Toward Ecosophy

Among the things I find most interesting, and most entertaining, about history are the little details that suddenly make it clear that the past really is a foreign country. Past eras aren't simply dress-up games for people who think exactly the same way we do -- human beings in those eras really did understand the world in ways that we don't. One of my favorite examples is the belief, tolerably widespread in Europe in the Middle Ages, that of all the men who had ever lived or would ever live, only Jesus of Nazareth was exactly six feet tall. 

But I have a new favorite example, courtesy of James Davidson's Courtesans and Fishcakes, a history of Athenian passions. Think of ancient Greece, and what comes first to mind? White marble temples gleaming in the Mediterranean sun, the robust poetry of Homer, the origins of philosophy and formal mathematics? 

Radishes. Radishes, more to the point, used in a very undignified way. 

Under Athenian law, a man who caught another man having sex with his wife or his concubine -- male or female -- had the right to kill the adulterer on the spot. This draconian law -- literally Draconian, as it was part of the early Athenian law code established by Draco in the 7th century BC -- was almost never enforced. Normally the aggrieved husband was satisfied with a whopping fine, but there was another option if the guy caught in flagrante didn't have the money. It was called αποῥαφανιδωσις, aporhaphanidosis, which can be translated quite precisely as "enradishment." 

You got it. The husband had the legal right to have a radish inserted in the adulterer's rectum. 

The sources I was able to find on enradishment don't mention who first came up with this idea, nor do they mention whether the radish was generally peeled or not -- I suspect it was, and given that ancient Greek radishes were apparently quite hot, I suspect this was the point of the exercise. Nor have I been able to find out how often it happened. Greek writers, including the comic playwright Aristophanes, mention it, and the scholiasts who dutifully annotated the classic Greek texts in Hellenistic and Roman times explained what those mentions meant. Catullus, the bad boy of Roman poetry, also threatened to enradish one of his friends if the friend in question messed with Catullus' boy-toy, but then Catullus was as erudite as he was scatological and probably got the idea from Greek literature. 

Two final notes before you run for the brain bleach.  First, the past really is a foreign country; they do things differently there -- including things with radishes. Second, as a longtime fan of well-chosen euphemisms, it occurs to me that the verb "to enradish" deserves modern use. I'm pleased to say that my wife is a pioneer here; on learning that the teachers' union across the river in Providence just lost a lawsuit in which they were trying to defend their mismanagement of one of the worst public school systems in the nation, Sara turned to me and said, "Well, the Providence teachers' union just got enradished."