LITMIR.BIZ

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potential as a consumer item was heavily limited, as we have seen, by the isometric techniques of butchery demanded by ritual. Fish, on the other hand, is the quintessential commodity. The agora is its element. It is even on occasion compared to money. The silver that comes to Athens from its allies is described in one image of Aristophanes as a shoal of tuna spied swimming from far out at sea. In comedies, jokes are made comparing fish-scales with the small change that Athenians carried in their mouths. As a corollary, fishermen, who are often represented as stereotypes of extreme poverty in the ancient world, are, with a few exceptions, quite invisible in the Athenian discourse of fish-madness, victims of the extraordinary fetishization of their products. Instead the focus is consistently and repetitively on the market-place and on the processes of buying and selling. A particular feature of this concern is the caricaturing of greedy fishmongers, often foreigners, and their attempts to trick the citizen-consumer. A typical example is from Antiphanes’ play the Pro-Theban: ‘Is it not strange, that if someone happens to be selling fish recently deceased, he addresses us with a devilish scowl and knotted brow, but if they are quite past their sell-by date, he laughs and jokes? It should be the other way round. In the first case the seller should laugh, and in the second go to the devil.’ Another fragment from Xenarchus’ Porphura (Mauve or The Purple-fish) includes a character praising fishmongers as more imaginative even than poets when it comes to inventing ways to get round a (probably fictional) law:

      For since they are no longer at liberty to anoint their wares with water (this is forbidden by the law), one of these chaps, not exactly loved by the gods, when he saw his fish dehydrating, quite deliberately started a fair old scrap among the traders. Punches were thrown and one seemed to have mortally wounded him. Down he goes, gasping what seems to be his last gasp, lying prone amongst his fish. Someone shouts ‘Water! Water! Straightaway, another of his fellow-traders grabs a jug and empties it, missing him almost completely, but managing to drench the fish. You would say they had just been caught.

      Such were the perils of shopping that the early Hellenistic writer Lynceus of Samos actually wrote a treatise on how to do it properly, addressed to one of his friends who was a market failure. He advises taking along a copy of Archestratus to intimidate the traders:

      One thing you will find useful, when standing at the fish-stalls face to face with the unblinking ones, the unyielding-on-price ones, is abuse. Call Archestratus to the stand, the author of the Life of Luxury, or another one of the poets and read out a line, ‘the shore-hugging striped bream is an awful fish, worthy ever of nought’ and try the line ‘bonito buy when autumn wanes’, but now alas ’tis spring, and in summer ‘the grey-mullet is wonderful when winter has arrived’, and many other lines of that sort. For you will scare off shoppers by the score and many passersby, and in so doing you will force him to accept a price you think is right.²⁰

      The fishmongers in question belonged to a characteristically urban environment of crafty charlatans and tricksy merchants, for one consequence of the placing of fish in a trade-economy was that it came to be seen as part of the world of the. city. If fish do ever make an appearance in the countryside they seem almost exotic, as a fragment from a satire on peasants makes clear:

      ‘You, Pistus, will take some money and do some shopping for me.’

      ‘Not me, I never mastered the art of shopping.’

      ‘Well then, Philumenus, what’s your favourite fish?’

      ‘I like them all.’

      ‘Go through them one by one, which fish would you like to taste?’

      ‘Well, once a fishmonger came to the country, and he had sprats with him and little red-mullets, and by Zeus he was popular with all of us!’

      ‘So, now you would like some of them?’

      ‘Yes, and if there is any other small one; for it is my opinion that all those large fishes are man-eaters.’

      The notion of the fish-ignorant countryside goes back at least as far as Aristophanes who in one fragment describes a city-dweller who decides to move out to the country so that he can ‘have chaffinches and thrushes to eat instead of hanging around for little fishies from the market, two days old, overpriced and tortured at the hands of a lawless fishmonger’.²¹ Eating fish, and knowing which ones to prefer, is not only an indication of modernity and secularity, it is also a mark of urbanity.

      The ancient passion for fish, then, can be explained largely in terms of what it was not, in terms of its positioning within a series of intersecting contrasts that set it against other types of food. Eating fish was free of a prehistory commemorated in festival banquets, or Homer’s epics, or Platonic recollections of the primitive condition. It was not a serious or venerable activity. Fish were not slaughtered or distributed in a ritualized symbolic context. Fish stood outside the theatre of sacrifice and outside official banquets. It had no public role or responsibilities, free to play itself, the quintessential modern commodity fully fetishized for the private consumer, a food whose value could be gauged only according to desirability and demand, the object of constant assessment according to species and specimen, and the subject of an exquisite discourse, argued over and haggled for in comedies and dinner-parties, in markets and treatises.

      A DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT

      So far so good. We have answered Socrates’ question. Thanks to Plutarch we know what an opsophagos is and we can see why philosophers might get upset about it. An opsophagos was a fish-lover. Fish-lovers were mad about fish and philosophers thought them decadent. Unfortunately, Plutarch was not at the banquet and the question is not as simple as that. In Xenophon’s discussion a number of possibilities are canvassed for the meaning of opsophagia but fish-eating is not one of them. But if the vice of the opsophagos is not fish-philia, what is it?

      We need, perhaps, to go back to basics. The noun and its verb, opsophagein, first make an appearance in Greek literature towards the end of the fifth century in the poetry of Aristophanes. During his battle with bad-mannered Badlogic in the Clouds, for instance, old-fashioned Betterargument claims opsophagein is one of those bad habits the Athenians of former times prohibited, along with giggling, fidgeting and snatching celery from one’s elders. In another of Xenophon’s anecdotes, Socrates comes across someone thrashing an attendant. When he asks what the man has done to deserve such punishment his master replies it is for being ‘an opsophagos to an extreme degree’. It seems clear the word is made up of two elements, opson and phagein. Phagein means eating. It does seem clear, then, that an opsophagos is a man with some kind of reprehensible eating-habit. Opson too should be quite transparent in meaning. Whereas we normally talk of nourishment as comprising two elements, food and drink, the Greeks could distinguish three, a feat achieved by dividing the solid part of sustenance into two distinct halves: the staple and what you eat on the staple, sitos and opson. The staple was usually bread made from wheat or some other grain. Opson represented almost everything else. This tripartite division of diet: staple, relish and drink, or bread, opson and wine, occurs in numerous passages in ancient literature from Homer onwards, whenever the Greeks discussed sustenance as a medical, economic or moral question. The most famous example perhaps is Thucydides’ story of how the Great King rewarded Themistocles for going over to the Persian side by granting him the revenues of three rich cities to meet his needs, ‘Magnesia for his bread … Lampsacus for his wine and Myus for his opson’.²²

      An opsophagos, then, straightforwardly enough, is an opson-eater, a relish-eater, ‘an eater of non-farinaceous food’. This appellation, however, is not quite as transparent as it appears. To begin with, it seems to distinguish nobody, for of course man cannot be expected to live by bread alone … But perhaps at this point we should rejoin the dinner-party and let Socrates continue in his own words:

      ‘[A]ll men, of course, eat opson on their bread when it is available; but they have not yet, I think, been labelled

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