X.
To the Victors, the Feast
Just as the full moon dims the midnight stars with its brightnessSo did the champion’s body shine amongst the multitude of Greeks.
—BACCHYLIDES, VICTORY ODE FOR PENTATHLON VICTOR AUTOMEDES, C. 450 B.C.
FLANKED BY TEMPLES and a tall hill, the Sacred Grove of Zeus had the acoustics of an amphitheater. At dusk on day two, the air began to ring with choruses of tenella kallinike! (“hail to the champion!”) as the victors, garlanded with flowers, were carried among the torchlit temples of the sanctuary. The winning pentathlete and equestrian owners were much admired by the crowd. But it was the celebrity owner of the winning four-in-hand chariot who put on the most lavish, festive display. He was usually rich, young, and flamboyant, and a triumph at Olympia demanded that no expense be spared.
Revellers celebrate a friend’s success.(From an Athenian drinking cup, c. 450 B.C.)
In 416 B.C., the glamorous Athenian Alcibiades—who, as we recall, had entered seven chariots in the four-in-hand race—won first, second, and fourth places, a feat unprecedented in Olympic history, even by Greek kings. To mark his stunning success, Alcibiades decided to set a new standard in magnificence for his victory banquet, feeding not only his supporters but the entire teeming mass of spectators. As part of his sponsorship deal with the allies of Athens, the up-and-coming politician had cajoled financial support for his celebration: the city of Cyzicus provided sacrificial animals, the island of Lesbos the food and wine, Ephesus the banquet tent. Olympia had seen nothing like this lavish feast. Euripides, the greatest playwright of that time, wrote the victory ode for Alcibiades, and news of his triumph spread like wildfire throughout Greece.
The more typical victory banquet was an exclusive event—a private dinner for the victor, his family, and friends. (Xenophon describes one such gathering put on by the wealthy Callias for his young “boyfriend” who had just won a junior competition; it was a chummy affair attended happily by the boy’s father, who typically accepted the social fiction that such pederastic relationships were chaste.) The most prestigious feasts would have as many as sixty or seventy guests, and cost up to ten thousand drachmas, as much as a skilled laborer’s wages for thirty years. Elegant marquees would glow with candlelight, and house reclining couches that had been brought on wagon-back from distant cities. The same strict protocol for dining applied here as in the boudoirs of Athens or Miletus. The meal had to be completed before the drinking of wine could begin. Guests would lean back on their left elbow and eat with their fingers, using the right hand for most communal dishes and the left hand for bread. There were elaborate rules for the number of fingers used for each type of food and for its quantity, balancing an equal amount of bread with meat.
For the Greeks, banquets existed as a domain of male pleasure. Respectable women were rarely invited, but the beautiful hetaeras, or courtesans, were as carefully chosen as the food and wine for a successful party. Hosts would contact the upscale pornoboskoi (“prostitute shepherds,” or pimps) for a handpicked selection of these charming women to provide witty conversation. Sex agents could also fill a banquet with voluptuous flute girls and handsome lyre players, who would often engage in erotic shows playing mythological lovers like Dionysus and Ariadne. The music is lost, but we know that tunes were usually variations on religious hymns such as “Zeus’s Theme” or “Apollo’s Chorus” (one Greek wit joked that the courtesans’ favorite song should be called “The Grasping Hawk,” referring to their ability to fleece their male admirers).
We have an idea of a hetaera’s banquet demeanor from one of Lucian’s dialogues, where a woman tutors her daughter on how to behave:
CROBYLE (THE MOTHER): First of all, a courtesan dresses like a lady, smartly and with good taste. She’s gay with everybody—but doesn’t giggle at just anything. She has a way of smiling sweetly and enticingly. Whenever she’s invited to a dinner party as a paid escort, she never gets drunk—men can’t stand you making a fool of yourself—and she never behaves like a pig and gorges herself. She handles her food with the tips of her fingers, doesn’t smack her lips after a mouthful, and doesn’t gobble away with both cheeks full. She drinks slowly, never gulping, but just sipping.
CORINNA (incredulously): Even when she’s thirsty?
CROBYLE: Especially when she’s thirsty. She never says more than she should, never makes fun of the other guests, and has eyes only for the man who’s paying her. When she has to sleep with someone, she’s isn’t lewd, but never acts as if she doesn’t care.
The availability of hetaeras at drunken victory banquets became the subject of many a lurid male fantasy. One apparently lovely courtesan named Neaera was at a riotous party for a charioteer in Delphi in 374 B.C., when her wealthy consort fell asleep in his chair. “Many had sex with Neaera while she was inebriated,” notes the commentator, “even the servants of the host.” Lucian describes a “rich Lesbian” hetaera at another banquet, who shaved her head, dressed like a man, and paid dancing girls for carnal favors. When respectable women were invited to these evening celebrations, they did not always find the atmosphere congenial. The female philosopher Hipparchia outwitted her fellow dinner guests in debate, but found her cleverness unappreciated: one male guest found he “had no defense against her logic, so started to pull off her clothes.”
Efdipnias! (“Bon Appetit!”)
WHAT WAS ON the menu at these wild Olympic feasts? Western haute cuisine, it could be argued, arrived in Greece from Sicily and southern Italy during the sixth century B.C. The large, sun-drenched island of Sicily was a land of plenty, its fields overflowing with plump livestock, juicy olives, and succulent cheeses; the pleasure-loving inhabitants of one southern Italian city, the Sybarites, became synonymous with hedonism itself. Sicilians wrote history’s first cookbooks, and brought their skills back to the mainland, especially during the Olympic Games. (Centuries later, the Greeks of southern Italy would teach Romans how to cook, but the pupils would soon outstrip their tutors in extravagance. The Romans’ taste for highly seasoned and adventurous meals, thick with sauces, would ultimately render traditional Greek cooking as provincial and plain.) By the time of Socrates, in the fifth century B.C., infusions from Asia Minor and Africa had added to the culinary mix in Greece. Chefs at Olympia had to transport their own ingredients from afar, but this did not seem to moderate the level of indulgence. While Greeks normally agreed with the philosopher’s dictum that one should eat to live, not live to eat, the Games were—for the superrich, at least—a time for giddy gourmandizing.
The typical fare at Olympia’s banquets would have included such delicacies as roasted sow’s womb, pork stewed with apples and pears, fried liver wrapped in lamb intestines, olives with mashed chickpeas, veal kebabs, whole piglets stuffed with the flesh of small birds, egg yolks, chestnuts, raisins, and spiced meat. Local hunters brought in freshly killed boars, stags, and gazelles from the surrounding mountains. Fish, the most beloved of Greek luxury foods, was sadly rare at Olympia because of its inland location and the summer heat. But gourmands, when they could get a catch barged up from the coast, went into paroxysms over the sea bass and red mullet, crustaceans and tuna, while the eel, it was said, “commands the field of pleasure.” In an inspired example of early food writing, a chef catering a sports banquet is the happy recipient of a top-quality fillet: “Oh, what a fish was lying tender before me! What a dish I made of it! It wasn’t drugged senseless with cheese sauces or window-boxed with dandifying herbs, but emerged from the oven naked as the day it was born. . . . The first of the guests to taste its delights leapt up and fled, taking the platter with him for a lap of the stadium, the others hot on his heels. I allowed myself a shriek of joy. . . . I have discovered the secret of eternal life; men already dead I can make walk again, once they smell this dish in their nostrils.”
Sweets and nuts were mixed liberally throughout the meals, including ambrosial fruits, dates, fat figs, almonds, hazelnuts, Athenian honey cakes, and the favorite of all Greek sweets, cheesecake—the subject of many a learned treatise by ancient cooks.
AFTER THE MEAL, the interior would be swept, and the drinking could begin.
Wine was consumed as a communal act, not for intoxication but to fuel conversation, which Greeks regarded as the highest of all civilized pleasures. The banquet host acted as sommelier, mixing the wine with water in a large shared bowl—with slightly more water than wine—often adding infusions of salt water or perfume such as myrrh. We know that there were hundreds of varietals to choose from: almost every Greek colony had vineyards and exported its produce in distinctively shaped amphorae. Connoisseurs would weigh the merits of wines that were sweet, dry, or autokratos, in between; fragrant or odorless; “slender” or “fat.” In one Athenian comedy, the god of the vine, Dionysus, ranks top wine producers. He favors the nectar from Thasos, with its “apple scent”; Mendean wine, so sweet that “the gods themselves wet their soft beds when they imbibe”; and a velvety Chian table wine that is mercifully “inoffensive—and painless.”
The most intimate and cerebral drinking parties, with ten to fifteen guests, were the famous Greek symposia favored by rich students and university dons (who were definitely not bookworms, as the title of a dense volume by Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, “The Partying Professors,” suggests). Here the wine and erotic dances helped stimulate lofty academic debate. Philosophy, science, poetry, geometry—nothing would escape the omnivorous intellectuals. Hosts could even buy “conversation guides” with handy lists of topics to draw on when chitchat flagged. Suitable discussion points included:
• Why did Homer call salt divine, but not oil?
• Why are the aged long-sighted?
• Why is alpha the first letter of the alphabet?
• Why does a piglet squeal on the way to sacrifice, while a sheep goes silently?
• How do you ward off the evil eye?
• In which hand was Aphrodite wounded by Diomedes in The Iliad?
Even though this elegant boozing was far removed from the casual quaffing enjoyed by the masses in their wagons, aristocratic decorum certainly frayed as the night progressed. Banquets would get out of control, as the large bowls, called kraters, went around, supplemented by drinking horns. Drunken partygoers succumbed to paroinia, the frenzy of intoxication. The playwright Eubulus advised wise guests to stop at the third cup, because “the fourth belongs to hubris, the fifth to shouting, the sixth to revel, the seventh to black eyes, the eighth to legal actions, the ninth to bile and the tenth to madness.”
With a taste for debauchery as well as debate, professors led golden-haired youths in cavorting, playing practical jokes, and squandering their incomes on auctions of pretty young flute girls. At the height of the ecstasy, they often formed a version of the conga line called the komos, swaying around the Temple of Zeus with musicians by their side.
The Refuseniks
SOME OF THE greatest intellectuals of ancient life were avid sports fans, comprising a virtual Who’s Who of Western civilization. According to many scholars, Plato got his nickname during his days as a virile young wrestler at the Isthmian games (from platus, probably meaning “broad-shouldered”; his real name was Aristocles). The playwright Sophocles, as well as being noted in the ring, was a famous handball player; the general Themistocles, who defeated the Persians, came to the Games of 476 B.C.; the mathematician Pythagoras may also have been a revered sports coach. But the Olympics did have their occasional critics. There had always been a modest but vocal undercurrent of antisports feeling among Greek thinkers. Understandably, in an age when Reason was paramount, some would argue the superiority of the mind over the body, and suggest that the national obsession with athletics was frivolous, even philistine.
The Cynic Diogenes, who traded repartee with Alexander the Great himself, was one of the most outrageous naysayers, and, in the fourth century B.C., he brought his attacks to the sports field itself. His best-documented demonstrations occurred at the Corinth games, when he grabbed a victory wreath from the prize table and put it on his own head, claiming that he was victor in the contest of life, and that spiritual rather than physical effort was more worthy of rewards. “Are those pot-bellied bullies good for anything?” he asked a gathering crowd. “I think athletes should be used as sacrificial victims. They have less soul than swine. Who is the truly noble man? Surely it is the one who confronts life’s hardships, and wrestles with them day and night—not, like some goat, for a bit of celery or olive or pine, but for the sake of happiness and honor throughout his whole life.”
Later, when he saw a sprinting champion being carried from the Stadium, Diogenes acidly noted that the rabbit and the antelope were the fastest of animals, but also the most cowardly. He later ran off with another victory wreath and put it on the head of a horse that had been kicking another horse, proclaiming it the victor in the pankration contest. Finally, Diogenes made reference to Hercules, the patron of athletes, who had cleaned the filthy Augean stables as one of the Twelve Labors—then Diogenes squatted on the ground and emptied his bowels, suggesting that competitors clean it up.
“At this the crowd scattered,” we read, “muttering that Diogenes was crazy.”
DIOGENES WAS ECHOING centuries of criticism. In the fifth century B.C., Euripides referred to athletes as the bane of Greece for their self-importance. Many Spartans thought the Olympic sports inefficient because they did not promote useful military skills. Centuries later, Roman moralists mocked the connection between the gymnasium and pederasty: Greek athletes, suggested the historian Tacitus, attracted only shirkers and perverts. But perhaps the most scathing antisports rant came from the second-century-A.D. doctor Galen who, in his career guidance pamphlet On Choosing a Profession, described athletes as the most useless of all citizens: “Everyone knows that athletes do not share in the blessings of the mind. Beneath their mass of flesh and blood, their souls are stifled as in a sea of mud. But the truth is that they don’t enjoy the blessings of the body, either. Neglecting the old rules of health, which prescribe moderation in all things, they spend their lives like pigs—over-exercising, over-eating and over-sleeping. Their coaches fatten them and distort their limbs. Athletes rarely live to old age, and if they do, they are crippled by disease. Then they have neither health nor beauty. They become fat and bloated. Their faces are often flaccid and ugly, thanks to their boxing scars.”
Eyes that have been gouged over the years go rheumy, Galen adds; battered teeth fall out; joints that have been incessantly twisted become arthritic.
“Even at their physical peak, their vaunted strength is useless to society. Can you fight wars with discuses in your hands? In fact, athletes are weaker than new-born babies.”
Galen’s solution? When choosing a profession, try becoming a doctor.
HARSH WORDS. BUT at Olympia, the antisports voices were faint—drowned out by the chorus of fans, who defended athletics on the grounds that they promoted endurance, physical beauty, and moral fiber. Apart from which, many Greek thinkers would have added as they cavorted drunkenly at victory banquets, the evenings were rather fun.
On a Sober Note
AS THE CONGA lines swayed around the Sacred Grove, there was one location where it was hard to keep a merry face. At the burial mound of Pelops—sealed off by a pentagonal wall—a gloomy funerary rite had been held after dark on day two (which for ancient Greeks was actually day three: the new day technically began at nightfall). A black ram had had its throat slit and its steaming blood poured into the earth, to nourish the hero in the Underworld. It was a reminder of man’s sorry fate. In the classical era, pagans could draw little hope of life after death. Even heroes like Pelops were doomed to spend eternity in Hades, their spirits flitting batlike in the cold darkness. This melancholy prospect, it is recorded, often raised its ugly head at the happiest banquets, “a pang among the flowers” (as the Roman poet Lucretius said), to cast a pall over the exuberance.
Such dark thoughts had to be pushed aside. There was always another cup of wine to be had—and the parties would continue until dawn. The next morning, hungover revelers would cluster at the altars and sacrifice, rather forlornly, to the gods.