Seasonal sex and seafood

Why is springtime the time for lovers?

Well, in summer women are at their keenest for sex - and men the least keen.

In winter time it is the opposite story.

So what bit of the year is left?

These seasonal rules came to the ancients from no less authorities than Aristotle, Hesiod and 'Pythagoras'.

So they had to be true.

Hesiod, arguably the first Greek poet whose work survives, describes the difficulty directly.

With so much summer wine and fresh goat meat around, the  female of the species is full of lust.

But the male skin gets too dry in the sun, particularly around the knees.

So opportunities, we must assume, were sadly  few.

Then in the winter, what was an 8th Century central Greek agricultural male supposed to get up to when the women were pushing him away?

Just shovel more snow?

There is a tricky passage in Hesiod's poem, Works and Days, in which he may be trying to tell us.

The setting is a miserable hovel in the bleak Boeotian plains, 'a fireless house on a winter day', where a subject described as 'boneless' is doing something, gnawing or stretching, to either its tip or foot.

We students were long told by our teachers that this 'boneless one' was an octopus.

The verb in the line meant 'to gnaw' and the eating of its foot was, as everyone knew, what an octopus occasionally did at home in the dark depths of the sea.

So what was the problem?

Hesiod, like every Greek restaurant-goer since, liked his octopus - and would surely bring one into any poem if he could.

Then in 1986 an Italian scholar pointed out that 'the boneless one' was, in other languages often a word for the male sexual organ.

'Stretch' was a more likely meaning for the verb than 'gnaw'.

And 'extremity' or 'tip' more plausible, he thought, in this context than 'foot'.

How had we all got it so wrong?

The best answer was the respect in which the ancients held those who were even more ancient than themselves.

Many an idea, particularly in medicine, lasted much, much longer than observation of the facts might support. 

Such was the special respect given to Hesiod that whatever meaning his successors thought he had given to words was good enough for them too.

Any early mistake might easily become a permanent mistake.

There were many new questions from the penile revisionists

Did octopuses, after all,  really have 'fireless houses'?

Classical commentatators in our own age may have liked the idea of so sophisticated a metaphor.

But would the land-lubber, Hesiod, marrooned in inland agararian poverty have really turned first to the octopus for his winter scene?

No, thought Snr Campanile. And the great lexicographer, John Chadwick, later gave him some support - addding one or two technicalities of grammar to the cause.

So the octopus became the penis of a frustrated old farmer.

The Boeotian male could be imagined stretching out his member on a cold frosty day - with or without the presence of any Boeotian female whose thoughts, were she to be allowed thoughts, were on future sunshine, cicadas and retsina.

A happy scene - though there remain opposing views on the matter.

I have been thinking about this problem today not because it is springtime.

London this week is as wet and cold as any winter in the Theban fields.

I have been conducting my own bit of lexicography - in English - on the word 'squamous', a term used of fish scales and cancer cells.

W. H. Auden deploys it in his early 70's poem, Nocturne:  'Do squamous and squiggling fish, down in their fireless houses, notice nightfall?'

I had not noticed this use of Hesiod's undersea 'fireless house' before.

The reference would certainly have appealed to the dedicatee of the poem, the wise and witty classical scholar, E.R.Dodds.

And to its first readers in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1972.

Chadwick gives no earlier citation for the 'penis-in-winter' interpretation of Works and Days (524-5) than 1978.

But the idea may have been circulating in senior common rooms before that time.

Auden would doubtless have enjoyed it, even if he did not believe it.

Comments

[Vernon Ram]

Dear Sir Peter:

Forget the octopus and the 'boneless one' - light years earlier, Vatsyayana of Kama Sutra fame, had zeroed in on the day/time/diet that triggered uncontrollable ovular excitement in the female of the species. The days were pre-winter Fridays when the lady has her ceremonial oil bath, decks her hair in jasmine headbands, and is fed an almond-enriched halwa as dessert. The orgasm-inducing combination is believed to be so potent as to put the lead into the most sterile of boneless penises.

[Pauline Roberts]

Do you know, I may not be as naive as I have hitherto thought for immediately I read Peter Stothard's fascinating article and the reference to "the boneless one" I confess that only one thing sprung to mind and it certainly wasn't an octopus. One wonders why it took until 1986 for an Italian scholar to point out the obvious.
As for the assertion that in summer women are keenest for sex might the great bard have had something a little different on his mind when he penned the immortal lines "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious by this summer son"- well spelling wasn't his forte.
Sir Peter you have opened up a veritable literary can of worms for now I am questioning the true and hidden meaning of such lines as "Once more unto the breach dear friends" and even, oh do please forgive this lamentable lapse in a lady's sensibilities, "a horse, a horse my kingdom for a horse."
Homeo-erotic bestiality. My God, the man was a pevert.

[Chuck Unsworth]

Well I'm very glad that Sir Peter has clarified the relative seasonality of urges. True, I've had my moments but latterly my problem is establishing which particular summer it is that women are 'at their keenest'.

Maybe I need to get out a bit more.