A lost world
Peter Levi
COURTESANS AND FISHCAKES by James Davidson HarperCollins, f25, pp.371 The pleasures of knowing Greek include immediate communication with a world very unlike ours, apparently of an amazing freshness and vitality, as if even in their tragedies and their epics, let alone their ceremonies and solemn architecture and painting, the Greeks were consumed by their own energy and a love of life which in our world we just touch like the shadow of a cobweb in sunlight, for the brief period of being young or in love. That is the secret of their constant attraction. It is a pity that other peoples could not read or write, or we might get the same pleasure now from the poetry and the story-telling they have alas neglected to record. Through the specialised and lifetime-devouring study of Greek there run threads of pleasure attrac- tive at first, but ruinous to the reputation and destructive of classic taste: ancient food and drink, for example, which is an endless desert, and sex, which invites and drowns many students. These things should be studied only by scholars with more solid pretensions and ostrich appetites, with nothing dilettante about them.
When I was a beginner, there was an author called Athenaeus (c. 200 AD) who was a rock on which the sirens sang. His text was in a poor state, there was (so I was told) only one manuscript, perhaps in Venice, and Oxford had paid vast sums to send promising young men to this Levan- tine library, Venice being, after all, the gateway to the Levant, to report on the pleasures of the table and so on as record- ed in the mountain of fragments rammed together into some 15 books by Athenaeus; but the young men took to the pleasures they were reporting on, or other pleasures, and none of them ever reappeared in their colleges. One sees them sometimes in mid- dle age, hanging about picturesque drink- ing places in Greece or Sicily, making their livings God knows how. I knew one once who had set out to measure the mutations of some sound, a vowel that became more frog-like as you moved east, from end to end of the island of Crete. He had finished his task, but never bothered to publish the results; pleasure had undone him. Athenaeus, if he becomes one's work, loses his attraction; he becomes more boring than one can express. A full commentary would have been invaluable, but James Davidson has not chosen that deadly path.
He is a lecturer at Warwick, where no one else knows much Greek, unless things have changed. But he knows all about Marxism, which he dislikes, modern criticism and feminism, and takes an enjoy- able swipe at Sir Kenneth Dover, the ex- President of Corpus. He demolishes Veblen, who developed the theory of leisure and conspicuous consumption, he likes the French savants of 20 years ago, he knows some archaeology, he has read works of mind-cracking boredom, is a clas- sicist with at least one excellent idea about a Greek pot (the Eurymedon vase), and can ride in a chariot pulled by all these horses at once. He is more promising than all those golden youths who used to go missing, or just went to ground in pursuit of Athenaeus, but I speculate that he will one day be overtaken by more specialised scholars with deeper foundations: that is just part of the unfairness of life. He is like Stephen Leacock's character who flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions. That was my first impres- sion, but it may be unfair; those who think of investing a lot of time in this book should start with the conclusion, six pages of biting clarity. My grizzles begin with the title, because the Greeks did not have potatoes, without which they did not make fishcakes, and as for courtesans, that is a classy word for a poule de luxe and there is no precise Greek equivalent for the word; hetaira is not the same. Two hundred years ago a German scholar said it meant the kind of girl you meet at a public fireworks. But anyone interested now in ancient pleasure will learn a lot here: most impressively from the building known to excavators as 'building Z' in the Ceramicus in Athens, a women's weaving factory and long-term whorehouse with many foreign cults and so on. It stood close to the gate leading to Plato's Academy and the road to Eleusis. The other fascinating new sources are also archaeological. A Leningrad vase, by the way, should not simply be reported 'lost': tactful enquiry usually produces such things. While we are on the subject of vases, I was sad not to notice the Cabirion Odyssey vase on which the fat and rude Odysseus on a raft of wine jars is fishing with a trident, while unshaven Boreas blows him along. Still, a newly discovered curse tablet gives us entry into a world of slaves at least equally low. The few pages in which Dover is demolished as a sexologist hinge on Dover's equivalence of penetra- tion and the exercise of power: Davidson makes it look like a sergeant's blackboard demonstration.
Women's lives were not much fun. Their seasonal work was grape-picking or that old stand-by, the loom, or wet-nursing, but anything, it appears, was better than slav- ery, and slaves of course were mostly for- eigners. I do not really believe in what Davidson sees as the modesty of the way of life of simple Athenians, because below them lived the nine-tenths of the iceberg, in slavery. Still, he blows Nietzsche full of holes and blasts Foucault out of the water, to my delight in both cases, and for every lack there are two or three appealing truths. He has written an excellent and learned exploration of a subject which for 50 years has crumbled to dust whenever touched, and those of us who live long enough will watch what he undertakes next with the expectation of delight. On Pindar or the Homeric hymns? On horse-racing? There are pleasures, and authors (not Pindar) who lie dormant for a century or more until a new kind of vividness, a super- freshness descends on them. James David- son has that skill.
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