From Ikaria to the Stars: Classical Mythification, Ancient and Modern by Green Peter

Author:Green, Peter [Green, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2013-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

8

A Variety of Greek Appetites*

OUR VIEW OF, and attitude toward, the ancient world are in perpetual flux: a Heracleitan assertion itself liable to be dismissed—on impeccably rational grounds, ça va sans dire—by a new generation of critics. We look in the mirror and see ourselves: the age and style of the mirror make little difference, even, or perhaps especially, when (as in Andrew Stewart’s Art Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece) it’s adorned with explicit erotica, and was the cherished possession of a woman who may have been Leaina (“The Lioness”), a Corinthian beauty (c. 320–300 B.C.) whose skill at “riding” her sexual partners, jockey-style, won an enthusiastic tribute from that noted gynophile Demetrius the Besieger. Both Stewart and James Davidson in Courtesans and Fishcakes stress, rightly, the variant idiosyncrasies in perception (erotic or other) of different ages, as well as their obstinate insistence on judging the alien from their own local and temporal viewpoints. Both also become involved with current trends and theories in the process. Davidson takes these on and dismantles them; Stewart at first pays them lip service, but later, for long stretches, to the reader’s considerable benefit, forgets about them. Both, to a quite unusual extent, are quirky, idiosyncratic, and brimming over with original insights.

What goes for sex also applies to culture in the widest sense. One age’s trash is the next one’s treasure. The enthusiastic stripping of the Acropolis in the early nineteenth century consigned tons of priceless neolithic sherds to the rail-bed of the Athens-Piraeus Metro: passengers today who fancy they’re riding on history are in fact, in a far more literal sense, riding roughshod over prehistory. (The recent extension-tunnelling under central Athens has widened the image in a highly dramatic manner: the Syntagma subway station now has its own archaeology, very strikingly, on permanent display.) Many early archaeologists, obsessed with palaces and precious artifacts, strike us today as barely distinguishable from the crassest kind of treasure-hunter; but if they could witness our own contemporary sifting of daily detritus, they would, in their turn, dismiss us contemptuously as mad proletarian scavengers. That upper-class disdain for the banausic that formed so crucial an element in the Athenian character, and was adopted with enthusiasm by earlier generations of classicists, isn’t wholly dead even today. James Davidson lays out the ample evidence for Athenians’ obsession with fish, and gets a protest (admittedly only a mild one) in a review by the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, arguing that since a large chunk of the evidence comes from Athenaeus, that lip-licking picker-up of ancient gourmet allusions, the problem is still to a great degree literary, that is, unreal. But then, fish are about as banausic as you can get.

As Davidson pointed out in a spirited rebuttal, both Athenaeus and he himself are interested in a good many other things besides fish (notably wine and sex, the second of which has only fairly recently established itself as a main-line, indeed hot, topic for analysis by up-and-coming classicists),

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.