The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (17 page)

At some point during the visit, some sort of offering will have to be made to the gods in thanksgiving or in hopes of a safe
journey ahead. The offering may be as simple as a quick libation of wine poured into the ground or the singeing of the hair
of the animal to be eaten. At the reconciliation of Achilles and Agamemnon, the butcher-priest Talthybius swings the sacrificial
boar over his head like a shot put and flings it into the sea. When Nestor speeds Telemachus on his way, he propitiates Athene
with a lavish sacrifice. The women sing sacred hymns while barley is scattered and hands are washed. The heifer's horns are
clad in gold before she is cut down, her throat slit, her blood collected, her flesh and fat butchered, elaborately rearranged
on wooden billets and burned, and her intestines sampled by the participants. Only then can her meat be spitted and roasted
for consumption. Athene happens to be present for this particular sacrifice because Telemachus is her pet cause of the moment,
and she may be presumed to be delighted, as she often is in her girlish way, by all the fuss.

When all goes well, when all the rules of hospitality are faithfully observed, the gods are satisfied, the traveler is sent
safely on his way, and the wheels of the divine machine continue to spin smoothly and unhindered. Naturally enough, things
can and do go wrong, with results that vary between the inconvenient and the cataclysmic. The Trojan war itself erupted as
the result of a breach of these rules: Paris's abduction of Helen while his host was away at a funeral. Paris's misdeed was,
of course, more than simply an example of a guest behaving badly, but it was explicitly recognized and condemned by Proteus
as a crime against hospitality. The Cyclops episode, the slaughter of the Sun God's cattle and Circe's transformation of Odysseus'
men into pigs are other cases in which a disregard for the obligations that guest and host owe one another is a direct cause
of the ensuing debacle. Aeolus welcomes Odysseus to his island with a month of lavish feasting and all due honor, then sends
him on his way with the gift of an ox-hide bag filled with howling winds. But when Odysseus' resentful sailors open the bag
and their ship is blown all the way back to Aeolia, Aeolus is rightly convinced that his hospitality has been abused: "Away
from my island - fast - most cursed man alive! It's a crime to host a man or speed him on his way when the blessed deathless
gods despise him so. Crawling back like this - it proves the immortals hate you! Out - get out!" One of the most savage epithets
that Medea can think of to hurl at Jason in her fury is that of "guest-deceiver."

Hardly a single disaster or peril is described in the vast annals of Greek mythology that is not, in some way, connected to
the desecration of hospitality. Consider Psyche, who dares not accept the hospitality of Pluto on her journey to the underworld.
Consider Phineus, on whom Zeus visits the plague of the Harpies, which swoop down upon his dinner table at every meal, steal
his food, and leave nothing but stinking remnants, making it somewhat awkward for him to receive and entertain guests. Consider
the hapless god Atlas, turned to stone for refusing hospitality to Perseus. Consider the bandit Procrustes, whose specialty
was to offer a comfy bed to passersby, only to cut off their legs or stretch them on the rack in order to make them fit.

First and foremost, consider with dread - as did any Greek who ever contemplated abusing his guests in any way - the saga
of Tantalus and his descendents. Of vast wealth and king of Lydia, Tantalus was much favored by the gods because Zeus was
his father; he is said to have been the only mortal ever allowed a taste of ambrosia. For reasons that you probably had to
be there to appreciate, Tantalus chose to put his patrons to the test by inviting them to a banquet at which he served up
his own son Pelops, slaughtered, butchered, and boiled. His deception was discovered, but not before Demeter had helped herself
to a tender joint. Pelops was restored to life with an ivory shoulder to replace the one that had been eaten, but Tantalus
endures his torment in Tartarus to this very day. Standing up to his chin in a lake of clear, fresh water under a tree groaning
with ripe fruit of all kinds, he is wracked by hunger and thirst, but the waters recede whenever he bends to drink and the
branches of the tree rise in the breeze, just out of reach whenever he stretches to eat.

His daughter Niobe, imperious queen of Thebes, lost all her children to the arrows of Apollo and Artemis and was eventually
turned into a stone that is said to weep night and day. Pelops prospered, however, producing two strapping sons, Atreus and
Thyestes, who cruelly vied with one another for the throne of Mycenae. Having temporarily achieved the upper hand, Atreus
invited his brother to a lavish dinner at which, with a shameful lack of originality, he served up several of his nephews,
Thyestes' sons, butchered and boiled according to an old family recipe. Sadly for Atreus, he failed to cook Thyestes' remaining
son, Aegisthus, who eventually murdered him and restored his father to the throne.

Atreus had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Agamemnon eventually overthrew Thyestes, while Menelaus became king of Sparta.
But in order to catch a favorable wind to Troy, Agamemnon agreed to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, for which his wife,
Clytemnestra, was never quite able to forgive him. While he was away at war, she took his cousin Aegisthus for her lover;
ten years later, upon the destruction of Troy, Aegisthus threw Agamemnon a spectacular homecoming banquet at which he slew
him and all his men. Aegisthus was eventually killed by his nephew Orestes.

Five generations of bitter vendetta, all set in motion by an ill-considered menu.

Over the ensuing centuries, the Greeks slowly emerged from the darkness, recovering their literacy, developing city-states
and leaving their tribal past behind. They planted colonies throughout the Mediterranean, Anatolia, and the Black Sea, founded
a vast, if short-lived, empire, and came into contact with myriad diverse and far-flung peoples. This had the double benefit
of enriching their civilization in countless ways while confirming their deep-rooted sense of superiority. Particularly after
routing the Persians at the battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea between 490 and 478 B.C., the Greeks of the classical
age experienced the kind of blossoming of culture, wealth, and sophistication from which heroic societies rarely recover.

In the sciences of gastronomy and the arts of hospitality, the peace dividend paid off handsomely and immediately. Suddenly,
almost overnight in historical terms, we see an explosion of cookbook writing, especially in the wealthy Greek colonies and
cities of southern Italy and Sicily, which developed such international reputations for their decadent opulence that, to this
very day, being a sybarite means more than simply being from the Calabrian town of Sybaris. Such Sicilian food writers as
Matro of Pitane, Mithaikos, Heracleides and Agis of Syracuse were famous in their day. The greatest of them all, Archestratos
of Gela, "Daedalus of tasty dishes" and author of
The Life of Luxury,
is said to have "circumnavigated the inhabited world for the sake of his belly and the portions of his anatomy below the belly"
and to have been worshipped like Homer. His book, a kind of culinary travelogue, insists that we buy bread only from Lydian
or Phoenician bakers, but disdains anyone who prefers Phoenician wine over Lydian as an
alazonochaunophluaron -
roughly, according to his translator, an "emptyheadedbrainlessbullshitartist." In
Deip-nosophistae,
his fifteen-book treatise on food and foodways, Athe­naeus of Naucratis is able to list at least eighteen cookbooks containing
recipes for the spiced gravy known as
karyke.
A lost masterpiece,
The Art of Grocery Shopping
by Lynkeus of Samos, included advice on how to disparage fish by claiming them to be out of season, thus driving away customers
and driving down prices.

A new profession was born: freelance catering. Professional caterers imported from Italy and Chios were all the rage, while
hired cooks became stock figures in Greek comedy, like lawyers today. The wealthy found new ways of pampering themselves.
According to Chamaeleon of Pontus, Smindyrides of Sybaris brought one thousand slaves - including fishermen, fowlers, and
cooks - to his wedding to Agariste, the daughter of Cleisthenes.

The Greeks - whom Athenaeus chides as "dinner-chasing Sophists" - began to sound suspiciously like New Yorkers. They yearned
for simplicity yet craved the latest exotic imports. One minute they were indulging in
anthosmias
(wine adulterated with seawater to enhance its bouquet),
garos
(a ubiquitous sauce made of fish fermented in clay jars for months), haggis, and "pease puree poured over eggs, oysters and
scallops"; the next, they were praising the simple traditional preparations of the old country and bemoaning the ultrasophistication
of the Italians, who ruined good fish "by covering it with cheese and sprinkling it with liquid vinegar and silphium-flavored
broth." In the land of Sophocles, Euripides, and Sappho, it was no longer blasphemy to assert, as did Euphron, that "the cook
and the poet are just alike: the art of each lies in his brain." Sparta, its martial valor an anachronism, became a laughing
stock for its "black broth."

"As gastronomy advanced, it left the gods behind," says food historian Andrew Dalby. He is suggesting not that the Greeks
were in danger of abandoning their gods and religion, but rather that, as they advanced in sophistication and assimilated
foreign ways, the intimate connection between food, hospitality, and piety became ever more ritualized, alienated from its
origins as a genuine response to genuine terror before the unknown.

Nowhere is this evolution more evident than in the great symposia of Plato, Xenophon, and, later, Plutarch. Although such
works spare no more than a passing mention of the food and drink served at these parties (which were distinct from and always
followed dinner), none contains more than a glancing nod to piety, either. "They made libation and sang a chant to the god
and so forth" is a fairly typical dismissal of the obligatory ritual. The conversation at these parties was all directed to
contemporary philosophical topics - democracy, individual freedom, logic, education, governance, nature, virtue, morality,
love. The atmosphere was informal, playful, amicably competitive, rarely scholarly, often lubricious, and occasionally drunken.
Friends reclined, two or three to a couch, drank, played parlor games, discussed the issues and personalities of the day,
and made fun of each other and themselves. Socrates, fat, bald, and ugly, threatens to dance at Callias' symposium. Were it
not for the entertainment - flute players, dancers, buffoons, prostitutes and the scarcity of women, these parties could easily
be taking place among well-educated urbanites in any modern capital. At least, since all the most learned and distinguished
men of Athens were gathered in one
andron,
it is easy to imagine that the other, less high-minded symposia going on around town were devoted to the kind of talk we know
so well - careers, sports, salacious gossip, real estate. These were not people who were afraid of being turned into geckos.

The participants in Plato's
Symposium
gather at the home of their friend Agathon to engage in a contest to deliver the best discourse on love. They are serious
enough about the issue to agree to limit their drinking, an unusual enough occurrence in its own right, but are otherwise
in a typically lighthearted, dinnerparty frame of mind. Phaedrus begins by asserting that Love is among the oldest of the
gods and makes men behave nobly and honourably because they would be ashamed of doing otherwise before their beloved. He even
suggests that, for this reason, soldiers should go into battle with their (male) lovers, an idea which the Spartans had already
put into practice. Pausanius, contrarily, reminds the symposiasts that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, has two natures: one
that inspires noble love and virtue, including the love of friends and little boys whom one seeks to improve, and another
that inspires the meaner, common forms of love, including the love of women. Eryximachus, a doctor, makes the analogy that,
just as healthy and unhealthy elements vie within the human body and throughout nature, creating a tension that it is the
physician's task to understand and balance, so too it is the task of the pious man to distinguish between healthy love and
unhealthy love and thus to effect a reconciliation between men and gods. Aristophanes proposes that there was once an androgynous
third sex, composed of two beings fused together face to face, that was punished for its hubris by being cut in two, and that
love is the obscurely understood impulse of these incomplete halves to rejoin and complete each other. Agathon moves the discussion
away from the effects of love and toward its nature, which is of surpassing beauty and goodness and thus the cause of beauty
and goodness everywhere.

The final, falsely reluctant speaker is Socrates, who offers that love is neither beautiful nor good, but rather an intermediate,
a search for something only dimly glimpsed. A wise man, he says, has no need to seek wisdom; an ignorant man cannot perceive
the need to do so. So, too, someone who is loved does not seek love, while someone who cannot love does not see the need for
it. Thus, love is to be found somewhere in between, in a spiritual quest, "for the whole of the spiritual is between divine
and mortal . . . interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men." From that point, Socrates
gradually builds a vision of love that rises above attraction to beauty, above desire, above yearning for that which it lacks,
above mortality and parenthood toward "a certain single knowledge connected with a beauty which has yet to be told." Love
is infinite and immutable:

Beginning from obvious beauties he must for the sake of that highest beauty be ever climbing aloft, as on the rungs of the
ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies; from personal beauty he proceeds to beautiful observances,
from observance to beautiful learning, and from learning at last to that particular study which is concerned with the beautiful
itself and that alone.