Grasp Courtesans And Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions Of Classical Athens Expressed By James Davidson Depicted In Electronic Format

and Fishcakes is a really fascinating, lively and original look at the world of Ancient Greece.
Davidson looks at the social implications of desire, and how desire mediated through physical thingsfood, drink, sexcreated tensions and conflict within classical Athenian society.
He rebuts Foucault's contention that the fear of penetration was a major stimulus in the Athenian psyche, positing instead that it was a fear of desireunleashed, unrestrained, uncontrollablethat the average Athenian constructed as the biggest threat to the healthy life of the individual, the oikos, the polis.
I found his theory very interesting, particularly his refusal to reduce sexuality to a zerosum game of dominator/dominated, and his examination of how the hetairai, the courtesans of the title, negotiated the space between public and private.
There's something there to come back to, I think,

Where I did have a little trouble with what he was saying was his attempt to reconstitute traditional scholarly views on socioeconomic class tensions by saying that degrees of luxury were available to everyone, thus negating the existence of an 'upper' class.
While it's true to say that we can't mapth orth century preoccupations with class tensions onto the largely agrarian world of ancient Attica, I don't think that means that such tensions were absentparticularly when I can't remember Davidson acknowledging that the sources from which he worked were all written by men, and almost exclusively by men with the means and leisure to support their writing.
Wow, this kid knows from Greek, I tell ya, Not a read for someone just beginning to explore the ancient Greek civilization, this is a book for someone well versed in the culture because the author writes to that audience.
But if you have a couple of books or continuing ed course down already, give it a shot.
Just be warned that he likes to write in omegas and taus and stuff, If you can get through the first chapter on Greek attitudes towards food, especially bread, and gluttony without tossing this out a window, you are in for a real treat.
The book brings a strange, foreign people to life, And somehow gives me hope for democracy, I read a review on Goodreads that called this book dull and densely written, Doubtless this person took the Courtesans and Fishcakes's base subject matter of seafood and prostitutes at face value, expecting a cheeky popular history for the casual reader.
That is not at all what this is,

I'm so glad I didn't let myself be put off of it by that review, choosing to trust that my preexisting knowledge of ancient Athenian customs, culture, and developmental history would carry me through.
This book was incredible, a truly breathtaking and thoughtprovoking work of scholarship on the Athenian psyche as relates to pleasure, indulgence, and its broader social impacts.
Through examining the underlying anxiety constantly simmering below the surface of Athens' otherwise unapologetically pleasureseeking society, Davidson draws an unwavering line from the obsession with eating fish all the way to the collapse of democracythe inevitable outcome, in the eyes of the ancients, when men are unwilling or unable to temper their appetites for food, wine, women, boys, and power.
His illustration of this point through analysis of Aeschines's famous speech Against Timarchus was particularly compelling, as was his discussion on common prostitutes vs.
courtesans and the latters commodification of sex within the guise of the gift economy, A truly excellent read! I found this a fairly choresome read, which was a bit of a disappointment when you consider that sex, food, and ancient Greece are pretty much my three favorite things.
The writing, when Davidson has the discipline to eschew the cute, is strong and the argument that the Greeks, lacking the clear cardinal directions of the proscriptive JudeoChristian moral compass, were extremely anxious about moderation and selfcontrol nothing radically new for the most part solid, but the book feels bloated.
Davidson will frequently back up a point with six to eight evidentiary quotes, which ends up feeling more insecure than thorough.
I will give him props for having the balls to assert, uniquely, I think, in my reading experience, that Foucault is wrong in this instance about the social significance in classical Attica of taking the passive role in sodomy.
I was most interested in Davidson's discussion of the Athenian obsession with eating fish, the synecdoche for luxurious living in Attic culture.
Since the Athenians were a legendary maritime culture, I would have thought that fish would have been a staple, but, apparently, the Mediterranean is notoriously fishpoor, at least with respect to delectable varieties.

C and F could really have used an editor with a heavier hand, It did make me drag out my Greek books, though,
The luxury of the ancient world is legendary, but the Athenian reputation is sober because this wealthy, successful citystate spent all its money on the conspicuous consumption of ephemeral things.
Their consuming passions for food, wine and sex drove their society, as well as generating the rich web of privilege, transgression, guilt and taboo for which they are remembered today.
Using pamphlets, comic satires, forensic speeches from authors as illustrious as Plato and as ignored as Philaenis as source material this study combines a traditional classicist's rigour with an appreciation of the new analytical techniques pioneered in gender and cultural studies to provide an alternative view of ancient Athenian culture and to bring its reality into a focus easier on the modern eye.
Zowel toegankelijk voor het algemene publiek als voor academici, Zalig om te lezen! I have the trade paperback of this book, but I never seemed to be able to get past the first chapter.
I'm doing much better with the kindle edition, One of my favourite nonfiction books ever! Utterly fascinating, at times hilarious, always entertaining, this book is not only perfect for the Classics lover, but for anyone who enjoys a good a meal.
: A really interesting slice of microhistorical text that explores virtue and vice as consumption in the classical Hellenic world.
I went into this book thinking it would be about recipes and gossip but instead it's more of a study of what luxury actually MEANT to the ancient Greeks.
How they viewed indulgence, moderation, and abstention Abstention was often viewed as worse than indulgence in the average man.


This book is dense but fun and once things really get going, it's easy to fly through it provided you have no distractions.
It definitely makes me want to read more of Davidson's work and I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who is interested in the more obscure aspects of life classical Athens.
I so wanted this book to be fun, but alas, Davidson's lugubrious academic writing weighed it down, Completely misrepresented by the sexy title and cover

design, which were clearly meant to attract a popular audience, as was the fact that the Greek was all transliterated.
Incredibly interesting topic but the writing style was not my bag I'm not convinced about a few of his conclusions.
the eurymedon vase seems to be a real spanner in the works for his reading of attic attitudes to sexuality.
but otherwise, interesting, intelligent, etc etc The best way to explain what this book is like to read, is this: it's like you are attending a symposium with lots of different history lectures to attend, and you decide to attend the one called "Drinking, Lust and Gluttony in Classical Athens" because you think, "hey, this has to be entertaining, it's about sex and booze", so you go, and the lecture is just endless and incredibly hard to follow, and you start to doze off, but you keep waking up whenever the speaker starts talking about sex, then you realize that he is just revisiting some point that he already made twenty minutes ago, and you fall asleep again.
Then you wake up at the end and yawningly applaud,
There has to be a way to arrange this book in a more easily readable way, The primary point that Davidson seems to be dancing around the entire time is that Athenians were mainly concerned with losing control of one's appetites, and this was what they found threatening.
So, seeing prostitutes or even being a prostitute wasn't so bad as long as one could control one's spending on such hedonistic pleasures.
Same thing with drinking: totally fine as long as one wasn't blowing huge amounts of money,
But Davidson never states anything clearly here, and he comes back to certain events over and over again, without adding anything new.
I finished this book through sheer force of will, If you cannot get enough of classical Athens, I suppose you might like it, otherwise, stay away,
Great historical tidbit though: "This is probably where the famous punishment of a radish up the arse came into play, the penalty of 'aporhaphanidosis', although as Kenneth Dover points out, in all probability this 'radish' was not simply the very small root we call radish but a generic name covering some much larger species'.

So yes, the Greeks not only punished people by stuffing radishes up their rear ends, but they had a special name for it, and it was a really big radish.

This was a reread of a book I first picked up many years ago, and one that has stuck in my memory.
As others have commented, the book is not for the novice, It assumes an existing familiarity with the history and society of ancient Greece, and delves into particularly specialised topics including colloquialisms and philology, gourmet and gourmand obsessions, body image versus attractiveness in others, and generally explores the thin line between pleasure and vice and how indulgence could be used in political narratives.
If youre not up for quite that level of detail, you may find yourself lost and/or bored reading this book.
I however relished the read, and still do, mainly because the intimate understanding it offers into ancient Greek thought processes enabled me for the first time to get the joke, and thats always a powerful moment for a student seeking to comprehend a distant alien culture from the past.
Its worth noting that the text is heavily slanted in favour of an Athenian perspective, but nonetheless, its an insightful read.
A fine scholarly work that takes its subjectsex and foodquite seriously, while digging down at it in a lively manner.
I learned all about quailtapping, which I now believe is the most hilarious gambling method ever devised, And of course it's about politics, since it's about Athens, In fact, that's a central point of the author's argument trying to take court cases and plays and histories and dialogues that talk about food and sex, and treating them as if they're ONLY about food and sex, means misinterpreting and missing out on an awful lot that has to do with the politics of the day.


There are a lot of precise, polite, brilliant jabs at Foucault, which I admit pleases me greatly.
The dissection and rejection of the phallocentric method of reading Athenian culture isn't the main point of this book, but it's done with skill and verve.
The text as a whole ranges from the hilarious to the nighpedantic, depending on what the immediate argument is.
At times I found myself wishing there were a little more clarity for, let's say, those of us who don't know French, or would like a little more info on the Juvenalian satire being referred to.
Those with no interest in Ancient Greece to start with are unlikely to find it rewarding as a whole, but I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who's already interested in the topic.
It's almost never dry, and there's a lot of great stuff in here, This is a thorough though at times repetitive book on the views of Classical Athenians on food, drinking and sex.
It was well argued and meticulously backed up and rather enjoyable, It was educational and at moments very funny, Complex ideas are well explained and cited and great use is made of contemporary writings,
I'm not invested in whether he is 'Right' as some reviewers seem to be and I enjoyed the book a lot.
He seemed to make his arguments well and his sense of Athens will remain with me, Good look into some odd aspects of life in ancient Greece, but fairly slowmoving, I was primed to not like this because of some reviews I read that mistakenly seized upon Davidsons Foucaultian leanings which I am happy to say were wrong.
Chatty, seemed longer than it was, lots of sex and fish, .