A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage

  In the words of Thucydides, a Greek writer of the fifth century BCE who was one of the ancient world's greatest historians, "the peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learnt to cultivate the olive and the vine." According to one legend, Dionysus, the god of wine, fled to Greece to escape beer-loving Mesopotamia. A more kindly but still rather patronizing Greek tradition relates that Dionysus created beer for the benefit of people in countries where the vine could not be cultivated. In Greece, however, Dionysus had made wine available to everyone, not just the elite. As the playwright Euripides put it in The Bacchae: "To rich and poor alike hath he granted the delight of wine, that makes all pain to cease."

  Wine was plentiful enough to be widely affordable because the climate and terrain of the Greek islands and mainland were ideal for viticulture. Cultivation of the vine rapidly took hold throughout Greece from the seventh century BCE, starting in Arcadia and Sparta in the Peloponnese Peninsula, and then spreading up toward Attica, the region around Athens. The Greeks were the first to produce wine on a large commercial scale and took a methodical, even scientific approach to viticulture. Greek writing on the subject begins with Hesiod's Works and Days, written in the eighth century BCE, which incorporates advice on how and when to prune, harvest, and press grapes. Greek vintners devised improvements to the wine press and adopted the practice of growing vines in neat rows, on trellises and stakes, rather than up trees. This allowed more vines to be packed into a given space, increasing yields and providing easier access for harvesting.

  Gradually, grain farming was overtaken by the cultivation of grapevines and olives, and wine production switched from subsistence to industrial farming. Rather than being consumed by the farmer and his dependents, wine was produced specifically as a commercial product. And no wonder; a farmer could earn up to twenty times as much from cultivating vines on his land as he could from growing grain. Wine became one of Greece's main exports and was traded by sea for other commodities. In Attica, the switch from grain production to viticulture was so dramatic that grain had to be imported in order to maintain an adequate supply. Wine was wealth; by the sixth century BCE, the property-owning classes in Athens were categorized according to their vineyard holdings: The lowest class had less than seven acres, and the next three classes up owned around ten, fifteen, and twenty-five acres, respectively.

  Wine production was also established on remote Greek islands, including Chios, Thasos, and Lesbos, off the west coast of modern Turkey, whose distinctive wines became highly esteemed. Wine's economic importance was underlined by the appearance of wine-related imagery on Greek coins: Those from Chios portrayed the distinctive profile of its wine jars, and the wine god Dionysus reclining on a donkey was a common motif on both the coins and amphora handles of the Thracian city of Mende. The commercial significance of the wine trade also meant that vineyards became prime targets in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and were often trampled and burned. On one occasion, in 424 BCE, Spartan troops arrived just before harvest time at Acanthus, a wine-producing city in Macedonia that was allied with Athens. Fearing for their grapes, and swayed by the oratory of Brasidas, the Spartan leader, the locals held a ballot and decided to switch allegiances. The harvest was then able to continue unaffected.

  As wine became more widely available—so widely available that even the slaves drank it—what mattered was no longer whether or not you drank wine, but what kind it was. For while the availability of wine was more democratic in Greek society than in other cultures, wine could still be used to delineate social distinctions. Greek wine buffs were soon making subtle distinctions between the various homegrown and foreign wines. As individual styles became well known, different wine-producing regions began shipping their wines in distinctively shaped amphorae, so that customers who preferred a particular style could be sure they were getting the real thing. Archestratus, a Greek gourmet who lived in Sicily in the fourth century BCE and is remembered as the author of Gastronomia, one of the world's first cookbooks, preferred wine from Lesbos. References in Greek comic plays of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE suggest that the wines of Chios and Thasos were also particularly highly regarded.

  After a wine's place of origin, the Greeks were primarily interested in its age, rather than its exact vintage. They made little distinction between one vintage and the next, probably because variations caused by storage and handling far outweighed the differences between vintages. Old wine was a badge of status, and the older it was, the better. Homer's Odyssey, written in the eighth century BCE, describes the strong room of the mythical hero Odysseus, "where piled-up gold and bronze was lying and clothing in chests and plenty of good-smelling oil: and in it stood jars of old sweet-tasting wine, with the unmixed divine drink in them, packed in rows against the wall."

  For the Greeks, wine drinking was synonymous with civilization and refinement: What kind of wine you drank, and its age, indicated how cultured you were. Wine was preferred over beer, fine wines were preferred over ordinary ones, and older wines over young. What mattered even more than your choice of wine, however, was how you behaved when you drank it, which was even more revealing of your innermost nature. As Aeschylus, a Greek poet, put it in the sixth century BCE: "Bronze is the mirror of the outward form; wine is the mirror of the mind."

  How to Drink Like a Greek

  What most distinguished the Greek approach to wine from that of other cultures was the Greek practice of mixing wine with water before consumption. The pinnacle of social sophistication was the consumption of the resulting mixture at a private drinking party, or symposion. This was an all-male aristocratic ritual that took place in a special "men's room," or andron. Its walls were often decorated with drinking-related murals or paraphernalia, and the use of a special room emphasized the separation between everyday life and the symposion, during which different rules applied. The andron was sometimes the only room in the house with a stone floor, which sloped toward the center to make cleaning easier. Its importance was such that houses were often designed around it.

  The men sat on special couches, with a cushion under one arm, a fashion imported from the Near East in the eighth century BCE. Typically, a dozen individuals attended a symposion, and certainly no more than thirty. Although women were not allowed to sit with the men, female servers, dancers, and musicians were often present. Food was served first, with little or nothing to drink. Then the tables were cleared away, and the wine was brought out. The Athenian tradition was to pour three libations: one to the gods, one to fallen heroes, particularly one's ancestors, and one to Zeus, the king of the gods. A young woman might play the flute during this ceremony, and a hymn would then be sung. Garlands of flowers or vine leaves were handed out, and in some cases perfume was applied. Then the drinking could begin.

  The wine was first mixed with water in a large, urn-shaped bowl called a krater. Water from a three-handled vessel, the hydria, was always added to wine, rather than the other way around. The amount of water added determined how quickly everyone would become intoxicated. Typical mixing ratios of water to wine seem to have been 2:1, 5:2, 3:1, and 4:1. A mixture of equal parts of water and wine was regarded as "strong wine";

  some concentrated wines, which were boiled down before shipping to a half or a third of their original volume, had to be mixed with eight or even twenty times as much water. In hot weather, the wine was cooled by lowering it into a well or mixing it with snow, at least by those who could afford such extravagances. The snow was collected during the winter and kept in underground pits, packed with straw, to keep it from melting.

  Drinking even a fine wine without first mixing it with water was considered barbaric by the Greeks, and by the Athenians in particular. Only Dionysus, they believed, could drink unmixed wine without risk. He is often depicted drinking from a special type of vase, the use of which indicates that no water has been added. Mere mortals, in contrast, could only drink wine whose strength had been tempered with water; otherwise
they would become extremely violent or even go mad. This was said by Herodotus to have happened to King Cleomenes of Sparta, who picked up the barbaric habit of drinking unmixed wine from the Scythians, a nomadic people from the region north of the Black Sea. Both they and their neighbors the Thra-cians were singled out by the Athenian philosopher Plato as being clueless and uncultured in their use of wine: "The Scythi­ans and Thracians, both men and women, drink unmixed wine, which they pour on their garments, and this they think a happy and glorious institution." Macedonians were also notorious for their fondness for unmixed wine. Alexander the Great and his father, Philip II, were both reputed to have been heavy drinkers. Alexander killed his friend Clitus in a drunken brawl, and there is some evidence that heavy wine drinking contributed to his death from a mysterious illness in 323 BCE. But it is difficult to evaluate the trustworthiness of such claims, since the equation of virtue with moderate drinking, and corruption with overindulgence, is so widespread in the ancient sources.

  Drinkers at a Greek symposion. The seated men drink watered-down wine from shallow wine bowls, while a flutist plays music and a slave fetches more wine from the communal krater.

  Water made wine safe; but wine also made water safe. As well as being free of pathogens, wine contains natural antibacterial agents that are liberated during the fermentation process. The Greeks were unaware of this, though they were familiar with the dangers of drinking contaminated water; they preferred water from springs and deep wells, or rainwater collected in cisterns. The observation that wounds treated with wine were less likely to become infected than those treated with water (again, because of the lack of pathogens and the presence of antibacterial agents) may also have suggested that wine had the power to clean and purify.

  Not drinking wine at all was considered just as bad as drinking it neat. The Greek practice of mixing wine and water was thus a middle ground between barbarians who overindulged and those who did not drink at all. Plutarch, a Greek writer from the later Roman period, put it this way: "The drunkard is insolent and rude. . . . On the other hand, the complete teetotaler is disagreeable and more fit for tending children than for presiding over a drinking party." Neither, the Greeks believed, was able to make proper use of the gift of Dionysus. The Greek ideal was to be somewhere between the two. Ensuring that this was the case was the job of the sym-posiarch, or king of the symposion—either the host, or one of the drinking group, chosen by ballot or a roll of dice. Moderation was the key: The symposiarch's aim was to keep the assembled company on the borderline between sobriety and drunkenness, so that they could enjoy the freedom of tongue and release from worry, but without becoming violent like barbarians.

  Wine was most frequently drunk from a shallow, two-handled bowl with a short stem called a cylix. It was also sometimes served in a larger, deeper vessel called a cantharos, or a drinking horn called a rhyton. A wine jug, or oinochoe, which in some cases resembled a long-handled ladle, was used by servants, under the direction of the symposiarch, to transfer wine from the krater to the drinking vessels. Once one krater had been emptied, another would be prepared.

  Drinking vessels were elaborately decorated, often with Dionysian imagery, and they became increasingly ornate. For pottery vessels, the classic form was the "black-figure" technique, in which figures and objects were represented by areas of black paint, with details picked out by incising lines before firing. This technique, pioneered in Corinth in the seventh century BCE, quickly spread to Athens. From the sixth century BCE, it was progressively replaced by the "red-figure" technique, in which figures were depicted by leaving the natural red color of the clay unpainted, and adding details in black. The survival to this day of so much black-figure and red-figure pottery, including drinking vessels, is misleading, however. The rich drank from silver or gold drinking vessels, rather than pottery. But it is the pottery vessels that survive because they were used in burials.

  Adherence to the rules and rituals of wine drinking, and the ' use of the appropriate equipment, furniture, and dress all served to emphasize the drinkers' sophistication. But what actually went on while the wine was being consumed? There is no single answer; the symposion was as varied as life itself, a mirror of Greek society. Sometimes there would be formal entertainment, in the form of hired musicians and dancers. At some symposia, the guests themselves would compete to improvise witty songs, poetry, and repartee; sometimes the symposion was a formal occasion for the discussion of philosophy or literature, to which young men were admitted for educational purposes.

  But not all symposia were so serious. Particularly popular was a drinking game called kottabos. This involved flicking the last remaining drops of wine from one's cup at a specific target, such as another person, a disk-shaped bronze target, or even a cup floating in a bowl of water, with the aim of sinking it. Such was the craze for kottabos that some enthusiasts even built special circular rooms in which to play it. Traditionalists expressed concern that young men were concentrating on improving their kottabos rather than javelin throwing, a sport that at least had some practical use in hunting and war.

  As one krater succeeded another, some symposia descended into orgies, and others into violence, as drinkers issued challenges to each other to demonstrate loyalty to their drinking group, or hetaireia. The symposion was sometimes followed by the komos, a form of ritual exhibitionism in which the members of the hetaireia would course through the streets in nocturnal revelry to emphasize the strength and unity of their group. The komos could be good-natured but could also lead to violence or vandalism, depending on the state of the participants. As a fragment from a play by Euboulos puts it: "For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health, which they drink first, the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine anymore—it belongs to bad behavior; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness."

  At heart, the symposion was dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, whether of the intellectual, social, or sexual variety. It was also an outlet, a way of dealing with unruly passions of all kinds. It encapsulated the best and worst elements of the culture that spawned it. The mixture of water and wine consumed in the sym­posion provided fertile metaphorical ground for Greek philosophers, who likened it to the mixture of the good and bad in human nature, both within an individual and in society at large. The symposion, with its rules for preventing a dangerous mixture from getting out of hand, thus became a lens through which Plato and other philosophers viewed Greek society.

  The Philosophy of Drinking

  Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom; and where better to discover the truth than at a symposion, where wine does away with inhibitions to expose truths, both pleasant and unpleasant? "Wine reveals what is hidden," declared Eratosthenes, a Greek philosopher who lived in the third century BCE. That the symposion was thought to be a suitable venue for getting at the truth is emphasized by its repeated use as a literary form, in which several characters debate a particular topic while drinking wine. The most famous example is Plato's Symposium, in which the participants, including Plato's depiction of his men tor, Socrates, discuss the subject of love. After an entire night's drinking, everyone has fallen asleep except Socrates, who remains apparently unaffected by the wine he has drunk and sets off on his day's business. Plato depicts him as the ideal drinker: He uses wine in the pursuit of truth but remains in total control of himself and suffers no ill effects. Socrates also appears in a similar work written by another of his pupils. Xenophon's Symposium, written around 360 BCE, is another fictional account of an Athenian drinking party where the conversation is rather more sparkling and witty, and the characters rather more human, than in Plato's more serious work. The main subject, once again, is love, and the conversation is fueled by fine Thasian wine.

  Such philosophica
l symposia took place more in literary imagination than in real life. But in one respect, at least, wine could be used in everyday life to reveal truth: It could expose the true nature of those drinking it. While he objected to the hedonistic reality of actual symposia, Plato saw no reason why the practice could not, in theory, be put to good use as a test of personality. Speaking through one of the characters in his book Laws, Plato argues that drinking with someone at a symposion is in fact the simplest, fastest, and most reliable test of someone's character. He portrays Socrates postulating a "fear potion" that induces fear in those who drink it. This imaginary drink can then be used to instill fearlessness and courage, as drinkers gradually increase the dose and learn to conquer their fear. No such potion exists, of course; but Plato (speaking, as Socrates, to a Cretan interlocutor) draws an analogy with wine, which he suggests is ideally suited to instill self-control.

  The Greek philosopher Plato, who believed that wine provided a good way to test a man's character

  What is better adapted than the festive use of wine, in the first place to test, and in the second place to train the character of a man, if care be taken in the use of it? What is there cheaper, or more innocent? For do but consider which is the greater risk: Would you rather test a man of a morose and savage nature, which is the source of ten thousand acts of injustice, by making bargains with him at a risk to yourself, or by having him as a companion at the festival of Dionysus? Or would you, if you wanted to apply a touchstone to a man who is prone to love, entrust your wife, or your sons, or daughters to him, imperiling your dearest interests in order to have a view of the condition of his soul? . . . I do not believe that either a Cretan, or any other man, will doubt that such a test is a fair test, and safer, cheaper, and speedier than any other.