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This book was produced by Human Bridges. Michael Hudson has devoted his career to the study of debt.
Introduction
Throughout the ancient world each social unit—the tribe, guild, or temple cult—had its common table and confirmed its membership at an annual feast which all members were expected to attend. Rites of passage such as marriages or funerals, and major transactions from land sales to peace treaties, were concluded by ceremonial meals to confirm the new status witnessed by the affected parties in an amicable atmosphere.
Communal feasts integrated families into larger groups based on an ethic of distributive justice. Meat and other food were distributed in measured portions so that everyone would receive an equal share. These equal servings formed a model for that of regularizing social relations in general.
Individuals expressed themselves paradigmatically at these banquets. The essence of table manners was to demonstrate moderation and sobriety. Guests were to relate as equals, to be solicitous of the welfare of their tablemates, and often to exchange gifts or reciprocate meal invitations. Indeed, out of these festive gatherings developed gift-exchange and proto-monetary contributions. The Greek oboloi “spit-money” and drachmae (or “handfuls” of obol/spits) may have originated as contributions of livestock or value-equivalents.
For Mesopotamian temple and palace dependents, and probably for many communal-private sector families as well, the major source of meat was at the public festivals, above all the New Year feast. In Greece serving meat was a ritual act: The carver (invariably a man) served as a distributive official. It was from his role as “cutter” that the Greek “tamias” (“treasurer”) evolved. Officials such as deacons (literally “servers”) also evolved out of the “bureaucracy of the sacrifice.”
Group meals played a central role because food was the most obvious and primordial source of life, and hence of wealth. However, whereas the appetite for food was limited by the dimensions of the human stomach, the appetite for wealth was addictive, leading to arrogant hubris. Archaic poets compared a well-run society to a properly conducted meal marked by moderation. Thus, whereas the preceding chapter has discussed tempering the musical scale, the present one places temperance in the context of moderation in dining, drinking, and wealth-seeking. At the aristocratic symposia banquets of classical Greece we find the idea of moderation elevated to a philosophical principle—one which subsequently was undercut by the transition to more oligarchic and individualistic forms.
- “If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries.”
- —Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal”[1] (1971: p. 61)
The Westerner’s Boardinghouse Reach Versus the Japanese Tea Ceremony
Before American diplomats are sent off to the Far East, the State Department gives them a briefing on how to comport themselves at meals. It would be politically disastrous for new appointees not to be made aware of how their cultural behavior strikes Asians, and for that matter “old school” Europeans. For the way modern Americans eat together is a far cry from being an exercise in moderation.
A familiar model is the way in which American guests at Chinese restaurants pass dishes around the table. Each diner piles his (or her)[2] plate high with food as the dish runs its circuit. Such behavior seems quite fair to Americans, but traditionally strikes Asians as reflecting a self-centered drive to monopolize food—and by analogy, other things in life—beyond one’s immediate needs. Culturally, it seems almost an act of desperation, a lack of trust that one’s companions will leave enough for the guest to finish their meal. The traditional Asian practice is to take one’s share a few bites or so at a time, waiting to refill the plate until the others have kept pace. Tablemates will pour tea or sake for each other before filling their own cups, whose small size requires frequent mutual refillings.
The Japanese traditionally prefer to entertain business associates at restaurants rather than at home. However, instead of each person ordering their own choice of dishes from a menu as “a metaphorical expression of individuality,” the Japanese “host and guests alike will eat the same foods” just as at a home meal “as a metaphor of shared values, a communion through commonality” (Farb and Armelagos[3] 1980: p. 103). In short, food is not just a meal; it is a way of relating interpersonally.
Such differences usually are taken to indicate an underlying contrast between east and west, but if we look back to classical Greece and Rome we find no such polarity. Antiquity’s dining protocol was more “eastern” than “western,” in the sense that its ethic of eating was based on reciprocity and, ultimately, on distributive justice. Yet for this very reason archaic table manners may seem to involve something almost mystical to modern western observers, a kind of “zen of eating.”
Antiquity’s meals were “non-western” in the same way that ancient social philosophy rejected the idea of profit-maximizing “economic man.” Instead of urging individuals to satisfy their appetites to the maximum degree, philosophers extended the idea of moderation from the consumption of food and drink to the pursuit of wealth. To devote one’s life to earning as much money as possible was considered an addiction akin to drunkenness. The narcissistic table manners and decadence of imperial Rome reflect the epoch’s immoderate thirst for wealth, a self-centeredness that the Stoics denounced as hubris.
This chapter describes the social values inherent in classical antiquity’s table manners from the vantage point of character formation. (There is too little Bronze Age evidence to draw firm conclusions relating table habits to social values.) If the appetite for food formed an analog for attitudes toward commerce and wealth, then it followed that if individuals were well trained in the etiquette of eating, their table manners would shape their character in all areas of life where “appetites” were involved. Dining practices were socializing experiences repeated day after day, year after year. They were what Werner Jaeger[4] (1936) has summarized as “paideia,” an educational process. As such, they shaped behavior along similar lines to philosophy and religion, music, and medicine/health.
All these activities promoted the ideal of balance. Moderation in eating and drinking was deemed analogous to musical tempering. Meanwhile, the “hierarchies of the table” exemplified the principles of either “harmonic” or “arithmetic” proportions. The result was that democratic and oligarchic social philosophies each had their own ideas of balance and modes of table behavior.
Food as Primordial Wealth
Before there was money, there was food. As the most immediately life-giving form of wealth, food played the role taken over by money in today’s world. Feasting and sacrificing represented the most universal disposition of the economic surplus. Communal festivals and fairs accordingly became the paramount occasions for distributing all forms of the social surplus. In time these came to include gifts, taxes, and commercial products.
Far from being merely background diversions from the routine of archaic social life, eating and drinking had an ideological function: Archaic social values dictated that food, as the primary form of wealth, should be shared equitably, expressing the subordination of individuals to the community.
Some characteristics of eating are axiomatic at the outset. Convening at feasts turned hunting, gathering, and agriculture into activities that involved the whole community. The ethic of reciprocity and mutual aid became the source of communal cooperation as well as of life. Claude Lévi-Strauss[5] (1969: p. 33) found that “Primitive thought unanimously proclaims that ‘food is… something that has to be shared’” (quoting Audrey Isabel Richards[6] 1961: p. 197). This is particularly the case in low-surplus economies where mutual aid is necessary at special times such as the dead of winter in the north, or simply at symbolic times to (re)establish traditional norms of distributive justice, such as at the Bronze Age New Year festivals.[7]
Table Manners as a Civilizing Process
In a Greek comedy by Athenion,[8] a cook harangues on how his profession played a catalytic role in civilizing mankind:
- Cook: Don’t you know that the cook’s art has contributed absolutely more than anything else to piety?
- Foreigner: Really?
- Cook: Entirely so, you ignorant foreigner. This art has freed us from a bestial and lawless life. From disgusting cannibalism it has led us to discipline…
- Foreigner: But how?
- Cook: Pay close attention and I will explain it to you. At a time when cannibalism and all sorts of evils existed, a man arose who was no simpleton, the first to sacrifice a victim and roast the meat. And since the meat was nicer than human flesh, they no longer chewed one another, but sacrificed and roasted sheep. And once they had experienced that pleasure, with the beginning thus made, they advanced the cook’s art further.
- The use of sauces and seasonings saved men, for once these were developed, everyone kept aloof from eating a man’s body any longer. All consented now to live with one another, a populace came together, cities became civilized, all through this art of cookery. … It is we cooks who perform the rites of consecration; we offer sacrifice, pour libations, because the gods hearken more to us than to all the others for having discovered those things which pertain most to the good life.
While this is comic exaggeration, group meals did indeed provide a focus for most social occasions. Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage (1909; English tr. 1960) has shown that every public or sacred ritual was accompanied by a sacrifice and repast. Status changes were ritualized in ceremonies highlighted by feasts, just as are modern christenings, birthday parties, confirmations or bar mitzvahs, marriages, and, in some cultures, wakes (Hocart 1954[9]: p. 36 and 1970[10]: p. 62). Admission to the group table—being “taken out to dinner”—marked acceptance into a family, to formal citizenry, or to smaller sacred or civic groups. In all these cases the extension of hospitality by the incorporating family, together with the presence of witnesses, attested to the mutual amicability of the change in status.
Ceremonial meals also marked all major transactions with outsiders. Treaties of peace and trade were formalized by meals for the contracting parties, or at least their chiefs and leading hierarchies. Third-millennium BC Mesopotamian land-sale records reported that buyers stipulated to provide a meal for the sellers as part of the transfer price (Melul 1988). For many centuries such land transfers remained subject to ritualized procedures capped by meals, not so much as part of the payment as a symbolic act essential to formalize the transfer. The group meal gathered together the relevant parties as witnesses in a friendly atmosphere, signifying their approval of the sale, for who would sit down to dine with one’s enemies or exploiters? Acceptance of the purchaser’s hospitality (often accompanied by an exchange of clothing or other gifts) was above all a friendly act, and meant that the transaction could not later be called into question or repudiated.
In the first century of our era, Tacitus (Germania 22) described how the convivia banquets of the Germans were essential occasions for providing a forum for tribesmen to discuss “the reconciliation of personal enemies, the conclusion of family alliances, the choice of chieftains, peace, and war, because they believed that there was no more favorable moment for man’s spirit to be open to frankness and to be fired to greatness.”
Food was thus the universal token of peace as well as the staff of life. Conversely, as warfare became formalized, military groupings consolidated their companionship by taking meals in common. It was normal for soldiers who fought together to eat with one another, most notably in the Spartan military mess or “syssitia,” where the entire adult male population ate and whose “ritual character appears in the fact that part of any animal sacrificed had to be sent to the mess” (Hocart[11] 1950: p. 135). If music, architecture and art, writing, myth and drama, and even the symbolic content of clothing and jewelry were the major vehicles of expression, their major forum was at festivals and banquets. To the extent that these occasions were structured to be microcosms of the social kosmos, they interface with every chapter of The Creation of Order. For instance, Chapters 2 and 3 have traced how calendars, measures, and weights provided an underlying grid for archaic social activity. Inasmuch as the major festivals were held at the new moon and New Year, they signified a kind of “rite of passage” for time itself, and hence centered around a festive meal. Regularized calendars, measures and weights, writing, and accounting initially were elaborated to manage the flow of food and related rations through Bronze Age temples and palaces, and to provision public festivals.
Yet at first glance these ancient feasts might seem antithetical to the idea of order. Generations of moviegoers have grown accustomed to Hollywood portrayals of Saturnalia and their profligate excesses of food and drink. Instead of being carefully structured gatherings, these gala occasions seem to have been breaks from social rules. One thinks of the excesses of the emperor Caligula and his successors, and the vomitoria following Roman feasts of nightingales’ tongues and similar conspicuous consumption.
Anthropologists also have succumbed to sensationalism in popularizing modern tribal examples of feast-giving. Their examples often are entertaining in a bizarre fashion, but hardly reflect the scrupulously equitable principles that characterized most ancient societies.
The reality is that archaic festivals and banquets were exercises in moderation. To be a successful guest was to display self-control in consuming food, and to retain one’s wits when drinking. The culinary and table rituals of classical antiquity emphasized an underlying measure and balance. A guest’s behavior at the group meal was a test of his degree of socialization.
The result was more like the Japanese tea ceremony than a barbarian feeding. In fact, proper comportment at meals was considered to be a watershed elevating civilized persons over barbarians. The Gilgamesh epic portrayed the beast-man Enkidu as someone who does not know what to do with bread when it is put before him. As the French structuralists Jean-Louis Durand and Alain Schnapp[12] (1989: p. 53) have summarized: “To eat whatever comes to hand means to eat like beasts. Rules are needed, to avoid the risk of becoming bestial… Thus partaking of meat becomes a religious act. And the whole complex of rules that allows men to eat animals under the eyes of the gods, is organized into a system that we call, for lack of a better term, sacrifice, in which everyone has a defined place and role.”
These ideas are expressed in the realm of mythology by the muse Thalia. Before settling down as the patron spirit of comedy and pastoral poetry, her task was to convert humans’ “concern for food and drink from something savage and animal into a social and convivial affair” (Plutarch, Table Talk 746e). “That is why we apply the word thaliazein (merry-making) to those who enjoy another’s company over wine in a gay and friendly manner, not to those who indulge in drunken insults and violence.”
At its highest level the group meal and communal feast defined each ancient culture. What ultimately was being regulated at eating and drinking occasions was how guests dealt with their appetites vis-à-vis their companions. This is the sense in which Marcel Detienne and Jesper Svenbro[13] (1989: p. 153) found that “the social contract is first of all a culinary operation.” Everyday life was not always characterized by openhanded reciprocity, but at least this ethic could be maintained ceremonially at public meals. The idea of distributive justice thus found its culinary counterpart in assigning equal portions to all “companions” (a word that means literally “breaking bread together,” from Latin “panis”).
The words “appetite” and “thirst” have become widespread similes for the drive to consume anything, including money as well as food and drink. However, Aristotle (Politics I.9) pointed out that whereas the stomach imposes a natural limit so that one becomes satiated with food, nobody can have too much wealth. The appetite for money is addictive and unlimited, akin to the immoderation of alcoholism.
Table manners were designed to counteract such self-indulgence. They treated food, the very embodiment of life-giving power, as the paradigmatic form of wealth. The egalitarian ethic reflected itself in the standardized portions served to each guest, signifying that all members attended the communal meal as equals. Most societies, however, celebrated the egalitarian group meal only at major public festivals.
Equality of Servings
Just as standardized rations were doled out to public dependents as discussed in Measures, Rules, and Prices, so measured portions were served at public festivals and private banquets. “[F]rom Homer to Plutarch over nearly ten centuries,” summed up Detienne and Svenbro[14] (1989: p. 153), “the egalitarian meal, via sacrifices and public banquets,” acknowledged the equal status of guests. In the shared meals and military messes of the Spartan and Cretan warrior-citizens (“homoioi”), each peer “receives an equal portion of the available food, i.e., the food placed in the center and offered to the community—food that by virtue of having been ‘put in the middle’ [en meson] is necessarily meant to be equally divided,” much as were booty and other common gains.
Egalitarian social philosophers through the ages have sought to relate the Greek word “dais” to the idea of equally dividing food and drink among the guests. Athenaeus[15] (I.12) pointed out that in the Homeric poems, meat portions were equally divided, and Homer called banquets “equal” “because of the equality observed. Dinners were called daites from dateisthai, ‘to divide,’ and wine as well as meat was equally apportioned.” Thus the Odyssey (8.98) stated, “By this time we had satisfied our souls with the equal feast.” Zenodotus believed that Homer “calls it ‘equal,’ using an extended form of the word,” aisa for the more usual iso. “And so the meal is called dais from daiesthai, ‘divide,’ that is, to distribute in equal portions; and the roaster of meat is daitros, or ‘divider,’ because he gave an equal portion to everybody.” In I.24 Athenaeus acknowledged that this etymology was forced, yet the fact remained that “only man’s food can be dais, and his ‘lot’ is what is given to everybody,” for “man alone progresses from primitive violence to fair dealing.” Athenaeus pointed out that Homer uses the word “dais” only in reference to humans, never to beasts.
The socialist historian Jack Lindsay[16] (1974: pp. 322ff.) believed that in local Greek dialects “aisa” meant “a share of the banquet or a part of the sacrificial offerings; thence, a portion of anything. … Instructive too is the way in which the term for law, nomos, originally referred to a share of pastoral land, as moira did to a share of the arable. … the old word for a meal meant properly a share or division. … (We saw that dais was cognate with desmos.) Once the moira of meat went by lot. ‘And when they had roasted the outer flesh and drawn it off the spits,’ says Homer [Odyssey 20.470, 14.433], ‘they divided the moirai and had a glorious dais.’”
Plutarch (Table Talk 643f.) contrasted these “portion banquets” of Homer and the early democracies with the dinners of his own imperial Roman period in which each guest helped himself from the group pot. The democratic spokesman defended egalitarian meals by pointing out that the equal division of servings and their distribution by lot minimized the resentment individuals were liable to feel when others took more than their fair share. “Those who eat from the dishes that belong to all antagonize those who are slow and are left behind, as it were, in the wake of the swift-sailing ship. For suspicion, grabbing, snatching, and elbowing among the guests do not, I think, make a friendly and convivial prelude to a banquet; such behavior is boorish and crude and often ends in insults and angry outbursts aimed not only at fellow guests, but at waiters and at hosts.” Quoting a pre-Socratic fragment—“Where each guest has his own private portion, companionship perishes”—Plutarch concluded: “This is true where there is not an equitable distribution; for… the taking of another’s portion, and greed for what is common to all, began injustice and strife. The laws hold this in check by limiting and moderating private rights, and their very name [nomoi] they owe to their office and power of equitable distribution [viz. Nemesis] in regard to what is common to all.”
Plutarch’s oligarchic proponent of “every man for himself” countered that “This division of meat into shares kills sociability” and actually turns out to be inequitable inasmuch as each diner has a different-sized stomach. “It follows that just as one is ridiculous who prescribes with precise weights and measures an equal amount of drugs for sick men, so is the sort of host who brings to the same fare men neither thirsty nor hungry in the same degree and serves all alike, with an arithmetical instead of geometrical determination of what suits them.”
So we are brought back to the metaphor of arithmetic versus geometric proportion discussed in the previous chapter of The Creation of Order. Should each man be allotted what everyone else receives? Or should he take what he wants according to his “worth,” that is, his inherited status and wealth?
The oligarchic advocate urged his companions to “renounce Homer’s dinners, for they leave one a bit hungry and thirsty, and the kings who preside over them are more dreadful than Italian innkeepers.” Suppose a guest brought his mistress or a harp-girl to the party. Should “all possessions of friends be common”? This would have been a violation of fellowship. “And so let us stop dishonoring the goddesses of Portion [Moirai] and ‘Lot, child of Luck,’[17] as Euripides called him, for he gives preeminence neither to wealth nor to glory, but, as he chances to fall, now this way, now that. He makes proud the poor and humble man, exciting him with a taste of independence, while the rich and great he accustoms to bearing equal treatment without ill-temper and so teaches them self-control without giving offence.”
Exactly! By the time this dialogue was written, in the second century of our era, portion-meals had become a relic of the past, served mainly on public ceremonial occasions.
Private Banquets Became More Free-Flowing as Wealth Became More Unevenly Distributed
In earlier centuries the Greeks used spits to serve “the anonymous portions which will be eaten outside of the sacred zone. Each successive cut of meat after the entrails becomes more ‘ordinary.’ Each person in the social collectivity is defined thus as having the right to a sacrificial meal by his place in the general sharing.”[18] Vase paintings depict guests with equal servings, eating and drinking out of identical dishes and cups (Durand and Schnapp[19] 1989: p. 56, Hocart[20] 1970: p. 69, and Illustration 6.1). The utensils employed are large kraters to mix wine and water, cups and dishes of equal size, and benches or lounges for discussion. “Each person will have an equal share, without special distinction. The cuisine of sacrifice means first of all equal access to the common supply of meat, an alimentary democracy.”[21]
“The commensal meal begins with division,” Detienne[22] described (1989: p. 13). “The choice pieces—thigh, hindquarter, shoulder, and tongue—are given to the priest, king, or high magistrates of the city,” or perhaps to honored guests such as a brave warrior, wise man, or simply a visitor. The remaining parts of the animal were “divided entirely into pieces of equal weight, which are distributed by lottery.” Under the popular tyrants of the seventh and sixth centuries BC, public hearths began to supplant those of the aristocratic leaders. Like King Arthur’s Round Table, the Greek hearth was without a head. It had a center, and indeed was a center shared in an “egalitarian and isonomic” manner. The distribution of the table companions around a center (rather than a head) defined “a social space both circular and central… To place something ‘in the middle’ is the act on which egalitarian practices are based, whose field of application extends in the warriors’ world to voting assemblies, the organization of funeral games, and the sharing of loot” (Detienne and Svenbro[23] 1989: p. 151). “Placed in the middle,” observed Detienne[24] (1989: p. 13), “the portion eaten by each of the guests consecrates, in alimentary and sacrificial order, his share of political rights that arise from his belonging to the circle of citizens and having in principle the same rights of speech and the exercise of power as the others.”
Of course, not the entire population was invited.
Who Can Eat at the Common Table?
Archaic social bodies typically defined their membership in terms of who could partake in the communal meal. Just as the meal bound the family together, so religious cults, professional guilds, and other corporate groups defined themselves in terms of responsibility for their mutual support. From these obligations emerged the practice of taking a census at New Year ceremonies, and classifying or otherwise ranking citizens in terms of their public obligations. In this way mutual contributions to group meals evolved into proto-money and proto-taxation. The Greek Apaturia, for instance, was a festival where the boy was inducted into the clan, “and his admission was marked by the offering to Zeus of a sheep or goat and of wine.” In India and many other parts of the world, eating with the members of one’s own caste or clan division “is the essential part of admission or readmission” (Hocart[25] 1950: p. 133; see also Dumont[26] 1970).
In this way group meals integrated corporate bodies. They did so through the intermediary of fire. “Cooking meat before eating it reinforces the contrast with the animals that feed on raw flesh,” noted Vernant[27] (1989: p. 38). “It represents culture as opposed to wildness. In this way it prepares the way for the theme of the ‘civilizing’ fire, ‘master of all arts,’ that will be developed in Aeschylus’ Prometheus.” If fire was a hallmark of civilization, then the hearth where it burned to cook the meals became a common social focus. Indeed, the word “focus” literally meant “hearth.”
Group meals, the hearths where they were cooked, and the areas where they were served accordingly became symbols of brotherhood for the family, clan, corporate body, and entire communities. In his Politics (VII.12), Aristotle recommended that “Buildings devoted to the service of the gods, and the chief feeding-places of members of committees, should have a suitable position on the same site,” unless the Delphic oracle directs the contrary. For “the government of the state being divided into officials and priests, it is right that the latter too should have their eating-places established round the sacred buildings.”
Position and authority were confirmed at these public meals. A person’s place at the table reflected his standing (actually, seating). In sum, the communal feast integrated individual households into a common body. Aristocratic democracies defined citizenship in terms of closed bloodlines, and confirmed their citizenries in terms of who could partake in the feasts and sacrifices designed to bind their members together. “One of the marks of a foreigner,” noted Detienne[28] (1989: p. 4), “is that he is kept away from the altars and is unable to make sacrifices without the official mediation of a citizen.”
Group meals were a microcosm of the world, and the socializing experience par excellence. They extended the family table to encompass larger social groupings, ultimately integrating entire communities as the classical city-states transformed the hitherto private hearth into the civic prytaneion. (The Archaic Cosmology of Cities: Building the Kosmos on Earth gives the details.) Making the prytaneion hearth public removed it from the control of any single family, transforming what had symbolized the private household into a communal focus for the citizenry at large.
The ‘Bureaucracy of the Sacrifice’
Hierarchic seating was said to have begun with the gods. In the Iliad (20.15) Poseidon, “even though he came last to the assembly, ‘took his seat in the middle,’ implying that this place belonged to him. And Athena is always seen to occupy the place of honor beside Zeus.” Plutarch (Table Talk 617c) concluded that the mortal host who ignored this principle and failed to assign his guests to their proper places at the table “turns an individual’s prerogative (each man’s according to his worth) into common property,” committing a theft of “the recognition due to virtue, kinship, public service, and such things… Though he thinks that he avoids being offensive to his guests, he… offends each one of them by depriving him of his accustomed honor.”
As noted earlier, officiators and honored guests received double portions or other special tokens of respect such as the “meat privilege” (“geras”). “Once the choice piece or pieces have been taken, the most meat being awarded to those having a special honor or dignity, the rest of the victim can be distributed in an egalitarian fashion in accordance with a certain isonomic ideology of the city” (Detienne[29] 1989: p. 13). Sparta’s kings received the hides from the livestock sacrificed—a major source of economic gain.
These hierarchies of the table were subject to strict rules in a highly structured context. The first hierarchy was that between servers and the diners at large. In classical Greece the servers were also the butcher-carvers. The Greek vocabulary was in fact unique in that sacrifice and butchering belong to the same semantic zones. The Greek word for “butcher,” “mageiros,” signified also “sacrificer.” (Detienne[30] 1989: pp. 3, 11, and Durand[31] 1989: p. 87 elaborated this point.) Likewise, in Homeric usage “hiereion” referred indiscriminately to the animal as “sacrificial victim” and simply as “animal to be butchered” (Vernant[32] 1989: pp. 25f.). In sum, the sacrifice was essentially a feast, and vice versa.
The officiating “mageiros” (from which our words “magistrate” and “master” derive) was akin to the herald, the Hermes/Mercury figure related to writing and music. (He reappears in an urban context in The Archaic Cosmology of Cities: Building the Kosmos on Earth.) We learn of this official’s function, along with much other eating and drinking lore, as mentioned in previous chapters, from a large survey that includes excerpts from otherwise lost books called The Banquet of the Sophists, written in the third century AD by the author Athenaeus. For instance, it quoted (in XIV.660[33]) the Athenian historian Cleidemus to the effect that “there was a guild of mageiros cooks/slaughterers having official rank derived from this art; their business was to gather the multitude together.”
Norman Brown[34] (1947: pp. 25ff.) found that “the personal service which the herald rendered the king was a by-product of his ceremonial functions. … The king presides over the assembly, the heralds keep order; the king makes a sacrifice, the herald prepares the sacrificial animal; the king has a ceremonial banquet, the herald takes care of such ceremonial niceties as the proper division of the meat into portions.” Heralds “render the king personal service, particularly at royal banquets, where they even have the menial duty of washing the tables; they prepare the royal bath. … They are functionaries in sacred ceremonies, such as sacrifices and the ritual of divination by lottery; even the royal banquets at which they minister are in essence sacred meals.” In effect they became masters of ceremonies. (However, as oligarchies replaced chief-kings in classical antiquity, heralds were left mainly with the role of town crier.)
It is noteworthy that most words associating authority with “seat” reflect the seating positions at group meals. Royal chairs or thrones are emblems of rulership throughout the world—seats that everyone sees on public occasions. Administrative meetings are still called “sittings,” “sessions,” or “synods,” literally “a sitting together.” The Greek word for “chair,” “hedra,” underlies the word “cathedral,” literally the “seat” (or “see”) of a bishop.
It was largely with regard to public ritual occasions that archaic administrative status emerged. Hocart[35] (1970: pp. 137f.) found that the modern tribal chief’s “raison d’être is not to coordinate, but to be head of the ritual.” In Fiji, “One tribe was without a chief; it was run by the chieftains, the heads of clans. The people decided to have a chief. To govern them? No, the reason they gave was ‘that he might face the feasts.’ That is, they wanted some one to be the principal. Offerings involve two parties that ‘face each other’; in the state ritual the chief is one party and faces the feast,” receiving contributions, distributing food, and acting as stand-in for the gods or intermediary with them. (Hocart added that snobbery also “plays a part: to be without a king is to be in a position of inferiority in relation to neighbours.”)
In the tribal communities analyzed by Hocart and other anthropologists, the chief was responsible for seeing “that the other participants in the ritual play their proper part in the cosmic drama…” The chief typically took charge of the sacred storehouse and its sacred objects (whose value often derived from their use on festive public occasions). In performing public rituals the chief typically “takes the leading part; he it is who decides when it is to be performed, and during the celebration the proceedings are carried out under his direction, though he has while conducting them to follow out strictly the customs of his ancestors” (Hocart[36] 1970: p. 138, quoting Spencer and Gillen[37] 1927: p. 11).
The “bureaucracy of the sacrifice” reflected status in such a way as to exemplify what psychologists call “compensation”: The higher a person’s status in everyday life, the more servile he was supposed to behave at the ritual feast. Much as we refer to our highest political officials as public servants, so the church officials called deacons were literally “servers.” This compensatory behavior helped legitimize wealth by making its holders and other headmen appear to use their resources at the service of their community. And of course a servant of the gods was master of his fellow men.
Hosting feasts was an accepted way to establish or reinforce status. Funerals were one of the major such occasions. Plutarch reported that Sparta’s seventh-century BC Lycurgan legislation restricted lavish funeral behavior, and in 594 BC Solon banned excessive funereal pomp so as to restrain Athenian aristocrats from seeking prestige, and hence power, through the conspicuous consumption that characterized archaic feast-giving. But most other types of group meals remained a basic social ligament, reinforcing or establishing status.
The Semantics of Sacrifices and Drink-Communions
Festivals were organized as sacrifices, as was all eating of meat in classical Greece. The words “sacred” and “sacrifice” thus were associated with the idea of partaking in common meals. “All consumable meat comes from ritually slaughtered animals, and the butcher who sheds the animal’s blood bears the same functional name as the sacrificer posted next to the bloody altar,” wrote Detienne[38] (1989: p. 3). The Greeks kept this ritual violence at a distance. Even the knife used to butcher the animal was ritually hidden in a basket of grain carried by a young woman (Durand and Schnapp[39] 1989: p. 53). “Political power cannot be exercised without sacrificial practice. Any military or political undertaking—a campaign, engagement with the enemy, the conclusion of a treaty, works commissioned on a temporary basis, the opening of the assembly, or the assumption of office by the magistrates—each must begin with a sacrifice followed by a meal.”[40] All meals were made into sacred occasions involving proper sacrificial practice, and hence relations between humans and their deities (ultimately amongst themselves, of course).
Vernant[41] (1989: pp. 26f.) found that “thuo,” which originally meant the entire sacrificial ceremony, came in time to be secularized, meaning “to feast, to eat well.” The term “thuos” meant “incense,” whence “thyme,” literally “to cause to smoke or to smell strongly”; today the spice “thyme.” An association of meanings connects the ideas of smoke (hence “to rise”) with “theos,” “divine,” via “food of the gods.” The Latin counterpart is “fume,” reflecting the inhalation of incense at sacrificial festivals. The gods “rejoice in the sacrificial fumes, eat nothing, and thus enjoy the superb state of immortality in which human beings have installed them.”
Alcoholic drinks played a central role in archaic group meals. The bronze tripods displayed at Delphi and other sacred Greek centers were of special value not only as cooking vessels but as kraters to dilute their wine with water (Athenaeus II.38ff.). Benveniste[42] (1973: pp. 456f.) found that Greek “hieros” corresponds to Vedic “isirah,” associated “with the idea of ‘vigor’ and ‘vivacity,’” and the adjective “isayati,” “‘he makes lively, strong.’” The feminine “is-” is “a beverage used in offering which strengthens and refreshes,” apparently the “water of life,” much as modern languages call liquor “spirits.” The Greeks called their sacred drink “ambrosia.” The word is related to “amrita,” “immortality,” and is analogous to the Vedic “soma,” the important ceremonial drink, first consumed in sacred ritual contexts. Aristotle stated that the Greek verb “methu,” “to get drunk,” derives from the use of wine after sacrifice. The word is related to “mead,” the ancient honey-wine, and also to the “amethyst,” a charm intended to protect its wearers against drunkenness (“a” + “methu”).
In Japan, “Saki[43] was originally brewed as an offering to the gods; mortals would then gather to share it at the altar,” reported Farb and Armelagos[44] (1980: p. 104) in their anthropological review of eating habits throughout the world, Consuming Passions. “Although saki is no longer regarded as a sacred beverage, its communal function is still deeply imbedded [sic] in an elaborate drinking etiquette. Everyone pours for someone else, as an indication that each is at the service of the others. Because saki cups are extremely small and need to be refilled frequently, every diner must remain attentive to the others throughout the meal. A cup to be refilled is invariably lifted from the table, as an acknowledgment that in the pouring of the saki service is being rendered.”
We are dealing here with a widespread practice. The English anthropologist Arthur Hocart[45] (1927: pp. 49f., 59f.) noted that the Fijian word to install a ruler meant “to drink,” apparently because “The kava ceremonial was the central point of the chief’s installation. … [I]n Fiji kava is freely drunk as we drink spirits, but never without the prescribed ceremonial, though the form may be simpler at private parties than at public functions. It was not, however, always drunk so freely: it is asserted that of old only chiefs drank of it; it was also used for libations to the gods. This is all one and the same since chiefs were gods.”
As such practices spread from the sacred to the secular sphere, it often became difficult to draw the line between group meals and ritual sacrifices. The latter were not yet compartmentalized as otherworldly events, but were the setting for economic exchanges in general. This hardly should be surprising, for religion historically has provided a context to socialize personal egoism. One might say that it does “from without” what table manners do from within. In both cases personal and social values are being shaped. The feast is a paradigmatic experience with its careful rules for consuming and distributing food and drink. (Detienne and Vernant’s 1989 The Cuisine of Sacrifice provided a helpful bibliography.)
At the end of antiquity the religious communion or agape came to symbolize the sacred communion with Christ. Hocart[46] (1970: p. 47) pointed out that such communions were a normal part of rituals. Eating food and drinking wine in a group context linked all participants in an extended group identity, making the meal sacrosanct and imbuing it with a symbolic meaning.
Urban Festivals and the Emergence of Markets
To bring large numbers of people together, often on foot for as long as two weeks, required that they be fed. This called for large sacrifices of animals and the serving of great volumes of drink. Festivities were organized in what became a more or less standard agenda, with the New Year feast providing the ultimate model, above all the New Years at which new rulers were crowned.
Throughout most of the Near East these festivals were the major occasions for many people to eat meat, and also to drink liquor. Rawlinson[47] (1881: I.577) reported that “Meat, which is never eaten to any great extent in the East, was probably beyond the means of most persons.”[48] The group feast retained the idea of setting aside livestock and other resources deemed sacred.
A bull, ram, and goat were sacrificed on the eve of Delphi’s Pythian Games and were eaten by the participants in a group meal. As usual, “Apollo’s portion (and that of other gods) was the fat, bones, and some cuts of the less choice meat.” The Olympic festival (whose stadium’s capacity of 40,000 made it as large as its modern counterparts) lasted five days, highlighted by the sacrifice of a hundred oxen (hecatomb) on the morning of the third day.
Renfrew[49] (1988) noted that such games helped bring into being a food market and catalyze the use of money. Victors celebrated by hosting private festivities in the evenings, and for other meals, “There was no shortage of local people anxious to earn a few drachmas by hiring out tents, mules, and donkeys, selling food and drink, and providing entertainment for the crowds when the Games were not in progress.” The monetary historian Barclay Head[50] (1887: p. lxix) noted that “From the frequent mention of the Public Games on the coins of the Imperial age struck in Greek cities, it is evident that these periodical festivals everywhere created a demand for current coin in larger quantities than was sufficient for the ordinary requirements of the citizens. It is even probable that many of the less important towns only coined money at such times.”
This commercialization recalls the evolution of the Greek “tamias” from “cutter” via “distributor” to “treasurer.” It also reflects the temple’s role as a storage place, beginning with seed grain and other food (the thesaurus), penned-up animals, and precious objects such as were stored in the Parthenon. Sacred, commercial, and monetary functions went hand in hand.
The linkage between money and provisioning festivals had a long genesis. On the one hand stood proto-monetary contributions to the public feasts; on the other were the prestige money prizes awarded to victors in the games. In the Iliad (23.740–751) Achilles posted as rewards for his runners a silver krater in which to mix wine and water, a fattened ox, and a half-talent of gold (Puhvel[51] 1988: p. 30). “Achilles’ first prize for horse racing was a woman plus tripod, followed by an untamed horse, a cauldron, two talents of gold, and a bowl (Iliad 23.262–270). The wrestling champion got a tripod valued at twelve heads of cattle, and to the loser went a woman worth a mere four (Iliad 23.702–705). Cattle were thus a form of value unit, and so were sheep, as in many other cultures,” along with women, food, and ceremonial utensils such as tripods, kraters, and serving bowls.
Proto-Money and the Feast
Long before bulk commodity trade developed, the exchange of food occurred in a ritualistic context. Proto-monetary transactions probably developed out of contributions to communal feasts. “Whether one conceives of… [festivals] as gatherings at public expense or as receptions of one group by another… the rural agapai presuppose and require the gift, which is above all a ‘contribution,’” wrote Gernet[52] (1981: p. 26). Sacred offerings, beginning with food, found their secular counterpart in marriage dowries and related types of gifts offered to cement alliances.
Led by the French structuralists, anthropologists have studied gift exchange and their associated group meals in search of a universal set of relationships. This approach is dangerous in explaining how trade and social values actually were shaped from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity, but there are at least some common denominators. It is clear, for instance, that gift exchange was incorporated into society’s rites of passage along with the group meal. Food and gifts were monetized by being standardized and impersonally “economic.” “[I]n many primitive societies,” wrote Lévi-Strauss[53] (1969: p. 52), “every ceremony celebrating an important event is accompanied by a distribution of wealth.” Sumptuous meals, usually accompanied by gifts, are made “on the occasions of births, marriages, deaths, exhumations, peace treaties, crimes and misdemeanours… [among the New Zealand Maori, and in Polynesia, at] ‘birth, initiating, marriage, sickness, death and other social events, as well as much religious ritual.’”
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, changes of property as well as social status called for a feast and its associated exchange of gifts. The earliest deciphered cuneiform records (dating from the Fara period c. 2600 BC in Sumer) reported that land transfers were “concluded by means of a meal, the victuals for which were supplied by the buyer,” and at which one party supplied a garment to the other (Malul[54] 1988: p. 363 discussing Koschaker[55] 1942). The sellers, their families, and neighbors participated in this friendly and symbolic meal as witnesses and functionaries.[56]
As part of the meal’s role in mediating changes in property ownership, compensation was due to the witnesses, herald, scribe, and other functionaries. This usually took the form of presents—“articles of clothing and food items, such as oil, barley, dates, and the like” (Malul[57] 1988: pp. 366ff., 372).[58] Such payments were leading toward the idea of formal economic compensation, that is, money. Compensation “prices” were inscribed in Mesopotamia’s public laws beginning with Urukagina’s “reform text” c. 2350 BC, which specified the number of loaves of bread due to ritual priests for conducting marriage and burial ceremonies. Ultimately such payments were monetized.
The essence of money and pricing is standardization. Inasmuch as each person must pay the same rate, uniform pricing represents a kind of egalitarianism. By classical antiquity we find a carefully equalizing “uniformity” ethic at work across a broad spectrum of activities. Just as every table guest (except for specially honored individuals) consumed equally, so each tribal or “feast” unit was assessed a standard contribution, which ultimately became a “price” or “tax.” One type of proto-money represented the contribution of food, livestock, and other sacrifices to the deities being honored or due to the feast’s officiating hierarchy. Another type developed out of the standardized gifts exchanged between the host and his guests.
The German monetary historian Bernhard Laum[59] (1924: p. 9) traced the origins of Greek money to the fact that the term for small coin, “obol,” derives from the spits or skewers (“oboloi”) on which meat was cooked and distributed.[60] Payments of weregild and other fines, the bride-price, and related obligations to transfer wealth also were traditionally denominated in livestock. The Homeric measure of value was the steer or ox.[61]
For many decades economists assumed that denominating fines and other payments in terms of livestock stemmed from their market value. However, comparative anthropology has shown that such animals rarely were sold. What then gave them their value? Laum[62] (1924: p. 56) found it to stem from their sacred role as sacrificial animals, above all at group meals. He suggested that the term “obelos”—at first the instrument of sacrifice—symbolized the head of livestock, or in time its commutation payment in monetary form. Such contributions helped establish market values. Money thus did not begin as a means of barter, much less coinage. “The clan,” he asserted (1929[63]: p. 41), “divided the sacrifice as its most important political act.” He concluded that it would be wrong to follow Herodotus in tracing the idea of nomos (“law”) to the division of land (as Measures, Rules, and Prices has pointed out on other grounds). What was being distributed first and foremost was meat and other food at sacrificial meals, and subsequently public contributions, fines, and related social obligations.
It is in the nature of livestock that they cannot readily be standardized. To transform them into monetary form, some general standard was necessary. Laum[64] (1924: pp. 27ff., 158f.) found that whereas “Secular exchange is almost always free and unmeasured, it is the exchange between gods and men that is first regulated by specific norms.” The selection of sacrificial animals was the first act of economic behavior. “It is in the cult, not in commerce (which knows no basis for typology, but remains purely individualistic) that the valuation of goods finds its origins.” (Farb and Armelagos[65] 1980: p. 133 found the Jewish selection of fruits equally rigorous.)
Eating utensils such as the obols and drachmas noted above could be standardized to serve as monetary catalysts. Theopompus (cited in Athenaeus VI.231) noted that in archaic times the sacred precinct at Delphi “was adorned with bronze offerings which were not statues, but cauldrons and tripods made of bronze.” This enabled standardized offerings to be made to the temples which played so great a role in archaic economic life.
Votive offerings of silver and gold began to be made around 650 BC, starting with King Gyges of Lydia and his successor Croesus, followed by the tyrants Gelon and Hieron of Syracuse—the most prosperous Greek colony in Sicily—in the fifth century BC. The use of prestige food-vessels as proto-money was in keeping with the prizes awarded to victors in the Greek games cited earlier.
At the transition to the modern era we find festivals serving as venues for more clearly economic exchanges, above all the commercial fairs of medieval Europe. Already thousands of years earlier, from the Sumerian temples and palaces down through classical times, the feeding of large numbers of people was a regular day-to-day operation. The administrative sophistication needed to feed public dependents and royal entourages in the Neo-Babylonian empire and its Persian conquerors was made clear by the histories of Persia written by Heracleides of Cumae (Cyme) and Ctesias (excerpted in Athenaeus II.145–146 and XII.517). They stated that the Persian king normally spent 15 talents daily on his retainers and wives, and might expend 400 talents to feed as many as 15,000 men at a time. On public holidays everyone dined in the royal reception hall, but normally some guests sat outdoors where they could be seen, while others ate “indoors in the king’s company. Yet even these do not eat in his presence, for there are two rooms opposite each other, in one of which the king has his meal, in the other his invited guests. The king can see them through the curtain at the door, but they cannot see him.”[66] After dinner the king usually commanded a symposium to which a dozen companions or so were “summoned by one of the eunuchs; and entering they drink with him, though even they do not have the same wine; moreover, they sit on the floor, while he reclines on a couch supported by feet of gold; and they depart after having drunk to excess.”[66]
Heracleides observed that although the royal dinner might “appear prodigal to one who merely hears about it, … when one examines it carefully it will be found to have been… [organized] with economy and even parsimony; and the same is true of the dinners among other Persians in high station. For [of the] one thousand animals are slaughtered daily for the king,” from livestock and game down to poultry and birds, “only moderate portions are served to each of the king’s guests, and each of them may carry home whatever he leaves untouched at the meal.” This was how the nobility and retainers obtained the food for their own households. “[T]he most highly honoured of the king’s guests go to court only for breakfast,” so that they could then take the leftovers home “to entertain their own guests.”[66]
“But the greater part of these meats and other foods are taken out into the courtyard for the body-guard and light-armed troopers maintained by the king; there they divide all the half-eaten remnants of meat and bread and share them in equal portions. Just as hired soldiers in Greece receive their wages in money, these men receive food from the king in requital for services.” The slaves were given what was left on the tables.
From the Group Meal to the Symposium: Drinking and Egoistic Self-Control
Tablemates might have strived to impress one another, but it was not proper to lord it over others. Mastery was demonstrated by self-restraint. The Greek symposium-banquet was a forum, perhaps even an arena, to show off one’s wit, but not one’s ego. The objective was to share, not dominate. To hog a discussion was considered as impolite as to take more than one’s share of food and drink.
Temperance in eating and drinking was the antonym to hubris, and the poetry of Theognis and Solon used it as a general metaphor for good order—“eunomia”—in the seventh and sixth centuries BC.
The Greeks frowned on the Medians and Persians for eating in a reclining position on couches rather than sitting at tables. Barbarian hosts—soon emulated by local nouveau riches—sought to impress their guests with an ostentatious variety of meats, wine, side dishes, and sauces. The Greeks typically took a ceremonial first drink of pure wine but mixed subsequent drinks with water in a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio. But in their view, the easterners tended to drink to excess. “Wine was drunk both at the meal and afterward, often in an undue quantity; and the close of the feast was apt to be a scene of general turmoil and confusion,” such as was described by Xenophon (Cyrop. I.3) and Herodotus (I.133).
Surveying these ancient descriptions of meals, Rawlinson[67] (1881: I.579, II.317f., and III.19f., III.236) observed that in Assyrian sculptures of banquet-scenes “it is drinking and not eating that is represented.”[68] Babylonian banquets “were magnificent, but generally ended in drunkenness; they were not, however, mere scenes of coarse indulgence, but had a certain refinement.”[69] Music was “a recognised accompaniment to the feast; and bands of performers, entering with the wine, entertained the guests with concerted pieces. A rich odour of perfumes floated around, for the Babylonians were connoisseurs in unguents,”[70] coming as they did from a hot climate.
Drunkenness had long existed throughout the Near East. The Persians followed a widespread practice when, once a year, at the feast of Mithras, their king was obliged by custom to get drunk. This annual bout with drunkenness was part of the purgation and renewal ceremony to wipe the slate clean. In fact, private drinking throughout the ancient world appears as a secularization of originally sacred rituals (as noted above). Plato’s Laws (775b) thus were conservative in advising: “To drink to the point of intoxication is not proper to any other occasion except the festivals in honor of the god who gave the wine.”[71]
A treatise on the drinking cup of Nestor by Asclepiades of Myrlea (cited in Athenaeus XI.489) made clear the kind of cosmological symbolism that reflected the sacred role of drink. Just as the universe (kosmos) was spherical, so the ancients made round tables and circular tripods (which they consecrated to the gods and covered with stars). They made round cakes which they called “moons,” and called loaves “artos,” “because among geometrical shapes, the circle is perfectly even and complete. Hence, too, the cup, which contains liquid food, they made circular in imitation of the universe. But Nestor’s cup is even more characteristic. For it has stars also, which the Poet likens to studs, because stars are round just as nails are, and are fastened to the sky, as Aratus says.”
As part of this cosmologizing we find the Pythagorean proverb, “Drink five or three, not four.” Plutarch (Table Talk at 657) explained this as follows. Just as the musical ratio of 3:2 “gives a concord to the fifth, 2:1 the concord of the octave, and the concord of the fourth (which is weakest) consists in the ratio 4:3, so the musicologists of Dionysus observed three concords of wine and water, fifth, third and fourth. … ‘Five,’ indeed, is in the ratio 3:2, three parts of water being mixed with two of wine. … The mixture with a ratio of 2:3 is most harmonious, a complete inducer of sleep and relaxer of care, a ‘protecting and soothing governess,’ in Hesiod’s phrase [Works and Days 464], because it creates a profound calm and quiet among our lordly and disordered passions.” (The ratio “three” signifies “two parts of water being mixed with one of wine; and ‘four,’ three parts water per unit of wine,” an overly sober drink.) Such quasimusical philosophizing over moderation in drink indicates the desire to find objective and celestial ordering principles that could be applied to human behavior.
But of course this behavior changed over time, reflecting society’s own transformation. It hardly is surprising that the drinking habits reflected antiquity’s growing secularization. Athenaeus (II.36) quoted from a comedy by Epicharmus:
- A. After the sacrifice, a feast… after the feast, drinking.
- B. Fine, in my humble opinion!
- A. Yes, but after drinking comes mockery, after mockery filthy insult, after insult a lawsuit, after the lawsuit a verdict, after the verdict shackles, the stocks, and a fine.
Eubulus made the god of wine, Dionysus, say: “Three bowls only do I mix for the temperate—one to health, which they empty first, the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep. When this is drunk up wise guests go home. The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to violence; the fifth to uproar, the sixth to drunken revel, the seventh to black eyes. The eighth is the policeman’s, the ninth belongs to biliousness, and the tenth to madness and hurling the furniture.”[72]
But the Greeks found this barbaric. Drinking was supposed to be a test of a man’s moderation, showing off his self-control.
Appetite, Thirst, and Hubris, From Food and Drink to Money
This chapter began with the idea of food as the primordial form of wealth. The production, distribution, and consumption of food, often in a ritualistic context, brought the first economic hierarchies into being. In addition to reflecting traditional ideas of social balance and equity, table manners and drinking customs actively shaped these attitudes by providing citizens with a model of how to deal with their appetites in general. As the object of human appetite par excellence, food became an analog for one’s drives for wealth, power, sex, and other expressions of personal egoism. What made the appetite for wealth unique, however, was its insatiability: The wealth-seeker would always want more, without limit.
Such insatiability was akin to hubris, a word which the poetry of Archilochus and Solon used to describe the oligarchic excesses that began to tear Greek society apart in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Hubris meant arrogant immoderation, a trampling on other people’s rights without thought as to the consequences. A common metaphor for this loss of ego-balance was a banquet deteriorating into drunken revelry, with the participants making hogs of themselves as they lost all self-control.
Inasmuch as drinking was inherently less moderate than eating (“No desire is more insistent than the desire to drink,” observed Athenaeus X.434), the thirst for wealth became the usual metaphor for insatiability. Archilochus described his city Paros as becoming drunk with wealth, while in Athens, Solon found “good measure” (eunomie) in social relations to have its analog in moderation at the dining table (Nagy[73] 1985: p. 61): “Eunomie shackles those who are without dike (Solon 33), it checks koros [“insatiability”] (34), it blackens hubris (34), it ‘withers the sprouting blossoms of derangement’ (35), and it ‘makes crooked judgments (dikai) straight’ (36).”
Aristotle (384–322 BC) devoted three chapters of his Politics (Book I, Chapters 8–10) to economic and financial matters. Economic organization, he said, resulted first and foremost from the way in which society provided itself with food. “There are many different kinds of food, and that means many different ways of life, both for animals and humans. … Some animals live in herds and others scattered about, whichever helps them to find food.” Among humans, nomads did the least work, but as population density increased, it was necessary to raise animals and cultivate the land. Families began to specialize, and many began to exchange their products for food produced by others.
The “natural” mode of acquisition, continued Aristotle, was to produce use values directly. “One form then of property-getting is, in accordance with nature, a part of household management” in the sense that the household (oikos) produced its own basic needs. Agricultural and pastoral economies had no need to trade to obtain their food. According to Aristotle, natural wealth was defined in terms of its use value, as “a collection of tools for use in the administration of a household or a state. … wealth and the acquisition of goods by nature, and belonging to household-management (oikonomos).”
Aristotle found it natural enough for money to serve as a catalyst aiding exchange. Indeed, it was increasingly necessary as society grew more complex and labor more specialized. But with the division of labor, economic organization went “beyond nature.” Markets were developed to mediate exchange, and money became the means of obtaining one’s basic needs. Indeed, money became an object in itself for people who did not produce their own food and other necessities. People were increasingly dependent on money to obtain their necessities. It was at this point that economic relations became “unnatural” and socially polarizing.
Aristotle thus juxtaposed household management (oikonomos) to the commercial acquisition of wealth (chrematistike). The latter was part of household management and its use values to the extent that families needed to buy certain necessities. However, markets became perverse when money-wealth (chrema, “exchange value”) became an objective in and for itself. Tools and other forms of capital were means to make things, not to amass for their own sake. But commercial specialization swept aside this set of “natural” priorities. Aristotle thus represented exchange value as being “associated with trade (chrematistike), which is not productive of goods in the full sense but only through their exchange. … All those engaged in acquiring goods go on increasing their coin without limit… the end is sheer increase” for its own sake, not to expand use values. Exchange values thus reflected an “unnatural” way of acquiring goods.
Whereas “natural” economies maintained an equitable balance as to living standards and status among households, market exchange broke up this balance. Aristotle quoted from a poem of Solon: “No bound is set on riches for men.” He concluded that “Some people imagine that increase is a function of household management (oikonomos).” Some people likewise “are eager for life, but not for the good life; so, desire for life being unlimited, they desire also in unlimited amount what enables life to go on. These people turn all skills into skills of acquiring… [money], as though that were the end and everything had to serve that end.” Social balance thus was aggravated rather than helped by the invention of coinage (nomisma, or “numismatics”). As a man-made convention (nomos, “law”), money went beyond “natural” exchange. Commerce based on exchange values ultimately undercut the “natural” system of production and barter based on use values. As this occurred, society tended to lose balance. Personal character was warped into hubris, arrogant power-lust. Aristotle cited the legend of King Midas of Phrygia praying to Dionysus that everything he touched would turn to gold. His prayer was granted, and Midas found that he could not eat, for whatever food he touched was “monetized.” “And it will often happen that a man with wealth in the form of coined money will not have enough to eat; and what a ridiculous kind of wealth is that which even in abundance will not save you from dying with hunger!”
Yet widespread hunger was exactly what Athens was experiencing after it lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta at the end of the fifth century BC. The war impoverished many families and led to unprecedented social polarization as farmers borrowed against their land, only to lose it to creditors. Many persons were reduced to wearing threadbare rags, and a rising tide of robbery and burglary reflected a desperate response to spreading poverty (see David[74] 1984). Trade in grain and other necessities came to enrich a few dealers rather than feed the many.[75]
If food was a natural means to satisfy one’s appetite rather than to hoard and sell, it followed that the land which produced this food likewise should not be monopolized. Most societies prior to Rome had protected each family’s source of livelihood on the land. In cases where the land was forfeited for debt or sold under economic duress, the transfer was subject to repurchase or limited in time, e.g., until a new ruler took the throne, celebrated his 30th Jubilee or for any other reason “proclaimed equity and freedom.” In this way an agricultural self-sufficiency was preserved. Even Plato’s Laws (744e), hardly a democratic tract, stated that no citizen “should have the right to own property more than five times as great as the smallest property owned.” (Commenting on this passage in Politics II.7, Aristotle suggested that adjustments should reflect and reward honor and accomplishment, and also take account of the number of children for whom the property-holder was responsible.)
Aristotle and the subsequent Stoics juxtaposed the self-limiting gentleman—the Latin “modest man”[76]—to merchants and moneylending usurers. The general dislike of interest, Aristotle concluded (Politics I.10), “is fully justified, for the gain arises out of currency itself, not as a product of that for which currency was provided. Coinage was intended to be a means of exchange, whereas interest represents an increase in the currency itself. Hence its name, tokos (‘offspring’), for each animal produces its like, and interest is currency born of currency. And so of all types of business this is the most contrary to nature.”
As Vernant[77] (1982: p. 84) paraphrased this line of thought: “Ultimately wealth has no object but itself. Created to satisfy the needs of life, as a mere means of subsistence, it becomes its own end, a universal, insatiable, boundless craving that nothing will ever be able to assuage. At the root of wealth one therefore discovers a corrupted disposition, a perverse will, a pleonexia—the desire to have more than others, more than one’s share, to have everything. In Greek eyes, ploutos (wealth) was bound up with a kind of disaster… an ethos, the logic of a certain kind of behavior.” It was the ethic of hubris.
Such self-centeredness has become the basis of modern economic theory. Ironically, as Lowry[78] (1987: pp. 230ff.) noted: “the whole profit-motivated market process which we now call the ‘economy’ was regarded by Aristotle as chrematistics and external to his oikonomia. His political economy was directed to an analysis of the management and satisfaction of the needs of the household and state and not to the study of a market oriented toward profit maximization.” Modern economics thus inverts the views of classical antiquity. The self-interested businessman and consumer whose actions are steered by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (rather than by group-minded altruism or active public policy), Aristotle “would probably have called homo chrematisticus.”
Greek dramatists portrayed how the limitless greed for money became a disease of the psyche. In Aristophanes’s last play, Plutus (388 BC), the character Chremylos observed that one may have too much love, music, honor, valor, ambition, and command, and his friend Cario added that one may be oversatiated with food—bread, sweets, cakes, figs, and barley—but no one ever has enough wealth (lines 189–193). Chremylos then stated:
- “give a man a sum of thirteen talents,
- And all the more he hungers for sixteen;
- Give him sixteen, and he must needs have forty,
- Or life’s not worth living, so he says.”
As Chremylos later put matters (lines 500–504): “Our life nowadays can only be described as madness or lunacy. For many wicked men are rich having amassed wealth unjustly, while many others though scrupulously honest are poor and hungry.” The feminine character of Poverty “claims that she makes men better than does Wealth, better both in body and mind,” and her stimulus prompts industry. But Chremylos said that he loved wealth more than his wife and only son (lines 250f. See David[79] 1984: p. 41).
Plato’s Republic (Book IV at 421d) reflected similar ideas. Socrates asked what corrupts craftsmen, and answered “Wealth and poverty. … Will a potter who’s gotten rich still be willing to attend to his art? And will he become idler and more careless than he was? Doesn’t he become a worse potter then? And further, if from poverty he’s not even able to provide himself with tools or anything else for his art, he’ll produce shoddier works… Then from both poverty and wealth the products of the arts are worse and the men themselves are worse.” It followed that guardians of the Republic should protect against too much wealth as well as against too few goods. They should pursue the golden mean—the keyword of Athenian philosophy as the economy lost its balance after the fifth century BC.
So we are brought back to the well-known mottos of Greek philosophy: “Neither too much nor too little,” “Step not over the beam of the balance,” or simply “Avoid and hate all mean advantage, and seek for equality.”[80] Wealth was considered more corrosive than poverty, for it was addictive. The poor merely wanted to achieve normal living standards. The warping of character into a state of arrogant hubris was a problem that plagued the rich, not the poor. This meant that curing poverty would not cure crime, for the rich had become addicted to wealth, and sought to obtain it by hook or by crook. Solon condemned the hubris of the rich (Nagy[81] 1985: p. 43), and this also was Aristotle’s view (Constitution of Athens 5.2f.). In Aristophanes’s Ekklesiazousai the character Blepyros hoped that the problem of theft would disappear once everyone was provided with life’s basic necessities. However, Chremes pointed out, “prosperity had not actually stopped the wealthy stealing more and more; on the contrary, they had proved to be the biggest thieves” (lines 608, 667f., cited in David[82] 1984: p. 12). Similarly, Aristotle (Politics II.7 at 1267a) recognized that men commit the most serious crimes because “their aims are extravagant, not just to provide themselves with necessities. Who ever heard of a man making himself a dictator in order to keep warm?” Therefore, David paraphrased, “preventing highway robbery by removing the problems of hunger and cold, cannot… be a panacea for social ills.”
The usual viewpoint was one of “the wicked rich versus the honest poor.” From the perspective of the common good, the problem with wealth was that merchants tended to amass it at the expense of their fellow citizens. The objective of becoming prosperous, it was thought, should be limited to avoiding poverty and living “the good life.” This could not be achieved where inequality had passed a certain degree. “Wherever you see beggars in a city,” wrote Plato (Republic 552d), “there are somewhere concealed thieves and cutpurses and temple robbers and similar experts in crime.” Aristotle agreed (Politics II.6 at 1265b): “poverty produces faction and crime.” He concluded (VI.5 at 1320a) that “the duty of a true democrat is to see that the population is not destitute,” for this corrupts democracy. (David[83] 1984: pp. 11ff. provided further discussion.)
This ethic of distributive justice was threatened by the money economy. Many communities had ensured that their citizens owned enough land to remain self-sufficient in food, but property holdings became increasingly unequal over time. One of the major areas in which the egalitarian ethic survived was in the realm of eating and drinking. Stoic philosophy held that citizens should conduct themselves economically like well-behaved guests at a group meal, with moderation, self-restraint, and a generous concern for the welfare of their companions.
The symbolic ritual equality of servings also was undermined by the growth in prosperity. As Plutarch’s Table Talk (II.10 at 644) observed: “The custom of distributing portions of the meat was abandoned when dinners became extravagant; for it was not possible, I suppose, to divide fancy cakes and Lydian puddings and rich sauces and all sorts of other dishes made of ground and grated delicacies; these luxurious dainties got the better of men and the custom of an equal share for all was abandoned.”
With economic inequality a growing narcissism replaced cosmological paradigms. Music and dance became ecstatic, as did Dionysian-type religion. Banqueting was highlighted by the consumption of alcohol in an individualistic rather than sacred context. The Roman well-to-do wanted pictures and statues of themselves, not of some stereotype. They wanted to eat without constraint, however little might be left for others, and likewise to amass as much property as possible, regardless of the broad social consequences. They were drunk with wealth.
In an essay “On Drunkenness,” Chamaeleon of Heracleia (cited in Athenaeus XI.461) wrote that “If those who enjoy power and wealth esteem this devotion to drunkenness above everything else, it is not to be wondered at” that they would demand ever larger wine-cups. “This is why the larger forms of drinking-cups grew to be the fashion among persons in power. But this is, in fact, not at all an ancient custom among the Greeks, but is a recent invention, imported from the barbarians. For they, being lost to all culture, betake themselves to quantities of wine and procure for themselves superfluous foods of all sorts.”
From the Bronze Age Saturnalia to the Roman Orgy
One form of imbalance recognized as helping maintain rather than undermine social health was the purging Saturnalia. This occurred at the New Year re-creation of order, above all when Bronze Age rulers were crowned or celebrated their 30th anniversary on the throne. By correcting economic inequity, these releases of tension mitigated causes for jealousy, while psychologically the festival provided a release to “get out of the system” the residue of resentment and general tension.
The New Year ceremony’s agenda underwent a secularization via the Athenian agon dramas—“plays”—to culminate in the Roman ludi and military triumphs. These festivals were popular but not exactly egalitarian. Ambitious politicians bid for popular support by staging games “on a large and ever increasing scale,” symptomatic of the polarization to which imperial Rome succumbed. As this occurred, “the old religious word [for holiday,] feriae[,] becomes gradually supplanted, in the sense of a public holiday of amusement, by the word ludi [ludicrous], and came at last to mean, as it still does in Germany, the holidays of schoolboys” (Fowler[84] 1909: p. 288).[85] The English cognate is “fair.”
The Great Games lasted from September 519 BC until the first century BC. Fowler[86] (1909: p. 291) described these autumnal equinox contests as having “their origin in the return of a victorious army at the end of the season of war, when king or consul had to carry out the vows he had made when entering on his campaign. The usual form of the vow was to entertain the people on his return, in honor of Jupiter, and thus they were originally called ludi votivi, before they were incorporated as a regularly recurring festival. … thus in the year 70 BC Pompey’s triumphal ludi votivi immediately preceded the Ludi Romani of that year, giving the people in all some thirty days of holiday.”
The military character of these games was made evident by the fact that “the Ludi Romani consisted chiefly of chariot-races until 364 BC (when plays were first introduced), together with other military evolutions or exercises.” What was not military was usually a political bid for popular acclaim. The Ludi Plebeii were held in November. In 220 BC Flaminius built as a site for these games the Circus Flaminius in the Campus Martius, named for the champion of popular rights. His objective was to build a “new place of entertainment… free of aristocratic associations” (Fowler[87] 1909: pp. 300, 293f.). By the first century BC, spectators were admitted “free of cost, as being part of certain religious festivals which it was the duty of the government to keep up.” Actually, Roman politicians paid for the public games out of their own purse, often helped by their friends and political allies. As early as 176 BC the senate limited such spending, following lavish outlays by the aedile Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who squeezed the money out of Rome’s subject Italian populations (Livy[88] XL.44).
The archaic New Year re-creations of order can barely be found in these overlayerings. As festi became ludi, the spirit of Athenian drama gave way to mere pantomime. Silent gesticulation replaced verbal communication and discussion. The change was in part a symptom of growing physical scale (large groups could not hear spoken dialogue), but it also signified a shift away from cosmological renewal to mere entertainment.
The population was left with the games and carnivals climaxing in the late Roman orgies, which turned the word “Saturnalia” into a synonym for loss of social balance. By the end of antiquity, what began as sacred traditions became secularized and militarized. Most of these traces have been lost in the commercial fairs, civic parades, and games of recent centuries. The archaic festival agenda was passed on to the modern era mainly via the Christian communion and the periodic meals held annually by corporate bodies down through the early centuries of our epoch.
Looking over the broad sweep of public festivals through the ages, certain telling trends are apparent. Already by the third millennium BC, rulers had cupbearers. (For instance, Sargon of Akkad c. 2350 BC was cupbearer to the king of Kish.) This meant that they no longer were the first to drink as part of their ritual offering of sacrifices. In his essay on “Hieron,” or “The Tyrant’s Character,” Xenophon (cited in Athenaeus [IV.171]) wrote that “The tyrant lives in distrust even of food and drink; why, instead of being the first to offer the gods the consecrating morsel, they bid their serving-men take a taste first because of their suspicion that even in this rite they may eat or drink something harmful.” Cosmological practices were subordinated to worldly maneuvering.
Also reflecting these changes was the role of public officers hitherto provided with food in the course of their duties. In archaic Greece they were known as “parasites.” The term meant “meal companion,” from sitos (“meal”) and para (“beside”). Originally, such persons were the aides selected to accompany public officials in their rounds and duties. Some were assistants to the priests in charge of collecting grain to provision public feasts. Aristotle wrote of the city of Methone: “There were two parasites for each magistrate, and one for each military office; they received regular contributions from certain other persons, and particularly fish from the fisherman.” As public workers, demiourgoi, they were supported by the state; or, if aides, they were included in the meals taken by the these officials.
In his Attic Dialect, Crates wrote that “in earlier times parasite was the name given to those who were chosen to select the sacred grain, and there was a special repository for their use. Wherefore, in the royal code the following also stands written: ‘He who is king shall see that the magistrates are appointed and that the parasites are chosen from the demes according to the statutes. And the parasites are to select, each from his own share in the king’s office, eight quarts of barley, and those Athenians who are in the sacred precinct are to be feasted therewith according to ancestral custom.’”
In his discussion of the changing meaning of “parasite” over time, Athenaeus (VI.234–236) noted that one scholar wrote: “among the ancients we find it used of something sacred, equivalent to companion at a sacred feast.” The parasite was simply a guest, one who ate beside the host. By the end of antiquity he became an uninvited guest, winning his invitation through flattery and buffoonery, a stock character in Roman comedies. We thus find once again a degradation of status from sacred and public to private. This inversion of meaning reflects that of society at large.
As a closing image of this chapter I would like to cite how different are today’s formal meals from the ancient symposium. The cultural historian Bernard Rudofsky organized as the centerpiece of an exhibit on dining at New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum the stark contrast between Asian and western eating utensils. Against a single pair of chopsticks was juxtaposed the western 144-piece full dinner service replete with a wide variety of spoons, forks, and knives for each dish from salad and soup through the main course to dessert. Most people, of course, use only three or four utensils with their meal, even on formal occasions. The message being conveyed was that elaborate culinary ritual reflects modern class-conscious hierarchies by excluding from the common meal guests not of one’s own social class.
Conclusion
This chapter and the previous two chapters have focused on the cosmological grounding of personal expression—writing, music and dance, the arts, and the design of table manners and communal festivals. At their inception these modes of expression were highly formalized. They were formalized in such a way as to subordinate personal individualism to the communal context. Doing this in a cosmological manner provided an “objective” basis for the ethic being communicated. The ideal was not to benefit (or appear to benefit) any one group more than others. The next part of The Creation of Order will continue this theme of equitable distribution. Later chapters will explore how ancient communities divided themselves into tribal fractions, and also cover how individuals who could not fit into these family-based structures—because of infirmity, loss of parents, poverty, or simply because of their alien birth—were set aside as public workers. Chapter 9 then traces how urban sites were first elaborated as sacred cosmological areas with ritual standardization procedures, city layouts, and communal hearths. I show how all these examples of social structuring reflected archaic ideas of rectitude and righteousness.
Ultimately the periodic social renewal of this cosmological context was stopped. This is the point where “western civilization” began as a distinct continuum. A philosophy of every man for himself replaced the older tradition of periodic renewal. Wealth was permitted to operate as an increasingly arrogant dynamic in and of itself, with no communal overrides to protect the poor whose freedom and lands were being consumed.
Over and above its effect on social evolution, the dissolution of periodic renewal of the social kosmos affected how the world was perceived. It opened the way for more individualism, and also a free-flowing realism. Dance became more a vehicle for individualistic expression, as did banquets and the poetry recited at them—and, for that matter, religion. Statuary and portraiture grew more free to reflect the actual physical character of their subjects rather than regressing it to the traditional canon of proportions and attributes. Reigns were counted in actual calendrical time rather than being assigned the cosmological proportions found in the Sumerian King List and the biblical Patriarch List. And music became mere entertainment, as did public festival performances.
Key Concepts
This glossary of key concepts will help readers who are new to the subject of archaic human history.
Keywords: “Festival” (lit. “feast”), “companion” (lit. “a person with whom one breaks bread”), and various servers such as the “deacon” (originally “an officer to serve at sacred feasts”) and the Greek “magieros” or “tamias” (“butcher”/“cutter”/“distributor”/“treasurer”).
Key image: Communities and corporate bodies typically defined themselves in terms of who could attend the communal New Year feast or other “rebirth” occasions. A carefully measured equality of portions symbolized the parity of the guests, subject to the “bureaucracy of the sacrifice” with its special portions served to officers and honored guests.
Lunar symbols: The communal hearth (Latin “focus”) where official meals were served. Also the Greek spits and handfuls thereof (“oboloi” and “drachmae”), associated with contributions of meat or livestock to the communal sacrifices.
Solar symbol: The New Year Saturnalia was the major archaic social occasion. The ruler headed the feast, often with the high priest acting as master of ceremonies.
Principle of regularity: Each guest was to receive a standardized portion appropriate to their rank. (This also was the case with rations distributed to temple and palace dependents.) Some festivals were occasions for taking a census and (re)dividing the community into moieties or tribes.
Periodic renewal ceremony: Festivals were held at major annual or monthly turning points, above all the New Year and coronation ceremonies where social order and hierarchies were renewed.
Integration with the social kosmos: Public feasts were the major occasions for binding the community’s families together via exchange and establishing marriage ties. At the New Year festival laws and royal justice and freedom measures were proclaimed.
International interface: Gift exchange and intermarriage created bonds of mutual obligation among extended communities. The sacred games of Greek cities provided an occasion for promoting a pan-Hellenic identity.
Public character: Every formal public occasion was marked by a group meal, as were occasions requiring witnesses, such as land transfers in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.
Religious sanctification: Any Greek consumption of meat was a sacred occasion. The butcher/servers were male priestly officials.
Ultimate dissolution: Saturnalia degenerated into orgies, while the Roman ludi games and pantomimes replaced the Greek dramatic tradition.
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- ↑ Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in Clifford Geertz (ed.), Myth, Symbol, and Culture (New York: 1971), p. 61.
- ↑ I use male pronouns throughout this chapter because of antiquity’s sexually segregated functions. A woman’s place then was at the family hearth; the servers at classical banquets were men. For the Greeks, “There is not a single example of a mageiros, butcher-sacrificer-cook, who is not male” (Detienne 1989: pp. 131, 143). This means that in “the homology between political power and sacrificial practice,” women “are without the political rights reserved for male citizens, they are kept apart from the altars, meat, and blood.”
- ↑ Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (Boston: 1980), p. 103.
- ↑ Werner Jaeger, Paideia (Oxford: 1936).
- ↑ Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: 1969 [1949]), p. 33.
- ↑ Audrey Isabel Richards, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe (London: 1961 [1939]), p. 197.
- ↑ A methodological note: Throughout The Creation of Order I concentrate on Near Eastern and Mediterranean antiquity rather than ranging through space and time searching for some allegedly universal pattern of order. While many roots of archaic order no doubt derive from the Eurasian neolithic and Ice Age, I think it is quite dangerous to take as a proxy for antiquity the modern tribal enclaves all too often mixed together as representing “the primitive.”
Most theorizing about table manners has been done by the French structuralists, whose methodology derives from the writings of Marcel Mauss and his uncle Émile Durkheim early in the 20th century AD. A quantum leap occurred with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s series of studies on The Raw and the Cooked (1970, originally published in 1964–1968). His shortcomings are well criticized by Mary Douglas (1971: p. 62): “Here and there his feet touch solid ground, but mostly he is orbiting in rarefied space where he expects to find universal food meanings common to all mankind. He is looking for a precoded, panhuman message in the language of food… Second, he relies entirely on the resources of binary analysis. Therefore he affords no technique for assessing the relative value of the binary pairs that emerge in a local set of expressions.” The French studies by Jean-Pierre Vernant, Louis Gernet, Marcel Detienne, Louis Dumont, Jean-Louis Durand, et al., focus more successfully on classical antiquity sui generis.
- ↑ The Samothracians, cited in Athenaeus XIV.660.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Social Origins (London: 1954), p. 36.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors (Chicago: 1970 [1936]), p. 62.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Caste: A Comparative Study (London: 1950), p. 135.
- ↑ Jean-Louis Durand and Alain Schnapp, “Sacrificial Slaughter and Initiatory Hunt,” in Claude Bérard, et al. (eds.), A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece (Princeton: 1989), p. 53.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jesper Svenbro (1989), “The Feast of the Wolves, or the Impossible City,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 153.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jesper Svenbro (1989), “The Feast of the Wolves, or the Impossible City,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 153.
- ↑ Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, C.B. Gulick (tr.), published in Vol. I of the Loeb Classical Library Edition (1927–1930), via Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius (University of Chicago), Book I, Chapter 12.
- ↑ Jack Lindsay, Helen of Troy: Woman and Goddess (London: 1974), pp. 322ff.
- ↑ Literally “Kleros, child of Tyche.” The word “kleros” meant “lot” both in the sense of one’s lot in life and a real-estate lot—typically that allotted to Greek colonists by the draw. “The essentially democratic procedure of a lottery was used to ensure the equal distribution of pieces, just as the lottery was used to allot property in new colonial ventures, select citizens for public duty and so forth.”
- ↑ Jean-Louis Durand and Alain Schnapp, “Sacrificial Slaughter and Initiatory Hunt,” in Claude Bérard, et al. (eds.), A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece (Princeton: 1989), p. 56.
- ↑ Jean-Louis Durand and Alain Schnapp, “Sacrificial Slaughter and Initiatory Hunt,” in Claude Bérard, et al. (eds.), A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece (Princeton: 1989), p. 56.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors (Chicago: 1970 [1936]), p. 69.
- ↑ Jean-Louis Durand and Alain Schnapp, “Sacrificial Slaughter and Initiatory Hunt,” in Claude Bérard, et al. (eds.), A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece (Princeton: 1989), p. 56.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 13.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jesper Svenbro (1989), “The Feast of the Wolves, or the Impossible City,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), pp. 148–163.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 13.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Caste: A Comparative Study (London: 1950), p. 133.
- ↑ Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (London: 1970 [1966]).
- ↑ Jean-Pierre Vernant (1989), “At Man’s Table: Hesiod’s Foundation Myth of Sacrifice,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 38.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 4.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 13.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), pp. 3, 11.
- ↑ Jean-Louis Durand, “Greek Animals: Toward a Topology of Edible Bodies,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 87.
- ↑ Jean-Pierre Vernant (1989), “At Man’s Table: Hesiod’s Foundation Myth of Sacrifice,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), pp. 25f.
- ↑ Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists: Or Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus, C.D. Yonge (tr.), Vol. 3 (London: 1854), via Andrew Smith’s Attalus, Book XIV, Chapter 660.
- ↑ Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Great Barrington, Massachusetts: 1990 [1947]), pp. 25ff.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors (Chicago: 1970 [1936]), pp. 137f.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors (Chicago: 1970 [1936]), p. 138.
- ↑ Sir Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen, The Arunta (London: 1927).
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 3.
- ↑ Jean-Louis Durand and Alain Schnapp, “Sacrificial Slaughter and Initiatory Hunt,” in Claude Bérard, et al. (eds.), A City of Images: Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece (Princeton: 1989), p. 53.
- ↑ Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), p. 3.
- ↑ Jean-Pierre Vernant (1989), “At Man’s Table: Hesiod’s Foundation Myth of Sacrifice,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.), The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: 1989), pp. 26f.
- ↑ Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Coral Gables, Florida: 1973), pp. 456f.
- ↑ Observatory Editor’s Note: More commonly spelled “sake.”
- ↑ Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (Boston: 1980), p. 104.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Kingship (London: 1927), pp. 49f., 59f.
- ↑ Arthur M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors (Chicago: 1970 [1936]), p. 47.
- ↑ George Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, three vols. (New York: 1881), Vol. 1, p. 577.
- ↑ Muhammed A. Dandamaev (A Political History of the Achaemenid Empire [Leiden: 1989]) noted that this was true throughout most of the ancient world: “Meat was a luxury in most countries with the exception of Persia… Even in rich Babylonia, meat was accessible only to the wealthy, while the rest ate it only five to six times a year (mainly on temple holidays).”
- ↑ Jane M. Renfrew, “Food for Athletes and Gods: A Classical Diet,” in Wendy J. Raschke (ed.), The Archaeology of the Olympics (Madison, Wisconsin: 1988), pp. 174–181.
- ↑ Barclay V. Head, Historia Numorum: A Manual of Greek Numismatics (Oxford: 1887), p. lxix.
- ↑ Jean Puhvel, “Hittite Athletics as Prefigurations of Ancient Greek Games,” in Wendy J. Raschke (ed.), The Archaeology of the Olympics (Madison, Wisconsin: 1988), pp. 26–31.
- ↑ Louis Gernet, The Anthropology of Ancient Greece (Baltimore: 1981), p. 26.
- ↑ Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: 1969 [1949]), p. 52.
- ↑ Meir Malul, Studies in Mesopotamian Legal Symbolism (Neukirchen-Vluyn: 1988).
- ↑ Paul Koschaker, “Begriff des Kaufs nach keilschriftlichen Rechtsurkunden des 3. Jahrtausends v. Chr.,” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1941 (Berlin: 1942).
- ↑ The legal historian Libor Matous (“Zu den Ausdrucken fur ‘Zugaben’ in den vorsargonischen Grundstuck-kaufurkunden,” Archiv Orientalni, Vol. 22 [1954], p. 442), cited in Meir Malul (Studies in Mesopotamian Legal Symbolism [Neukirchen-Vluyn: 1988], p. 373), found in the meal and its associated gifts a legally binding ritual, “the first traces of the later Nichtanfechtungs-klausel [non-contestability clause] intended to prevent any future claims from other right holders beside the seller.”
- ↑ Meir Malul, Studies in Mesopotamian Legal Symbolism (Neukirchen-Vluyn: 1988).
- ↑ This kind of payment was called “nig.ba” (“gift”). It consisted primarily of food items, but occasionally silver or other metal.
- ↑ Bernhard Laum, Heiliges Geld: Eine historische Untersuchung Uber den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tübingen: 1924), p. 9.
- ↑ The “drachma” meant originally a “handful” of six obols. The number six rather than five suggests a 12-based division, and hence a calendrical character of festive contributions.
- ↑ In the Achaemenid Empire of Persian Assyria, much of the king’s metal remained unminted. Strabo (XV.3.21) said that Persians kept gold and silver more in the form of utensils than coins (The Geography of Strabo, H.C. Hamilton and W. Falconer [trs.] [London: 1903], via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Book XV, Chapter 3, Section 21). See Muhammed A. Dandamaev, A Political History of the Achaemenid Empire (Leiden: 1989).
- ↑ Bernhard Laum, Heiliges Geld: Eine historische Untersuchung Uber den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tübingen: 1924), p. 56.
- ↑ Bernhard Laum, Über das Wesen des Münzgeldes: Eine sach und begriffsgeschichtliche Studie (Halle: 1929), p. 41.
- ↑ Bernhard Laum, Heiliges Geld: Eine historische Untersuchung Uber den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tübingen: 1924), pp. 27ff., 158f.
- ↑ Peter Farb and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating (Boston: 1980), p. 133.
- ↑ 66.0 66.1 66.2 Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, C.B. Gulick (tr.), published in Vol. I of the Loeb Classical Library Edition (1927–1930), via Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius (University of Chicago), Book II, Chapters 145–146.
- ↑ George Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, three vols. (New York: 1881).
- ↑ George Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, three vols. (New York: 1881), Vol. I, p. 579.
- ↑ George Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, three vols. (New York: 1881), Vol. III, pp. 19f.
- ↑ George Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, three vols. (New York: 1881), Vol. III, pp. 19f.
- ↑ Joseph Fontenrose (“The Cult of Apollo and the Games at Delphi,” in Wendy J. Raschke [ed.], The Archaeology of the Olympics [Madison, Wisconsin: 1988]: p. 129) noted that on the retaining wall of Delphi’s stadium was inscribed “a law forbidding the taking of wine from the stadium and providing penalties for violations. Anyone who took wine out had to propitiate the god for whom it was intended, offer sacrifice to him, and pay a fine of five drachmas, about a dollar in gold or silver under the gold standard, a fairly heavy fine in classical Hellas. The inscription… shows that rites of worship were performed in the stadium in honor of several gods; the wine was intended for libations.” This is not exactly the modern spirit of drinking at sporting events.
- ↑ Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, C.B. Gulick (tr.), published in Vol. I of the Loeb Classical Library Edition (1927), via Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius (University of Chicago), Book II, Chapter 36.
- ↑ Thomas J. Figueira and Gregory Nagy (eds.), Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (Baltimore: 1985).
- ↑ E. David, Aristophanes and Athenian Society of the Early Fourth Century BC (Mnemosyne suppl. Leiden: 1984).
- ↑ One of the most widely resented men in Athens was the grain-dealer Nausikydes, who appeared in two speeches by the orator Lysias, Against Ergocles (388 BC), and two years later a speech Against the Corn-Dealers, as well as in Aristophanes’s Ekklesiazousai.
- ↑ Benveniste (1973: p. 403) noted that the Latin word modestus “means ‘he… who observes measure’; moderari means ‘to submit to measure (what escapes it),’” as in modern English usage: to moderate a discussion. The word media is used in the sense of mediate, advise, and hence govern as “applied to a disorderly situation.” In this sense “med” words are akin to the “reg” family of words discussed in Measures, Rules, and Prices.
- ↑ Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: 1982), p. 84.
- ↑ S. Todd Lowry, The Archaeology of Economic Ideas (Durham: 1987), pp. 230ff.
- ↑ E. David, Aristophanes and Athenian Society of the Early Fourth Century BC (Mnemosyne suppl. Leiden: 1984), p. 41.
- ↑ Drawing an analogy between social and personal health, ancient writers applied the principle of moderation both to the human body and to society at large. Classical doctrines of balance—whether in medicine or theories of social and economic justice—urged not to let any part of the body gain at the expense of the others. Per this view, personal egoism should be balanced with the need to live in community with others, just as appetites and lifestyles should be moderated. As long as forces were kept in balance, they would not disturb the body’s equilibrium.
- ↑ Thomas J. Figueira and Gregory Nagy (eds.), Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis (Baltimore: 1985), p. 43.
- ↑ E. David, Aristophanes and Athenian Society of the Early Fourth Century BC (Mnemosyne suppl. Leiden: 1984), p. 12.
- ↑ E. David, Aristophanes and Athenian Society of the Early Fourth Century BC (Mnemosyne suppl. Leiden: 1984), pp. 11ff.
- ↑ W. Warde Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero (New York: 1909), p. 288.
- ↑ Fowler (1909: pp. 286ff.) pointed out that “The Latin word for a holiday was feriae, a term which belongs to the language of religious law (ius divinum). Strictly speaking, it means a day which the citizen has resigned, either wholly or in part, to the service of the gods. As of old on the farm no work was to be done on such days, so in the city no public business could be transacted.” Cicero (Laws II.8) wrote that citizens had to abstain from litigation, and slaves were supposed to be excused from labor, much as on modern Sundays in Christianity or the Jewish Sabbath. But this was only an ideal, for no such law existed in practice. Rome had more than 100 feriae each year. Some were extended over a number of days, sometimes as many as 13 or even 15 for the great chariot races and pantomime plays in September and November.
- ↑ W. Warde Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero (New York: 1909), p. 291.
- ↑ W. Warde Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero (New York: 1909), pp. 300, 293f.
- ↑ Livy, History of Rome, Books XL–XLII (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1938), via Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library Project, Chapter XL, Section 44.
