LITMIR.BIZ

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too strong.’ The bonds betwen barmen and their regulars are reflected in the practice of drinking on tick. Athens was a city in which borrowing was very common. Ready use of credit is often seen as an indication of a highly developed capitalist economy, but in many societies, and in particular at Athens, it seems to have more in common with pre-money economies based on gift-exchange, a transaction which shifts the burden of trust away from the quality of the coinage and back to personal acquaintance. The practice of ‘prodo-sin pinein’ fatally compromises the impersonality of drinking in a tavern, tying up the free-flowing promiscuous exchange of commodities with bonds of debt and trust. It is a sign of the depths to which insolvency has brought Aeschines the Socratic, that even the local kapēloi have stopped advancing him credit.³⁵

      The distinction between symposium and kapēleion, then, was one of class and culture rather than of socialization. The tavern was differently socialized rather than unsocialized and if it was the site of those excesses whose debris so impressed the archaeologists, its reputation at Athens was not worse than that of the symposium. In fact, in the popular imagination it figures, if anything, as less of a threat to public order than the aristocratic drinking-party. For this, of course, was a democratic city with a radical reputation. Non-Athenians like Theopompus and Diogenes or the government of Thasos looked on taverns very differently.

      To a surprising degree the Greeks anticipate modern debates about drinking as a drug or as a social catalyst. They were nervous drinkers and shared the anthropologists’ anxiety about the threat wine presented to socialization, agreeing with Brillat-Savarin that the discipline of conversation must restrain it. One important aspect of the Greek problematic of wine finds few modern parallels, however, focusing neither on the community of drinkers nor on the drink, but on something in between.

      CUPS

      Some of the most surprising texts on the subject of drinking in antiquity are those fragments in poetry and prose in praise of Spartan drinking habits composed by the Spartan-loving revolutionary oligarch, Critias of Athens. In his Elegies he contrasted Spartan drinking habits – each man from his own cup, no toasts passed around and, he insists, no drunken excess – with Athenian practice. In a similar work, The Constitution of the Spartans, he elaborated his praise of Spartan institutions in prose with an encomiastic examination of the smallest details of their daily life from their footware to their crockery: ‘Laconian shoes are the best; their cloaks are the most pleasant to wear as well as being the most useful; the Spartan kōthōn is a cup most appropriate for military service and easily transportable in a kit-bag. It is a cup for soldiers, because it is often necessary for them to drink water that is not clean: the liquid inside a kōthōn cannot be seen too clearly, and the cup has ridges so that it retains any impurities.’

      This fragment of Critias is the first in a strange series of rationalizations penned by the supporters of Sparta’s peculiar conventions. Xenophon, for instance, tells us that Lycurgus devised red cloaks for the Spartiates because he believed this costume had least of all in common with a woman’s dress. He also permitted men past their first youth to wear their hair long, not for the sake of vanity, but because he thought it would make them look taller, more gentlemanly, more terrifying. Aristotle in his Constitution of the Spartans returned to the same theme. Red cloaks were inherently masculine. Their sanguinary dye accustomed the Spartans to depise the flow of blood. Plutarch had a slightly different explanation: the crimson colour was designed to disguise from the enemy the fact that they had been wounded. In the Rhetoric, again, Aristotle gives a Veblenian elaboration of Xenophon’s views on long hair: ‘it is the mark of a gentleman, for it is not easy to perform a plebeian task with long hair.’³⁷

      It is not difficult to see that this exegesis of the semiotics of Spartan fashion is rather defensive in tone, the self-conscious forging of a myth. The writers protest too much, and the reason for their defensiveness is not hard to find: the habits they describe look rather like luxurious practices to the Athenian eye. This is most obvious with the custom of wearing the hair long, a vogue that, outside the boundaries of Laconia, aroused considerable suspicions, drawing charges of effeminacy and enervation and bringing to mind paragons of long-haired vice like the fictional profligate Pheidippides in Aristophanes’ Clouds or, on the very streets of Athens, infamous Alcibiades. Similar connotations of luxury hover around other items of Spartan fashion. Laconian shoes are fine pieces of footwear, the shoes of gentlemen in contrast to the felt slippers of the poor. The phoinikis too, the scarlet cloak with its expensive vermilion dye, evokes extravagance to an outsider’s eye.³⁸ In democratic Athens the whole get-up would look like something very far from asceticism. The attachment of the Spartan epithet to the paraphernalia of a rich and opulent lifestyle was a continual rebuttal of those citizens of oligarchic tendency who tried to emulate the Spartan way of life, holding it up as an example of moderation and restraint.

      Critias’ elaborate defence of the Spartan cup falls into the same apologetic category. This too was a suspicious object. Spartan drinking, without the lively conversation, the toasts and the passing of the cup which characterized well-ordered drinking at Athens, looked rude, ill-mannered and dangerous to Critias’ audience. The Spartan way of drinking from one’s own cup, in silence, bore most resemblance to the transgressive and competitive drinking-to-get-drunk of Choes, the feast of the Pitchers. The cup was itself a symbol for the wrong kind of drinking, as Aristophanes made explicit in his lost play The Banqueters. The play centres on the activities of a man’s two sons, one of them a model of self-control, the other utterly dissipated in every field. An illustration of this dissipation is provided by his drinking habits; no moderate measure for him, no gentle sipping from shallow vessels between anecdotes, but ‘Chian wine from Spartan cups’.³⁹ The kōthōn, in an Athenian context, far from being an attribute of the rugged asceticism of soldiers, stands for the worst kind of vinous indulgence practised by urban degenerates. The reason for the cup’s infamy seems clear. It was the wrong shape.

      The Greeks enjoyed a rich and varied array of cups in all manner of shapes and sizes. There are indications that it was customary to progress from small cups at the start of the symposium to larger ones at the end. The Scythian Anacharsis, who represents for the Greeks something akin to the naive wisdom of the eighteenth-century’s ‘noble savage’, thought this very odd. Why drink from small cups when you’re empty and from big cups when you’re full? At the drinking-party described by Xenophon in his Symposium one of the guests, breathless from an impromptu dancing performance, tries to hurry things along and asks for ‘the big cup’ to quench his thirst. The host concurs and asks for big cups all round; the others are thirsty too, not from dancing but from laughing at his performance. Predictably, however, Socrates, who is a guest at an alarming number of attested symposia, intercedes and speaks in favour of ‘small cups sprinkled frequently, so that we will be seduced into reaching a state of amusement, instead of being forced by the wine into drunkenness’. The moderate drinking practices of the well-ordered symposium call for moderately-sized cups. Drinkers who are getting serious about drinking, on the other hand, typically ask for a big cup, or a bigger cup to show they mean business. The woman in Pherecrates’ Corianno goes so far as to bring her own well-sized vessel along, rejecting the little kyliskē hopefully offered to her.⁴⁰

      It is important to observe that in the literature big cups are almost always deep cups. The vessels to which they are opposed are flat, shallow, saucerish things. A fragment from a play of Pherecrates makes this relationship between size and shape quite clear. In his play Tyranny, which seems to have been a fantasy of women seizing power on the lines of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, he describes the women’s control of men’s drinking as follows:

      Then for the men they had cups made which were flat, nothing but a base with no sides, and room for not so much as a cockleful, like little ‘tasters’; for their female selves, on the other hand, they had deep cups made, cups like wine-transporting merchantmen, well-rounded,

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