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‘Davidson is the best thing to happen to ancient history writing for decades’
Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday
‘There are pleasures and authors who lie dormant for a century or more until a new kind of vividness, a super-freshness descends on them. James Davidson has that skill.’
Spectator
‘If little boys are still being made to learn dead languages, and expected to enjoy them, I hope their Greek master reads Davidson’s fascinating and witty book, and tells them the best stories from it. This certainly ought to wake them up at the back of the class.’
Sunday Times
The lifestyle of the classical Greeks often seems disappointingly modest. Where are the marbled floors, the pillared halls, the gilded rooms? Even the Athenians, the richest and most powerful of the Greeks, were said by one contemporary to dress no better than slaves.
Athenians, however, were as skilled at spending as their tragedians were at tragedy. Vast estates disappeared overnight, squandered not on material luxury, but on eating, drinking and sex, ephemeral pleasures that left no monuments but are remembered in numerous ancient texts.
Much of what they describe seems familiar – the pleasures of wine, the dangers of seduction, a mouth-watering plate of squid – but some stories are more puzzling: savages on the shores of the Persian Gulf who live off bread made from fish-flour; Alexander the Great drinks a toast that kills him; Socrates interrogates a beautiful woman who lives in luxury with no obvious means of support.
By unravelling these strange anecdotes James Davidson throws new light not only on ancient pleasures but on the Ancient World in general, unearthing surprising insights into Athenian society and the politics of the world's first democracy.
James Davidson lectures in Ancient History at the University of Warwick. He was previously Research Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. 'Courtesans and Fishcakes' is his first book.
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Book Description Soft cover. Condition: New. Synopsis: A portrait of life in ancient Athens examines the hedonistic lifestyles of the Greeks, detailing the vice, excess, and ephemeral pleasures that marked the classical world Review: Desire is a dangerous thing, and the relationship between the citizens of ancient Athens and their desires was a complex and troubled one. James Davidson's Courtesans and Fishcakes is a brilliant and kaleidoscopic examination of daily life in classical Athens, and the life he reveals is simultaneously more alien and more familiar than we might have imagined. From fish-guzzling gourmands to the ambiguous eroticism of vase paintings, the cradle of Western culture is artfully, and frequently amusingly, anatomized. Davidson believes that many historians, under the influence of Foucault, are guilty of imposing modern views of desire, and particularly sexuality, on Greek culture, resulting in a simplistic interpretation of what was an extremely complicated issue. He refutes the prevailing opinion that sex in Athens was a simple binary opposition of penetrator and penetrated, drawing on a remarkable number of sources to show how sexuality was a slippery commodity rooted in intricate social negotiations, a characteristic shared with many other objects of desire, from eels to undiluted wine. Davidson sometimes assumes a little too much knowledge on the part of his audience--some basic information about the size of the Athenian population would have been helpful--but in spite of this Courtesans and Fishcakes is both accessible and provocative, offering a fascinating portrait of the private and public lives of ancient Athenians. --Simon Leake "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. Seller Inventory # ABE-1632340531130
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