Letters from Tomis

Book Review

Davidson, James. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. London: HarperCollins, 1997.

James Davidson’s Courtesans and Fishcakes (1997) offers a lively, culturally rich account of the appetites—culinary, erotic, and political—that structured Athenian social life in the classical period. His work, while deliberately resisting the dominant paradigms of structuralist anthropology or Foucauldian sexuality studies, nonetheless presents a fertile site for Marxist engagement. Through a Marxist lens, Davidson’s focus on consumption, desire, and pleasure can be reframed as an analysis of the ways in which class relations, material production, and surplus distribution shaped not only the economic but also the moral and political fabric of Athens.

Consumption and Class Relations

Davidson foregrounds the Athenian obsession with fish, wine, and the courtesan as symbolic markers of pleasure and status. Yet beneath these cultural signifiers lie material class relations. For a Marxist reading, the culinary and sexual consumption he details represent more than indulgence—they are mediated expressions of surplus distribution within a slave-based economy. The relative scarcity of certain fish, or the exclusivity of access to courtesans, speaks to how surplus value extracted from enslaved labor in agriculture, mining, and domestic production was funneled into symbolic luxury markets. The desire for fish and hetaerae, then, is not merely cultural but reflects the concrete mechanisms by which surplus was appropriated and displayed by the Athenian citizen elite.

Davidson tends to emphasize the symbolic discourse surrounding consumption—whether Athenians viewed indulgence as shameful, manly, effeminate, or politically destabilizing. A Marxist critique would insist that these discourses were ideological: they naturalized the contradictions of a society where a leisured citizenry debated moderation while resting on the hidden labor of slaves, women, and metics. Thus, the “consuming passions” were structured by the mode of production itself, which made possible both abundance and anxiety over its moral consequences.

Desire, Labor, and Alienation

Davidson’s playful treatment of desire as a cultural passion—whether for grilled eels or a clever courtesan—can be reinterpreted through Marx’s theory of alienation. In Athens, the labor that produced these objects of desire (fish caught by professional fishermen, bodies maintained by enslaved women, wine harvested by peasant laborers) was systematically obscured. Citizens experienced consumption as the arena of freedom and self-expression, while the alienated labor that enabled such freedom was relegated to invisibility. This reproduces the ideological veil that Marx identifies in commodity fetishism: the social relations of production are masked by the pleasures of consumption. Davidson gestures to these contradictions but does not theorize them in explicitly material terms.

Politics of Moderation and the Reproduction of Order

One of Davidson’s central insights is that debates about moderation (sōphrosynē) and excess in food and sex were fundamentally political. For a Marxist reading, these discourses should be situated as ruling-class ideology: they functioned to discipline citizens, stabilize democratic institutions, and prevent what the elite feared most—unruly consumption that blurred class distinctions. Fish markets and symposia became spaces where the contradictions of democracy were negotiated: who could eat what, who could afford pleasure, and who had the right to transgress norms. Such anxieties were not simply cultural but expressions of deeper class tensions within a polis that both exalted equality among citizens and depended on the hyper-exploitation of slaves and non-citizens.

Methodological Observations

Davidson distances himself from both materialist economic history and high structuralist abstraction, preferring a witty, anecdotal reconstruction of appetites. While his refusal of strict economic determinism gives the book its charm, it also risks trivializing the material underpinnings of Athenian desire. A Marxist critique would call for a dialectical synthesis: the symbolic and discursive dimensions of appetite cannot be detached from the material base of production, nor from the relations of domination that made such consumption possible. The absence of a sustained analysis of slavery, class exploitation, and surplus extraction limits Davidson’s account, even as his cultural vignettes provide rich raw material for precisely such a critique.

Conclusion

Courtesans and Fishcakes succeeds brilliantly as cultural history, restoring to Athens its texture of desire and indulgence. From a Marxist perspective, however, the book invites a critical re-anchoring of these pleasures within the mode of production. The fish market and the symposium, the hetaera and the eel, are not merely metaphors for moral debates; they are commodities shaped by labor, scarcity, and surplus distribution in a class society. To fully understand Athenian “consuming passions,” one must see them as both cultural performances and material expressions of exploitation. Davidson provides the former in dazzling detail; Marxist theory supplies the latter.