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Dfferent kinds of women and different dinners.

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

WOMEN AND BANQUETS –
In the ancient Greece not only were family women barred from banquets, but the ban went as far as to forbid them to set a foot in the room where men held their parties, and this not even to clean it. The men’s dining room was called “andron” and, as we are told by Vitruvius and how we see it in the Greek house’s reconstruction done by Choisy, it was set near the entrance of the part reserved to the family’s males.
No woman then? No good family ones.
The reaction that was provoked to the guests of a dinner party at the entrance in it of a virtuous woman is well reflected by what happened to Apelles when, the painter - struck by the beauty of the adolescent Lais, whom he saw drawing water from the “Peirenes” fountain – decided to bring her to a banquet. Their entrance in the “andron” made all the guests indignant because he had dared to bring there a girl who was not a prostitute, and, clamoring, they began to protest. But Apelles retorted “Don’t be shocked my dear friends because I assure you that in less than three year this girl will became a splendid female and she will be a fountain of endless pleasure for all the men”. He guessed right. Apart of her beauty, Lais was always available to her admirers’s requests: at a certain price of course, but it also seems that from time to time she allowed herself some personal private recreations and these were always gratis.
Many of those courtesans, called “ethairas”, were famous. Atheneus dedicates to them a whole book of his opus “The Deipnosophists” and in it he cites the most fascinating ones. They were interesting these “ethairas”: a charming group of beautiful, intelligent and learned women. Yes, learned because they were first trained in many intellectual matters and completed their instructions by following the schools of the most celebrated philosophers. There, after having spent a long day discussing the most high problems of the universe, they also slept with them and reached a level of culture that we can only compare to a modern doctorate.
Once accomplished in all sorts of art, the young ethairas began their career, and not only they offered to men their beautiful bodies but also entertained them in brilliant and intelligent conversations. Of course they had intercourses with many men, but it was not always so. Some time an ethaira decided to sign a contract with one of her rich clients and for a fixed numbers of years she accompanied him everywhere he went, was faithful to him and, for the same period of time, abstained from any other relations.
The charges for those long commitments were astronomical but they were also so for any ethaira occasional performances and thus, signing contracts or exercising the oldest profession of the world, these women became very rich. Then as it always happens, old age obliged them to retire from their profitable activities. At this moment they became very pious, and spent the rest of their lives dedicating themselves to charities, and enriching the temples with votive offerings, statues, and gifts. Sainte women then.
In the ceramic of the times we see them engaged in their different activities, some time receiving in their houses old men with bag of gold, or at banquets, all naked, in shocking lascivious poses and in lustful situations. Of course those cups where banquet’s objects that always were licentious and implied something lewd, but they were also exclusively made for the male parties to which the courtesans were the principal highlight.
Now it is of course evident why family women – wives, daughters and old mothers - could not take part to these kind of lively male’s dinners. Spouses and other female relatives only shared the family meals that were prepared in the gynecaeum, the most secluded part of the house. During these family repasts men were not naked as during the “andron” parties where only a light veil covered the lower part of their body. In the gynaecium they lay on the tricliniar couch completely dressed, jacket and tie as we say now. Women, who couldn’t lay on the couches - something that only courtesans could do - sat on comfortable chairs that could be high and imposing as the one that we see in an Ephesus’ bas-relief, and they often rested their little feet on some nice foot-rests. It was an important part of the dinner’s etiquette that family women could never lay on the couches, and it was only seating that they could dine. The only women represented on a tricliniar couch in Greek or Middle East steles were very old ladies dining alone in the intimacy of their bed-rooms.
Scenes of banquets in the Gynaecea are mostly found as steles for the Middle Eastern’s tomb. Contrary to the Greek ones where death is represented either by the hearth rending scenes of the defunct parting from his loved ones or by the lady’s last toilet - bas-relief in which the end of this world’s life sign the departure for the dark and threatening reigns of Pluto - Hellenistic people was evidently more optimistic and hoped in a better world. It is evident that these people preferred to imagine the after life as a nice place where to stay and dine with their loved ones, scenes that are fresh and original, full of people ready to dine and savour the food displayed before them on rectangular low tables. The style could change with the passing of the centuries, but not what is represented in them, and the details are so tied to the defunct personality that on each of these “mensae” there are different kinds of food. It is easy to imagine that those were the dishes that the master of the house liked the most and also the ones that were usually served to the family. It looks as if, ordering the stele, the man had also listed what had to be the menu.
In some of them we can even recognize what are the foods depicted there. In the stele of an aged woman dining alone, a young girl servant brings to her a cake called “spira”, which recipe is found in Cato’s “De Agricultura” book. Many others different menus are found in this kind of steles - now preserved in the Museums of Ephesus and Istanbul... In them all the family is represented waiting for the foods to be served. With their eyes fixed on the passers-by and the cups in their hands they throng the limited space of the marble slab. Some time, when the men number is excessive, the stele can hardly contain them and they lay packed as sardines each one very close to the others, while the woman, deprived from her usual seat, perches herself at one of the couch’s extremity and looks like a strange bird. The important fact was that in any cases all the family had to be contained in the stele and that the wife had in some way be seated.
This did not depose well on the conditions of women in the Greek world. To dine sitting on a chair was a sign of submission and it was done by all the house dependants. Therefore sat the woman who was the legal property of the master of the house and with her sat also the children, all of them, even the ones belonging to the most important families of the place.
In Macedonia it was even worse because there even grown up men of the family couldn’t lay on the couches until they hadn’t killed with their lance and without any other help, as the use of nets and traps, a wild, ferocious ad angry boar. Thus also the 35 years old Cassander, a brave and daring hunter but one who didn’t had the chance to kill his boar, was obliged to consume his meals sitting on a chair as a woman.

Bibliography
Scientific popularization
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier: L'alimentazione nel mondo greco in Archeo, nº 44, October 1988, pp.48-91
E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L'alimentazione ed il banchetto in epoca greca in L'arcano convito, Cultural publications of the “Cassa di Risparmio di Verona, Vicenza e Milano”, pp. 44-47 September 1989.