by Iain Gately
Hard-drinking fathers breed hard-drinking sons. Alexander (356-323 BC), known to history as the Great, conqueror of most of the world known to antiquity, took after Philip in his fondness for wine. Indeed, his drinking habits, and their contribution to his early death, were the subject of scrutiny and controversy for centuries after the event. Alexander’s tutor was the philosopher Aristotle, who is recognized as the founding father of the scientific method, and who produced a treatise on the nature of alcohol and its place in society. Unfortunately only a few fragments of this work survive to tell us what Aristotle thought of drink. These show that he came tantalizingly close to discovering distillation, although he succeeded only in turning wine into flavored water, rather than spirits: “If the wine be moderately boiled, then when it is drunk, it is less apt to intoxicate; for as some of its power has been boiled away, it has become weaker.” They also show that he experimented with the effects of alcohol on animals and believed that “the man who commits a crime when drunk should be punished twice over, once for the crime, and once for being drunk,” although this maxim had little influence on the behavior of his pupil.
Alexander assumed the throne of Macedonia after King Philip was murdered in 336 BC. Having secured his kingdom and control of Greece, Alexander invaded Persia in 334 BC. The Persians were the archenemies of the Greeks and had attempted their subjugation on two occasions in the fourth century BC. They were acknowledged to be a special sort of barbarian, whose civilization was older and culture more refined than that of the Greeks. They, too, were committed wine drinkers; indeed Darius I, their greatest king, had the inscription “I was able to drink a good deal of wine and to bear it well” engraved on his tomb. Wine was ubiquitous in Persian society, and according to the Greek historian Herodotus, in addition to slaking their thirsts and inspiring them to poetry, it was used as a decision-making tool: “If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their resolution for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterward when they are drunk.”
The Persian empire consisted of a patchwork of subject states stretching from Anatolia to Afghanistan, incorporating the greater part of the Fertile Crescent, where the vine had first been cultivated. By 333 BC, Alexander had overcome its armies and occupied its capital, Persepolis, which he burned to the ground, quite possibly by accident, when his Bacchic victory celebrations got out of hand. He then proceeded to the conquest of Babylon and Egypt. Already the master of a greater territory than any previous Western ruler, he resumed his march to the east, reaching as far as the Punjab in India in 325 BC. In the process of his conquests, he introduced Greek culture, including a taste for wine, to a vast swath of territory. His armies were accompanied by philosophers, geographers, and historians, who compared their own observations to those of past travelers, and to legends, including that of Bacchus. Alexander himself “wanted the tales of the god’s wanderings to be true” and, en route through the mountains of the Punjab, became convinced that he was indeed following in the footsteps of Bacchus. Some local tribesmen, captured in a skirmish and questioned through interpreters, called themselves Nysaeans and the mountain beside them Nysa. Could this be Mount Nysa, the legendary sanctuary of the god of wine in his youth? The presence of wild vines and ivy seemed confirmation, so Alexander made formal sacrifice and “many of the not unprominent officers around him garlanded themselves with ivy and . . . were promptly possessed by the god and raised the call of Dionysus, running in his frantic rout.”
The Macedonians claimed to find the worship of Bacchus to be widespread in India, although it is likely that they confused the Hindu god Shiva with the son of Zeus. Shiva is often portrayed adorned with a tiger skin, in the style of Bacchus and his dappled cloak, and his followers, like bacchantes, were fond of dancing and drumming. Moreover, the Indian doctrine of reincarnation had a parallel in the birth and rebirth of the god of wine. In general, however, the Macedonians found the inhabitants of India temperate by their own standards. According to a doctor attached to their army, the Indians suffered from few diseases “on account of the simplicity of their diet and their abstinence from wine.” They were, however, considered to be fond of binge drinking, and when the Indian swami Calanus, who had followed the army for two years, lecturing whoever would listen, burned himself to death, Alexander staged a games in his memory. Since the Indians were unfamiliar with Olympic disciplines, it was decided that the contest should be “as to who should drink the greatest quantity of unmixed wine.” The consequences, as any Athenian would have predicted, were disastrous: “Of those who entered for the prize and drank the wine, thirty-five died at once by reason of the cold; and a little afterward six more died in their tents. . . . He who drank the greatest quantity and won the prize, drank four choes of unmixed wine . . . and he lived four days after it; and he was called the Champion.”
The contest took place close to the outer limit of Alexander’s conquests. Compelled to turn back by his Macedonian veterans, some of whom had been ten years from home, he led a disastrous march west through the Gedrosian Desert, where many of them were lost. The tragedy was attributed to Bacchus, who was believed to have a score to settle with Alexander. In his early Greek campaigns, Alexander had razed Thebes, which was under the official protection of the god of wine, but had failed to make the proper sacrifices in amends. When the source of his woes was pointed out to him, together with the corroborating evidence that he had killed his best friend when drunk— a sure sign of Bacchic displeasure—Alexander sought to appease the offended god with a triumphal procession of the remains of his army through Babylon. Perhaps the gesture of conciliation failed. He died of unknown causes in June 323 BC, at the age of thirty-two. While theories abounded as to what it was that killed him, including drinking a pair of eight-pint horns of neat wine in quick succession, the most likely cause was poison. Within twenty-five years his empire had been divided into four—Macedon, Thrace, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Egypt fell to Ptolemy, one of his generals, whose descendants formed a dynasty that ruled it for fourteen generations and nearly three centuries. The last of the Ptolemaic line to rule Egypt was the seventeen-year-old Cleopatra VII, whose allure and bounteous possessions attracted the attention of a new Mediterranean power: Rome.
3 IN VINO VERITAS
Rome was the next great drinking civilization to emerge in the classical world. Founded in legend by the twins Romulus and Remus on the banks of the river Tiber, the city-state subdued first its neighbors—the Latins, the Samnites, and the Etruscans—so that by 275 BC it controlled most of the Italian peninsula. Over the next 150 years, following victories over the Carthaginians and the Macedonians, Rome established itself as the preeminent nation in the Mediterranean. The new superpower gained ascendancy through a genius for organization and republicanism. On the way up, it won the respect of its foes for its asceticism and single-mindedness; once it was on top, it distinguished itself, at home, through decadence.
Like the Greeks, the Romans have left us a comprehensive picture of their drinking habits. These changed drastically over time, for in its formative years, by Hellenic standards, Rome was almost dry. Romulus, its mythical first ruler, is said to have used only milk when making offerings to his gods. The situation was little better in 290 BC, when the dictator Papirius could only tender a single small cup of wine to the god Jupiter in order to win his favor in a battle against the Samnites. The scarcity of wine in early Rome is corroborated by the relative insignificance of Liber, their native deity of the grape, who was an altogether more modest immortal than Bacchus. His duties seem to have been limited to protecting vines and their fruit. The power to inspire divine madness in a drinker was far beyond his reach, and when the cult of Bacchus reached Roman territory in the second century BC it was received with suspicion, and
its adherents were persecuted. It did not seem possible, to such a sober culture, that people should congregate in large bands merely for the purpose of becoming drunk together. The Romans decided that it was all a sinister plot to destabilize their rule, and in 186 BC their Senate issued a decree commanding the destruction of Bacchic shrines and the prohibition of Bacchic rites throughout Italy. With proscription came persecution: Spurius Postumius Albinus and Quintus Marcius Philipus were diverted from the “care of armies, and wars, and provinces, to the punishing of an intestine conspiracy.” Nearly seven thousand devotees of Bacchus lost their lives in the ensuing purge. The slaughter was justified on the grounds that its victims were irredeemable villains, who left “no sort of crime, no kind of immorality” unattempted, and among whom “there were more obscenities practiced between men than between men and women.”
Not only did the Romans of the time have a cultural blind spot for inebriation as a form of worship, they were also utterly opposed to any creed that encouraged drinking among women. Their traditional views on this matter were strong. According to one of their own historians, “at Rome women were not allowed to drink wine. . . . The wife of Egnatius Maetennus was clubbed to death by her husband for drinking from a large jar, and he . . . was acquitted of murder by Romulus.” The same source quoted, with approval, the example of a matron “who was starved to death by her family for having broken open the box containing the keys to the wine store.” In addition to prohibiting women from drinking, the early Romans also restricted the access of slaves and young men under thirty to alcohol.
However, within a few decades of the anti-Bacchic purge, Roman attitudes toward drink had shifted. The change was driven by pragmatic, rather than cultural, reasons. Wine formed part of the rations of Roman legionaries, and a secure and increasing supply was necessary to support the efforts of ever larger and more active armies. Once it had been decided that they would get into viticulture, the Romans went about the business with their customary thoroughness. Their genius was standardization. Weapons, legions, sewers, and roads were assembled according to formula. This practical bent was now applied to the cultivation of the grape. Their first steps were to establish a uniform procedure for winemaking, and to achieve this they were forced to borrow from their enemies.
In 160 BC, in the midst of the throes of the final Punic War, the Roman senate ordered the translation of a Carthaginian treatise on viticulture, resulting in De Agri Cultura, by Marcus Porcius Cato, which is the earliest surviving prose work in Latin. De Agri Cultura covered every aspect of vineyard management, right down to the rations of slaves, and their clothing allowances. It was circulated among landowners, and Rome very quickly became a significant producer of wine. By the standards of the time, the new model vineyards were large (Cato recommended sixty acres) commercial ventures, which required a substantial investment in slaves, plant, and buildings. They focused on producing bulk wines. De Agri Cultura speaks of only six different kinds of wine, against the fifty or so recognized by the Greeks. In addition to encouraging domestic production, Rome also set about stifling competition. In 154 BC the cultivation of vines beyond the Alps was banned. This protectionist measure stimulated domestic output further, and within a decade Roman-made wine was being exported in substantial volume to newly conquered territories.
A plentiful supply altered Roman attitudes toward drinking. They no longer need to count each cup when making offerings to their gods, and their largesse increased accordingly. They disposed of most of the surplus they produced by adopting the drinking culture of the Greeks, which both compensated for the poverty of their own and provided them with a wide range of reasons and rituals for consuming wine. By the middle of the first century BC, the transformation of Rome from a sober society, suspicious of both alcohol and drunkenness, to a major producer, populated with practiced and discriminating drinkers, was complete. The extent of change is apparent in the behavior of Mark Antony, a contender for the rule of Rome during the period of one of its civil wars (44-31 BC). Antony established his power base in the eastern part of Rome’s possessions, conducted a long and fruitful love affair with Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, and went into his final battle disguised as Bacchus, right down to the fawn skin and tambourine. Such conduct would have been simply inconceivable to his disciplined and ascetic ancestors, who had been one of the most proper plebeian families of ancient Rome.
The ultimate victor of this conflict was Octavian, acknowledged as Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, whose absolute rule commenced in 27 BC. Thereafter, a fashion for rare and costly foreign vintages appeared among the senior orders of citizens, and “the study of wines become a passion, and the most scrupulous care was bestowedupon every process connected with their production and preservation.” Roman writers, moreover, dedicated an increasing quantity of their output toward praising wine. Some even went so far as to denigrate water drinking, which would have been treasonous in the republican age, when Rome’s magnificent aqueducts were a matter of national pride. These new advocates of the grape borrowed heavily from Hellenic culture and, in doing so, incorporated Bacchus within their own. Poets began to call upon him in Latin as well as Greek to fill them with the creative spirit: “Whither, O Bacchus, dost thou hurry me, o’erflowing with thy power? Into what groves or grottoes am I swiftly driven in fresh inspiration?”
Not only did the Romans adopt Bacchus, they also embellished him with new myths and provided him with a sidekick—Silenus—a bloated middle-aged inebriate who carried around a bulging wine skin, and who served the drinks at mythical revels. However, while the powers of the god of wine were extended in fiction, belief in their truth diminished. The Roman Bacchus was less of a mystery than the Greek variety. He was another statue on a crowded shelf, invoked as a figure of speech rather than venerated as an object of faith. Wine became a secular substance, and the Romans no longer thought it necessary to blame drunkenness on possession by a god. In the absence of such magical associations, the effects of drinking were scrutinized with more critical eyes.
The poet Horace, in his Epistles, ridiculed the notion that since wine inspired writers writers should be drunk. Noting that “from the moment Liber enlisted brain-sick poets among his satyrs and fauns, the sweet muses, as a rule, have had a scent of wine about them in the morning,” and that would-be poets “have never ceased to vie in wine drinking by night and to reek of it by day,” he pointed out that this was to mistake the symptoms for the cause and was as futile as dressing up like Cato without possessing Cato’s virtues. Horace was, however, a fervent advocate of alcohol per se, so long as it was consumed in accordance with his motto, “Let Moderation Reign!” In the right quantities, in his opinion, wine could be a miracle worker: “It unlocks secrets, bids hopes be fulfilled, thrusts the coward onto the battlefield, takes the load from anxious hearts. The flowing bowl—whom has it not made eloquent? Whom has it not made free even amid pinching poverty ?”
In addition to ridiculing drunken poets and praising temperate drinking, Horace also satirized the prevailing fashions for fine wines and for consuming too much of them. He singled out for especial ridicule the trend toward ever more elaborate drinking rituals in the style of the Grecian symposium and poured scorn upon the vogue for ceremony. He was, however, swimming against the tide. The Romans of the imperial era had fallen in love with ostentation—magnificence was in as much as Hellenism—and they developed a domestic version of the symposium at which they might display their wealth and taste.
The Roman dinner party, or convivium, differed from its model in many aspects. Wine was served before, with, and after food, whereas in Greece the drinking had begun only after eating had ended. Most significantly, women were admitted to the dinner table, where they drank with the same gusto as their male counterparts. Rome, once noted for the sobriety of its women, became known for its drunkardesses. Their excesses attracted the attention of its satirists. The poet Martial pictured one such Latin maenad trying to hide the alcohol on her breath b
y not speaking; to no avail for her uncontrolled belching released its odor.
A measure of the difference between entertaining in imperial Rome and classical Athens is provided by the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, written during the reign of the emperor Nero. The story of two young men of good families who philander their way around the empire accompanied by a handsome catamite, and pursued by a nymphomaniac, the high priestess of Priapus, god of erections, and a gay but vengeful sea captain, the Satyricon features a convivium at the house of a rich ex-slave named Trimalchio, which is the polar opposite of the ideal symposium depicted by Plato. Whereas the Greek example focuses on the inventive wine-inspired after-dinner speeches of its participants, the Roman version is distinguished by coarse and venal conversation and the uglier forms of drunkenness.