Photo by Deidre Schlabs on Unsplash.
You know what a sycophant is – someone who sucks up to someone else to get an advantage. Also known as a toady, creep, lickspittle and so on. But it hasn’t always meant that. Previously, a sychophant was someone who accused someone else of being a fig-smuggler. Nope, this isn’t another name for Speedos – it dates all the way back to classical Athens (which was a long time ago y’all).
So, way back in the sixth century (I said it was a long time ago), Athens law didn’t let anyone export food (apart from olives, because that would just be mean) outside its borders. Apparently this was torture for some fig-loving souls, who broke the law by smuggling the fruit* out. Unlike food transportation, blackmail wasn’t against the law (that’s some effed-up legal system right there). So if someone busted you leaving town with your pockets full of figs, they’d threaten to tell the fuzz about it. These blackmailers were called sykophantes, which translates as ‘revealer of figs’.
(At this point I should probably say that Wikipedia reckons this is a load of old cobblers, as there’s no concrete proof for the whole thing. But ‘sykophantes’ does mean ‘revealer of figs’, and Plutarch (Greek scholar and all round clever dude) said it was true, so let’s just go with it. Because the other explanations are nowhere near as interesting.)
I’ve just realised I’ve never had a fig.
*Interesting fact alert: A fig isn’t technically a fruit – it’s an ‘inverted flower’. And they only exist because of the fig wasp. (Warning: this is gross, sorry. Brace yourself.)
Female wasps clamber inside figs to lay their eggs. It’s a one-way trip – getting in rips their wings off (I told you it was gross). Once the eggs are laid, the wasp dies. The baby wasps grow up inside the fig then mate (wait, aren’t they all related? Ewww). Then the boys die (they’re born without any wings, so their only job is to get their rocks off with their sisters), and the females fly out of the fig, all covered in pollen, off to find a male fig of their own to do the whole thing again. But, PLOT TWIST: figs have genders, and only the male ones have the special egg area (not what it’s called) the wasps need to lay in. So as long as Mrs Wasp sets up shop in a male fig, everything’s fine (apart from the whole wing-ripping, dying part). But if she ends up in a female fig, she’s a bit screwed. So, she just dies, with no babies. But the good news is, she does pollinate the fig with the pollen she bought with her. Which means more figs, I think (I’m not a scientist, okay?).
Us humans only eat female figs (I’m not sure how you tell the difference – maybe they get paid less than their male counterparts), which contain an enzyme that digests the bits of dead wasp. But because of the absolute horror show mentioned above, a lot of vegans don’t eat them at all. And I don’t think I’ll be trying one any time soon.