by Iain Gately
The usual way to recuperate after a bout of heavy drinking was to sleep it off. Indeed, sleeping late was considered to be a hallmark of the drunkard, as was a certain inattentiveness to serious matters. Habitual drunks were characterized by the description apeles, which means careless, and/or carefree. Being apeles was no disgrace. Many great men were honored with the title. It was, however, occasionally the subject of mild criticism. The historian Herodotus, for instance, pointed it out as a vice of foreigners and gave the example of Amasis, ruler of Egypt, who became apeles to the extent that he lost his kingdom.
The Greek word for drinker, philopotes, which also meant “lover of drinking sessions,” bore no stigma. As drinking was an inherently pleasurable activity it was understandable that people would want to indulge in it as much as possible. Those who succumbed too often did so not out of dependency but rather from an inability to resist an entirely natural impulse. They were considered weak, not wrong. In contrast, inappropriate sobriety was thought highly suspect. Some skills, such as oratory, could only be exercised when drunk. Sober people were coldhearted—they meditated before they spoke and were careful about what they said, and therefore, according to logic, the new science of reason, did not really care about their subject. When the orator Demosthenes wanted to criticize the youth of Athens for their drinking habits he had to coin a new term—akratokothones—to distinguish their dangerous kind of drinking. “But even so it was the remark and not its target that became notorious, laying the orator open to the more serious charge of being a water drinker.”
Water drinkers were believed not only to lack passion but also to exude a noxious odor. Hegesander the Delphian noted that when the two infamous water drinkers Anchimolus and Moschus went to the public baths everyone else got out. The different powers of the respective beverages were summed up in an epigram:
If with water you fill up your glasses,
You’ll never write anything wise
But wine is the horse of Parnassus,
That carries a bard to the skies.
This is not to suggest that the Greeks, whenever possible, avoided drinking water—they wrote lovingly of certain springs and streams whose contents were distinguished by their delicious flavors or medicinal qualities. Indeed, scientific inquiry, then in its infancy, was prepared to defend the beverage to a limited degree: “But that water is undeniably nutritious is plain from the fact that some animals are nourished by it alone, as for instance, grasshoppers.”
However, the same special quality in wine that raised its drinkers above water lovers was recognized as being a potentially dangerous force. The more extreme degrees of intoxication were conceived of as a kind of possession, during which an anarchic spirit took command of the drinker’s reason, made them blurt out all sorts of truths, and forced them to reveal their secrets, even to absolute strangers.1 According to a maxim of the period, “Wine lays bare the heart of man,” and in the days when looking glasses were made from sheets of burnished metal:
As brass is a mirror to the face,
So is wine for the mind.
Indiscretion was not the only side effect of too much wine to be recognized by the Greeks. Excessive indulgence could make “an old man dance against his will” and was the “sire of blows and violence.” Those who dedicated their lives to their amphorae, who went beyond apeles, were compared to rudderless ships, liable to drift with the wind and to wreck themselves on shoals. Finally, the Greeks also recognized that drinking could kill, albeit only suddenly. Their literature is littered with examples of men and mythical beasts who lost their lives to wine. In almost all such cases death was instantaneous—a pint or two too many and the drinker expired on the spot. Sudden death by drinking might strike anyone, anywhere, and there is evidence, in the form of a tombstone inscription, that public-spirited individuals sought to warn the living of the lethal potential of alcohol:
THIS IS THE MONUMENT OF THAT GREAT DRINKER,
ARCADION; AND HIS TWO LOVING SONS,
DORCON AND CHARMYLUS, HAVE PLACED IT HERE,
AT THIS THE ENTRANCE OF HIS NATIVE CITY:
AND KNOW, TRAVELER, THE MAN DID DIE
FROM DRINKING NEAT WINE IN TOO LARGE A CUP.
The Greeks attributed the perilous aspects of drinking to the work of a god—Bacchus, also known as Dionysus, who was the embodiment of their views about alcohol. Bacchus was a composite immortal, who had started life as a simple fertility idol and was built up over time into the sophisticated divinity of the classical period. He resembled Osiris in some aspects, and the Greeks acknowledged that they had borrowed from the Egyptians when crafting their god. The finished item was claimed to be the love child of the union between Zeus, the Thunderer, and Semele, a princess of Thebes. He was said to have been twice born, as Zeus had been forced to kill his pregnant lover to satisfy a technical point of Greek theology and had carried Bacchus in a special pouch in his thigh for the remainder of his term. After passing his infancy with the sea nymphs, the young demi-immortal spent his youth at Mount Nysa, which was reckoned to be in Africa or Arabia. Nysa, wherever it was, possessed a somewhat lax educational system. Instead of learning, like other little Greek boys, how to fight and debate, Dionysus passed his time in “dances and with troops of girls . . . and in every kind of luxury and amusement.” His education over, he returned to Greece with the aim of initiating its people into the pleasures of the grape. He wore his hair and beard very long and sported a wreath of vine leaves and ivy. A fawn skin was draped over his shoulders, and he traveled in a chariot drawn by a pair of leopards. His languid behavior and slender body, in contrast to the dynamism and heroic proportions of the other bastard sons of Zeus, verged on the effeminate. His power, however, was truly divine, and exercised in a capricious manner, as is illustrated by the story of how he introduced wine to Greece.
According to legend, upon his return to Hellenic soil, Bacchus had paused at a village where a goatherd named Ikarios offered him a drink of milk. In return, he presented Ikarios with some vines, together with directions as to how to cultivate them and how to turn their fruit into wine. The goatherd followed the god’s instructions, created the first-ever Greek vintage, and invited his neighbors to share the new drink. They were amazed by its bouquet, stunned by its effects, and soon were dancing and singing its praises. However, one by one they lost control of their legs. Those still upright accused Ikarios of poisoning them, beat him to death, and threw his mutilated body into a well. His daughter, Erigone, went mad with grief and hanged herself. She was turned into a star, in the constellation of Virgo. Maira, her faithful dog who guarded her body, was likewise set in the heavens as Canis Minor, the lesser dog. Maira was a vindictive little creature and has yet to forgive humanity for the death of her mistress. She rules over the hottest days of summer, whose scorching sun and dusty winds drive men mad.2
The tale is typical of those involving Bacchus. Like wine, he brought happiness but sometimes also chaos and misery. Notwithstanding this duality, he had many devotees. He was a god who stood for the untamed side of human nature, for liberation from the conventions of communal living. The long-haired love child of Zeus was a favorite among women, who would leave off their normal occupation of weaving, retire to the countryside, and surrender themselves to their divinity. These devotees were known as maenads, “women who were driven mad,” or Bacchae—the celebrants of Bacchus—and were distinguished by their cries of “OI!” The state of excitement they achieved was called ecstasis—hence our word ecstasy. They were famously outrageous. After enough wine they became inflamed with lust and bloodlust. The former they appeased by raping shepherds, the latter by tearing their flocks to pieces and eating them raw. They adorned trees with phalloi, they danced in a wild and abandoned manner, they threw away their clothing, and neither apologized nor repented when they deigned to return home, exhausted, naked, and covered with blood, to their brothers, their husbands, and their sons. The antics of these fair devotees were a popular theme in the visual ar
t of the period. Scantily clad maenads appear painted on pottery, sculpted in bas relief and in the round in marble, and cast in bronze, and are claimed to be the first representations of mortal female beauty ever to have been created by the hands of man.
In addition to such impromptu forms of worship, Bacchus enjoyed a number of formal rites. As befits the god of temporary amnesia, he was patron of the Greek theater, and every year in Athens, and every two or three years in other parts of Greece, festivals were staged in his honor. His patronage of the dramatic arts was traced in legend to his encounter with Ikarios, who had killed a goat that tried to eat his vines and, when their grapes were ripe, had used its skin as a receptacle for the new wine. Ikarios and his friends had danced around the goatskin during the early stages of their drinking bout, thus inventing “the ritual dance of the tragos, the goat,” which was the germ of the annual festival of Athenian tragodia, or tragedy. Comedy, the other principal theatrical genre in the ancient world, was likewise derived from the spontaneous devotions of the followers of the god of wine. Their drunken processions were termed komos, hence komodia, which celebrated the playful side of human nature, and which parodied the behavior of inebriates onstage.
Some of the tragedies and comedies written for the festival of Bacchus have survived and are still performed. They include one dedicated entirely to their patron—the Bacchae, by Euripides (484-406 BC), which portrays its subject as lord of the ecstatic dance, as an advocate of back-to-nature, and as an assassin. The Bacchae tells the story of the arrival of Bacchus in Thebes and his attempts to introduce its population to his rites. The women of the city-state are fascinated, but its ruler perceives the exotic and effete stranger to be a threat to his authority. The king challenges the god and loses—he is torn apart offstage by his mother and other drunken maenads, who have mistaken him in their cups for a young lion, and congratulate themselves for killing such difficult game as they share out his flesh. The message of the play is that there exist some aspects of human nature that the state cannot and should not try to control.
Notwithstanding the lessons in the Bacchae, and a generally enthusiastic attitude toward alcohol, the Greeks had strict rules as to who might consume the fluid. It was not customary for women to drink. Excepting the rare occasions on which they slipped out to worship Bacchus, they were expected to steer clear of wine. They were excused from formal participation in civic wine and meat feasts; for the wine was believed to make them paroinos (violent when drunk). Outside of the seasons for Bacchanalia, women who wanted wine were forced to make clandestine arrangements for its procurement. Many were ready to take the risk: According to the comic playwrights of the period, Greek women were secretive and dedicated drinkers.
Since access at home to drink was often controlled by a slave, with orders to keep it from the women, most slaked their thirsts in the kapelion, or taverns. According to archaeological evidence kapelion were widespread, and each neighborhood in the average town had a local wine bar. Their importance within the community is corroborated by the numerous katadesmoi, or hex tablets, which were pottery shards inscribed with curses against named persons and activated by the blessing of a magician, and which litter the ruins of Greek cities. These artifacts, each one bearing a line or two of vitriol, have as their usual targets tavern keepers, their wives, bar slaves, and married women.
Whereas custom held women and alcohol apart, philosophy alone kept it from the mouths of infants. A minimum drinking age was proposed by Plato in his Laws, which were intended to frame the legislation for an ideal society. According to Plato, no one under the age of eighteen should be allowed to touch wine, for the young were typified by “excitable” dispositions and it was an error to inflame this with wine, to “pour fire upon fire.” Plato recommended further restrictions until middle age but limitless access thereafter: “When a man has reached the age of forty, he may join in the convivial gatherings and invoke Bacchus, above all other gods, . . . that thereby we men may renew our youth, and that, through forgetfulness of care, the temper of our souls may lose its hardness and become softer and more ductile.”
Plato subsequently changed his mind about the minimum drinking age he’d proposed in the Laws. In his Republic, a revised blueprint for the ideal state, he argued, in the dialectic form he perfected, that youth must learn to drink. The reason given for the volte-face was that since wine was a necessary part of culture, it was best that young men gained early experience of its effects and disciplined themselves to manage them, as the following dialogue illustrates:
ATHENIAN STRANGER: Are not those who train in gymnasia, at first . . . reduced to a state of weakness?
CLEINIAS: Yes, all that is well known.
ATHENIAN STRANGER: Also that they go of their own accord for the sake of the subsequent benefit?
CLEINIAS: Very good.
ATHENIAN STRANGER: And we may conceive this to be true in the same way of other practices?
CLEINIAS: Certainly.
ATHENIAN STRANGER: And the same view may be taken of the pastime of drinking wine, if we are right in supposing that the same good effect follows?
CLEINIAS: To be sure.
In the opinion of Plato, the proper forum for training youth to tipple wisely, the gymnasium, so to speak, of wine, was the symposium, a formal, if convivial, drinking party. In order to emphasize the positive influence such gatherings could assert on society, he provided an ideal example of one in an eponymous prose work. His opinion was shared by most Greeks, who considered symposia to be the perfect expression of Hellenic culture. They were staged in accordance with strict rules that determined the order of proceedings, the number of guests, and that set a limit on the quantity of wine to be consumed. They were held in the androns, or men’s rooms, of private houses. These were furnished with a squared circle of couches on which guests reclined in pairs. The number of couches was seven, eleven, or fifteen, meaning fourteen, twenty-two, or thirty people present. All the guests were male, for the Greeks considered the habit, current in other nations, of encouraging men to eat with their female relations by blood or marriage to be barbaric.
A symposium commenced with a banquet, which was consumed without wine. Dinner was followed by drinking. The drinking was subject to a precise etiquette. First, a symposiarch was elected from among the guests, whose duty was to choose how they would be entertained while they drank. Next the guests, under the guidance of the symposiarch, decided how many kraters (a vessel the size of a garden urn) of wine they would consume together, and in what proportion the wine inside them would be mixed with water. The usual number of kraters seems to have been three, the usual proportion three-to-one water to wine, which would have resulted in a drink with a similar alcoholic strength to modern beer. The wine was then served in drinking bowls and drinking cups, decorated with Bacchic or other scenes. Some emphasized the bestial potential of wine with images of drunken centaurs attempting to tread grapes or rape peasants; while others represented its elevating qualities with beautiful girls in diaphanous robes, tossing their heads and kicking their heels, lost in the ecstasy of the dance.
Detail of ancient Greek wine cup
A variety of pastimes were enjoyed at symposia. The most common, a relic of the warrior feast, was the recital or composition of poetry, which was accompanied by music. Guests took turns to sing—a little like modern karaoke. The music was provided by pornikes, or flute girls, who sometimes doubled up as prostitutes (hence pornography—the graphic depiction of flute girls). Other popular entertainments included aenigma—playing at riddles—and a drinking game called kottabus, in which the player would throw the last drops of wine in his cup toward a metal bowl, while shouting out the name of his beloved. If all the wine hit the bowl with a clear, ringing tone, then all was well, but if it missed, Aphrodite, goddess of love, had blackballed him.
While in the ideal example of a symposium provided by Plato, the guests trundle off home in varying degrees of inebriation after a night of philosophizing, some o
f these gatherings ended in riot and disorder: It seems to have been part of their tradition that once the eating, sensible drinking, and entertainment had finished, the participants would quit the andron for the streets and perform a drunken komos through town. On the occasions when they were too drunk to leave the andron, they threw its furniture out the windows. Groups of well-bred young men formed drinking clubs, with names such as the Ithyphalloi (erections) and the Autolekythoi (wankers), which staged regular symposia, at which passions ran so high that one such caused a war:
Some young fellows, made drunk at too many games of Kottabos, went to Megara and stole a whore named Simaetha; thereupon the Megarians, in agonies of excitement, as though stuffed with garlic, stole in revenge two whores of Aspasia; and with that began the war which broke out over all Greece, caused by three strumpets.
War was a constant in classical Greece and kept its best minds in motion: The playwright Euripides composed his Bacchae while in exile in Macedonia, a country to the northeast of its Greek neighbors, which was acknowledged to be imperfectly Hellenic—a friend of some Greek nations, but no more. Macedonia was a sort of buffer zone, where Greek was spoken, Greek gods were worshipped, and Greek culture thrived, but all these were tainted with barbarism—Macedonians had atrocious accents, their worship, centered on sacrifice, occasionally human, was savage enough to raise Greek eyebrows, and to cap it all, their neighbors on the other side were the gloriously brutish Thracians. Despite its cultural limitations, Macedonia under King Philip II rose to be a regional power in the fourth century BC and the leader of a forced alliance of the principal Greek states. Once he had achieved dominance, Philip took pains to represent himself as a philhellene, a champion of Greek civilization. Orators, historians, philosophers, and artists were invited to his palace, many of whom returned his hospitality with sneers. According to one such, the Macedonians “gamble, drink, and squander money. . . . More savage than the half-bestial centaurs, they are not restrained from buggery by the fact that they have beards.” Indeed, the only matter in which Philip won unqualified approval was in his worship of Bacchus. The historian Theopompus described him as “a man of violent temper and fond of courting dangers, partly from nature, and partly too from drinking; for he was a very hard drinker, and very often he would attack the enemy while he was drunk.”