Keeping up with the Jones's in Ancient Athens | Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of...

Excerpts from Ancient Greek Playboy Magazine? | Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens | James Davidson

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	• Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens James Davidson Fontana Press, 2009 - 410 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Extraordinary!

A marvelously written, intricate weave from an incredible array of sources that illuminates the significance of Greek appetites (especially for fish -- yes, fish -- and for sex, in multiple forms and layers) and attitudes toward them, and thus, on the way, as it were, what was regarded as virtuous, that the author convincingly shows were central to social, philosophical and poltical life in classical Athens. An extraordinary book offering amazing insights. One awaits the next set of revelations, if there are more to be delivered to us, by Mr. Davidson, with something resembling opsophagia. A tour de force!

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Keeping up with the Jones's in Ancient Athens

A pleasant relaxing and amusing read about the ancients and their habits.Did you know they were obsessed with fish and that girls on top was the most expensive.

Excerpts from Ancient Greek Playboy Magazine?

James Davidson's Courtesans and Fishcakes provides an "extracurricular" view of ancient Greek ways, manners, and mores. It is a work both enlightening and maddeningly unfocused having sources including the writings from 'theatre' and 'traditional' authors known for their more cerebral works. The author is faced with the incredibly difficult dilemma of determining the genuineness of scenes that represent sincerity or comic parody. Davidson draws from the arts and artifacts of these worlds, and commentaries penned centuries after the collapse of Greek culture and economy as additional sources for his interpretations.

The author explores the roles of food, drink, and sex to provide social and political insights in ancient Greece. Most would not consider looking for big picture lessons by studying public and private means that commoners, courtesans, and commanders satisfied their primitive instincts. But their are insights that Davidson provides by just such an approach. I now have numerous reasons to question many of my beliefs of Greek as only pugnacious and terribly staid scholarly chaps. Davidson's book opens a door into a fascinating approach to history. I will await his next volume.

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A textbook for the truly curious

Courtesans and Fishcakes, make no mistake about this, is a textbook. It is a very witty and readable textbook and at times it demands all your background in the classics to immerse yourself in James Davidson's absolutely alien landscape. He is utterly original in his ability to help us put aside 21st century experiences and root around in the eating, mating, prostitution, friendship, tyranny, and socio-philosophical underpinnings of ancient Greece. This is the one book that gives no quarter to the reader. You are made to understand that current morality does not apply to the subject matter of ancient Greece. This book will help you in all your other forays into the ancient classics. It will broaden your understanding of Greek plays, the Peloponnesian wars, Greek democracy (so very different from ours) and Greek appetites, sexual and otherwise, of the ancients. Even if you are just a reader of historical fiction, your enjoyment level will be doubled by your encounter with this remarkable piece of scholarship. Three thumbs up!

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Scholarly book for educated readers

Be advised: this book is slow reading. Unlike Athenians at fish fests you will not gorge on the paragraphs as they come hot off the pages. I am a book a day man but this fellow took me more than two weeks. I will admit to other reading during that time , but this book was not for work, which is often the case with chapter a day reads. I know my Lit Crit theory. I have a little Latin and less Greek, and I needed them for this book, and yet every so often a wonderful prospect of words and word connectedness blossomed from this suggestive title, sort of like those rather suggestive amarillis stems and blossoms. I would add, that familiarity with contemporary literary critical theory would also help in appreciating what Davidson has achieved which is a learned and creative picture of that shaping and yet alien culture which was Athens.

Any teacher who has had to explain how tragedy fits into the Athenian vision with its strict moral code but lacking the ideas of sinful guilt will appreciate the careful path the author treads as he looks at a very different vision of addiction and desire from that we find in modern culture. Keep a good dictionary nearby while reading. Keep a bookmark too. You will want to, pause, set this side frome time to time, and think

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A brilliantly entertaining and innovative history of the ancient Athenians' consuming passions for food, wine and sex. Sex, shopping and fish-madness, Athenian style. This fascinating book reveals that the ancient Athenians were supreme hedonists. Their society was driven by an insatiable lust for culinary delights -- especially fish -- fine wine and pleasures of the flesh. Indeed, great fortunes were squandered and politicians' careers ruined through ritual drinking at the symposium, or the wooing of highly-coveted, costly prostitutes. James Davidson brings an incisive eye and an urbane wit to this refreshingly accessible and different history of the people who invented Europe, democracy and art.

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