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Wine and symposium in ancient Greece

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

WINE
In ancient time wine was the choice drink for a banquet. Euripides in his “Bacchae” wrote
“Wine, the antidote for all pains, was given to us mortals. Without wine love cannot subsist and all the joys die”
All the other poets approved, limiting themselves to recommend a certain moderation, because as Antiphanes said
“If a man drinks without a stop, he gets stupefied. Only if he drinks with moderation he could be filled with new worthy ideas.”
It was not easy to get drunk at those times because wine was served mixed with water and to get enough alcohol in the blood people had to drink an enormous quantity of liquid. However undiluted wine was considered dangerous and many people would never accept to drink it if not adequately watered. Of course there was always a certain group of men who didn’t agree, and among them Alexander the Great who never mixed water to his wine and, as he was also prone to exceed, was often stone drunk. It was widely murmured that this was the reason of his frigidity, a frigidity that had much worried his parents, but that could not have been so terrible if in his campaigns he always took with him the very famous and very expensive Thais, an accomplished ethaira. This brings us to suspect that he must certainly have found some way to use her.
However Alexander was not the only one to drink undiluted wine and get drunk. There was also Cleomenes the Spartan who did the same thing and wound up raving mad, madness that people attributed to the fact that he had spent a long time with the Scytians, and from them he had learned to drink undiluted wine. This custom of the Scythians was well known in ancient Greece where to say “drink like the Scythians” meant to assume one’s wine without watering it, and for this reason, when in a symposium the guests wanted to have a strong drink, they ordered “do it the Scythian way”.
The mixture was traditionally prepared putting water first and only afterward adding the wine to it (Xenophanes, Anacreon and others). In the triclinium there was always a table on which all the symposium’s vessels were exposed: wine jugs called “oinochoes”, water pitchers, ladles, cups of all sizes and the big vessel in which water was mixed with wine and served to prepare the drinks. These symposium’s outfits could be very rich, made by exceptional artists and shaped in precious metals, thus were the Bulgarians Valchitran and the Panagurichte treasures or the Boscoreale one.
The proportion in which water and wine had to be mixed was fixed by one of the guests who had been elected “Symposiarka”. The principal task of this man was to decide how much wine had to be mixed with water. Usually the mixture of half water - half wine was immediately discarded, because it was still judged dangerous. Thus the symposiarka chose either the one called five, or the other called three. The five proportions were formed by three part of water and two of wine; for the one called three the mixture was made with two parts of water and one of wine. There was still another one for which four parts of water were mixed with one of wine, but this mixture was so feeble that Plutarch spurned it and declared that it was just good for very sage and very, very old judges. Whatever were the mixture’s proportions wine was always a pleasant beverage that in winter times was diluted with hot water, while in summer with snow collected on Mount Olympus slopes and melted into the cups.
Hot and iced drinks were very pleasant, and, maybe for this, guests were always admonished not to be tempted by gluttony. Eubulus represent Dionysus saying that moderate men drank only three cups: one for toasts, one for sex and the last one for a good night sleep. At this moment - added the god - any wise man should leave the party and go home. Anyone who chose to stay would soon discover that the fourth cup entrained violence; the fifth a row; the sixth the merriment of drunkenness; the seventh, “black eyes”, which meant that the ones who stayed risked to get a black eye; then the eighth cup could wind them to the court house, the ninth give them liver trouble, and, at last, the tenth led them to madness and furniture’s destruction.
Greek wine must really had a very high alcohol content if ten watered cups could led a man to this extreme.
However Greek wine was considered the best among all the others. Many were the countries that tried to imitate it. Both Cato, Varro, Columella and many other authors of agricultural treaties, gave recipes and advices on how to make “Greek wine”, which as it seems was obtained by mixing a certain quantity of sea water to the fresh pressed must. It seems that this made a sweeter wine.
Done this way was the Myndus and, as it pushed Menippus, the Cynic, to define the inhabitants of the place “seawater drinkers”, the quantity of salt water mixed with it had to be very high.
Other Greek wines were the Alicarnassus and also the Coos, the latter of which had a strong addition of seawater. Less mixed was the Rhodes’s must. People believed that wine treated with seawater protected people from headache, was laxative, excited the gastric juices and helped the digestion: in conclusion that it was a real panacaea. Going on with the list of wines we find the red Chios that was considered the best one. There was also the Thasios which seems to have been a particularly good one and of it Antitodus wrote
“Fill my cup with Thasius because, whatever are the cares which are straining my soul, when I drink it my heart is immediately consoled. Esculapius soaked me……..”
Very appreciated was the Pramnian wine of Lesbos. Clearchus exclaimed
“Lesbos wine which musts might have been done by Maron himself (Maron was Apollo’s priest who gave his wine to Ulysses)”
And Alexis sang
“There is nothing pleasanter than a Lesbos cup”
And he added
“Bromius was very generous freeing the importers of this wine from customs”
Also Archestratus talked about wines and he recommended a well aged Lesbos. Of course Archestratus did not stop at this. He not only was a noted gastronome, but he was also a great traveller, who toured around all the Mediterranean area exploring all the different gastronomic specialties of the places, tasting all dishes and all wines. Also for Achestratus the wine of Lesbos was outstanding. Of course he could recognize the existence of very good other wines, but he affirmed that not one of the others could bear comparison with it. Hermippus differed from him and wrote that the same Dyonisus asserted that the best wine was the Thasos
“On which the perfume of apples hover”
For the god of wine the Thasos was the best among alls, exception only made for the Chios, the perfect wine, a wine not only with no blemish but also very healthy.
Very good seems to have been also the Naxos, and Archilochus, a good judge of alcoholic drinks, compared it with the god’s nectar. The poet wrote:
“On my lance depends my bread, on my lance also the Ismarus wine and leaning on my lance I drink it”
Then there were other wines with absurd characteristics. Thus Theophrastus in his botanic treaty wrote that at Heraea in Arcadia there was a wine that caused madness to the men, while women who drank it got immediately pregnant: if a lady took a sip of it immediately she found herself in a family way. It certainly worked much better and was simpler than our artificial insemination.
It is also true that there existed another wine, the Threzenius that counteracted it. It was a wine stronger than our condoms, moreover if a pregnant woman took a cup of it, she miscarried at once; It was also said that even a small bunch of the Threzenian grapes produced the same effect.
Then, to complete this entire list, it was said that in the island of Thasos its inhabitants had succeeded in making a wine which was much better than a sleeping pill; a beverage that plunged anyone who drank it in a deep slumber. Of course after this they had to make another wine which counteracted the first one and kept the men active for the rest of the day. Maybe both those drinks existed, and maybe not, but if they really worked so, they were certainly helped by a lot of suggestion.
However lets us say that it is always much better to drink a cup of wine than to swallow a pill.


Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- 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,
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier: L'arte del bere nell'antichità in Archeo, nº 81, November 1991, pp.62-105

Books
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L’arte del convito nell’antica Grecia. L’evoluzione del gusto da Achille ad Alessandro Magno , L’ERMA DI BRETSCHNEIDER, ROME, 2005.



Bibliography
Scientific popularization
- 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,
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, Dossier: L'arte del bere nell'antichità in Archeo, nº 81, November 1991, pp.62-105

Books
- E. SALZA PRINA RICOTTI, L’arte del convito nell’antica Grecia. L’evoluzione del gusto da Achille ad Alessandro Magno , L’ERMA DI BRETSCHNEIDER, ROME, 2005.