In the tavern as in the andrōn, wine was drunk mixed, but without all the ritual and regulation of the well-ordered symposium: ‘As for me – for there happened to be a large new kapēleion across the road from the house – I was keeping my eye on the girl’s nurse, for I had ordered the barman to mix me a chous [six pints] for an obol and to accompany it with the biggest kantharos he had.’ Wine in the tavern was mixed for the individual in an individual vessel, with an individual cup to drink it out of. The elaborate rituals of sharing from the kratēr which are such a conspicuous feature of the symposium, have no part in the commercial environment of the tavern. Aristophanes uses the symposium as a metaphor for community threatened by unwelcome outsiders, like War or the friends of Ariphrades. The kapēleion on the other hand, he uses as an allegory of cheating, the swindling taverners out to exploit to the fullest extent their clients on the other side of the bar. In the kapēleion are to be found those who had no part in the symposium: ‘des femmes, des esclaves, des barbares.’ It seems, therefore, to fulfil a role as the symposium’s Other, on the margins of the Athenian community of citizens, a place where people drink ‘in no kind of order’ as Plato observes of the drinking which disrupts and dissolves his own Symposium. The tavern is a place where wines are identified by their price, where drink is commodified and severed from social ties, a place where drink is for getting drunk, a place where ancient drinking comes to look most like the drinking we apparently do today.³⁴

      But this is to ignore certain characteristics of this commercial drinking which shine through, even though the evidence is so scattered. First of all, the bars are so often ‘local’. They nestle snugly into the neighbourhood. The nurse only has to pop across the road to her kapēleion, as do so many others from cuckolded Euphiletus to Blepyrus in the Wealth, and there she finds someone to buy her a drink. Blepyrus in that play thinks he recognizes in the goddess Poverty the cheating barmaid from his local and there is certainly an expectation that customers and clients would know each other and their drinking habits. This is a long way from anonymous drinking: ‘There is a taverner in our neighbourhood; and whenever I feel like a drink and go there, he knows at once – and he only knows –

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