by Glyn Muitjens originally published in the Raffia Print Magazine Nr. 1 of 2016
Fish and seafood – oysters in particular – are popularly believed to possess aphrodisiac qualities. This connection made between seafood and sex is not a recent phenomenon – actually. It is quite old, hailing back to even before classical Athens. What exactly did the ancient Greeks make of seafood?
Seafood and, less often, fish are today widely considered to have aphrodisiac qualities. A quick search on Google adequately proves this point: “Sex and the seafood connection”, “… a diet high in fish and seafood could have a positive impact on your sex drive”, and so on. The Cosmopolitan lists salmon and oysters in their top ten of aphrodisiacs. Shellfish seem to enjoy a reputation of particular potency: “Mussels – seafood for sex drive” is the headline of one of the many blogs on the subject. Of these molluscs, oysters are apparently considered about the best food one can get to “turn up the heat”, as it is phrased rather eloquently by one website. This has something to do with the fact that these bivalves contain a lot of zinc, which produces testosterone and – in men – seminal fluid, or so I was told. Regardless of the biological background, there clearly exists a libidinal fascination in the modern Western culture for seafood as an instigator of lust. Is this a recent phenomenon? When did this fascination first arise?
Greek comedy on seafood
Seafood and fish were considered aphrodisiacs as far back as classical antiquity. Particularly Greek literature shows glimpses of a cultural attitude to seafood that is similar to, but goes far deeper than the modern day sexual fascination-it comes very close to being an obsession. It is precisely the place seafood and fish had in connection to sexuality in ancient Greek literature, in comic poetry especially, that I want to relay in this article. As Carl Shaw, assistant professor of Greek literature at the University of Florida, has quite recently demonstrated, a connection made in Greek culture between seafood and fish on the one hand, and sexuality on the other is very clearly visible in Greek comedy. This focus has its advantages: comedy was staged in theatre festivals, visited by many Athenians, and has been argued to portray scenes closer to everyday life than, say, tragedy-although this view has been nuanced in recent scholarship This means that the attitude of Greeks to seafood relayed in comic theatrical pieces may very well reflect actual day-to-day discourse, not in the least because comic situations need to be recognisable to the audience in order to be funny. These discourses were in all probability even partly created and reinforced by regular comic performances.
On the other hand, there is also the disadvantage of every focus: partiality. Comedy as a theatrical genre peaked in the late archaic and classical periods, meaning the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, mainly in Athens. We are therefore limited to a certain genre, time, and place, which I want to stress at the outset. Luckily, not all of the comic material is Athenian, which makes for a slightly broader perspective.
The ancient Greek World spread out much further than what we today call Greece. As early as the first few centuries of the first millennium BCE, many Greek city-states sent their citizens out to found colonies, a process which launched the Greek culture of the mother cities across southern Europe. For our earliest (comic) sources on seafood, we therefore have to look outside of Athens, to the island of Sicily.
Many Greek cities on this island held close ties to Athens. In one of these cities lived the sixth century BCE poet Epicharmos, our first stop in comic Greek literature on seafood. His poetry has come to us only in fragmentary state, but seafood abounds in these snippets of comic plays. A salient example is his The Marriage of Hebe – a play most likely about the marriage of Hebe, the goddess of youth, to the hero Herakles – in which Epicharmos describes a banquet for the divine guests of the wed-ding, consisting exclusively of seafood. A banquet for the gods, however, does not tell us much about sexuality, or does it? For that, we will leave Sicily, and turn to Athens.
Sexy seafood
Perhaps it is through the active literary exchange between Athens and Sicily – attested, for example, by several vases from the fifth century found in Sicily, depicting what in all probability were Athenian comic plays – that fish and seafood first entered the Athenian comic stage. It has to be mentioned, however, that Epicharmos’ exact influence on later Athenian comedy is unclear, and contested by several scholars. Regardless of how, it is fair to say that if Sicilian comedy had its fair share of fish, Athenian comedy was awash with it: the amount of references to fish and seafood is almost overwhelming. The texts mentioned in this article are therefore necessarily only a small selection.
Seafood appeared early in Athenian comedy, and was sexualised from the outset. This is perhaps best demonstrated by a short quote from Merchantmen, a play by the famous comic poet Aristophanes: “devouring, splitting, licking out my sea-urchin below”. The sea-urchin here is a metaphor for the female genitalia, brought out more clearly by the surrounding, sexually suggestive words.
American classicist Carl Shaw recently noted that the sexual connection of seafood made in Greek comedy has remained largely under explored. He analyses many instances of this connection in Athenian comedy, and distinguishes between three types of sexual references.
There is firstly the use of seafood and fish as metaphors for genitalia, as in the quote from Aristophanes above. Shaw suggests that the list of seafood in Epicharmos’ The Marriage of Hebe also contains genital references, or at least many words that could be used as such. In a later fragment from the same play, Epicharmos mentions a sea-creature, the kolybdaina, a Sicilianism which cannot be translated. Luckily, we have an account by the second century CE author Athenaios, who informs us that the Hellenistic scholar Nikandros called this animal the sea phallus.
Seafood and fish were also used to denote courtesans. The comic poet Antiphanes, for example, uses fishy nicknames for several of them: there is gongros (eel), karabos (crayfish), and the lovely trugôn (stingray), to mention only a few. This connection also allows us to glimpse how much fish themselves were objects of desire, to be conflated with courtesans on such a large scale. The connection is particularly strong because, as we saw before, seafood could also be used to denote sexual organs. Courtesans were, in a sense, reduced to their genitalia through their nicknames.
The last type of sexual reference analysed by Shaw is one that is very familiar to us. In ancient comedy too, many types of seafood were known as powerful aphrodisiacs. For example, Xenarchos, another Athenian comic poet, calls the octopus “arouser of the vein”, by which he meant this invertebrate was capable of inducing an erection. For the sake of brevity, I will limit myself to this one example, mentioning only that there is much more source material on this.
Staple and supplement
What has become clear is that fish and seafood played an important part in ancient Greek literature, and were sexually fetishized in various ways, specifically in relation to courtesans. We have also seen various examples of how this happened. Let us now turn to the why, which is slightly more difficult to explain. Is there any particular reason why fish was sexualised the way it was? In order to explain this, we must first know how the Greeks conceptualised their food.
Greek sustenance in the classical period consisted of three parts: potos, ‘wine’ or ‘drink, sitos,
‘bread’ or ‘the staple’, and opson. The latter is rather difficult to pin down. It basically denotes everything which is not staple food, not bread, not sitos. Opson is the really good stuff: relishes, meat, fish, vegetables – the supplements of the staple. Using Derrida’s notion of the ‘dangerous supplement – a supplement that always threatens to take the place of what it should merely enrich, that which is really important, the staple – ancient historian James Davidson explains how opson became a place for luxury to the Greek mind.
Indeed, several Greek philosophers, including Plato, expressed their concerns about opson as something that draws attention from what is simple and essential to what is overly luxurious and – to their minds – morally degenerate. Opson, Davidson argues, eventually became a commodity which was fiercely coveted as a symbol of luxury in aristocratic culture. Thus, it becomes easier to see why in this context fish and seafood, both opsa, were sexualised.
Yet, this sexualisation happened only in the case of fish and seafood. Why not with meat, certainly just as expensive, and also a commodity for the well-off? The answer to this is a religious one. Ancient Greek religion was all about the relationship between man and the gods. In order to please their gods, the Greeks sacrificed animals to them in religious ceremonies and at festivals. After the sacrifice, the meat was shared with the citizens.
For many, this was one of few occasions on which they could eat meat. Regular victims for sacrifice were cows, sheep, goats… but not seafood. Greek sacrifice was mainly a blood sacrifice. As fish and seafood did not bleed (much), they were not offered to the gods. In the few cases that a fish was sacrificed, it was usually a tuna – a fish well-known to be very bloody. Fish and seafood were thus excluded from sacrifice, the divine diet, and were not handed out among the populace. Remember how Epicharmos described a seafood banquet for the gods? We now understand how that was meant to be funny. Meat was sacred, meant for both gods and men, shared equally; fish and seafood on the other hand were excluded from ritual, could thus be coined by the aristocracy as a symbol of absolute luxury, and were subsequently sexualised. I also think this is why specifically courtesans and fish are so closely connected: they were both’ property’ of the elite, and used as aristocratic symbols. Paradoxically, this lack of divine context was also the reason fish in Late Antiquity could be used by the Christians as a symbol for Christ, as noted by ancient historian Nicholas Purcell.
Conclusion
In modern popular Western culture, seafood and, to a lesser extent, fish, are widely considered to be able to “turn up the heat”. This is not a recent phenomenon – ancient Greek literature, especially comedy, is rife with sexualised fish and seafood. The Greeks also recognised their aphrodisiac qualities in their popular culture, but their fascination went much deeper, on many more levels, and in many more ways. Fish and seafood became the epitome of luxury, conflated with courtesans and female sexuality, used to denote genitalia, and were obsessively coveted. Speculation is not a very scholarly thing to do, but at the end of this article, I will allow myself to be slightly unscholarly. It is striking that a strand of popular culture today reflects one from nearly two-and-a-half thousand years ago. I have no way to prove that they are indeed and without a doubt connected – nor do I want to, as an awful lot can happen in 2500 years – and there are of course many differences. But what if the sexualisation of seafood somehow found its way from Greek antiquity, in diluted form, to The Cosmopolitan? I, for one, find the thought tantalizing. Chew on it.
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