by Iain Gately
The ancient connections of the Jews to viticulture were reflected in their sacred texts: Wine makes its debut in the Tanakh alongside Noah. After the flood, the original patriarch disembarked from his ark, planted a vineyard, and “he drank of the wine, and was drunken, and was uncovered in his tent.” Thereafter, references to wine flow thick and fast. The promised land—the homeland selected by God for his chosen race—is identified by the presence of vines bearing giant bunches of grapes; the prophets of the Tanakh discuss its consumption, and its patriarchs and kings gave conspicuous examples of how and how not to drink. The Tanakh even provides practical advice in the Book of Isaiah (5:1-5) as to the best way to lay out a vineyard, in the guise of a metaphor that illuminates the love of God for his chosen people. This sacred text is generally very positively disposed toward drinking, albeit with the odd warning: “A laboring man that is given to drunkenness shall not be rich,” cautions Ecclesiasticus 19:1, for instance. Such sentiments aside, alcohol, in the form of wine, is usually represented as the gift of god—a source of wealth and happiness, a substance with the power to “soothe the heavy-hearted.” Furthermore, the cultivation of the grape is portrayed as a dignified occupation— appropriate work for a prophet or a patriarch.
Wine played an important part in the personal rituals of the Jews. The weekly Sabbath commenced with a prayer delivered over a cup of wine; circumcisions, weddings, and funerals were celebrated with prescribed measures, the consumption of which was obligatory for every man present. In addition to such moderate imbibing, on the annual festival of Purim the faithful were instructed by their rabbis to drink so much wine that they could “no longer distinguish between the phrases ‘Cursed be Haman’ and ‘Blessed be Mordechai,’” respectively their most deadly enemy and most devoted friend at a critical point in their history.
Wine, and the Jewish Tanakh, likewise played vital roles in the lives of the adherents of a new religion, Christianity, which had arisen in the first century AD in Roman Judea. Christians were thought at first to be a breakaway sect of Jews, whose clandestine rituals were a cloak for witchcraft, and which also concealed a conspiracy to overthrow Rome and her empire. The emperor Nero blamed them for the fire that ruined much of his capital in AD 64, and crucified or burned as many of them as he could find. Any stragglers were sewn into the skins of wild beasts and fed to the lions at the circus. Notwithstanding such an inauspicious debut in the history books, the new religion made converts at so rapid a rate that despite imperial hostility, within a century of the death of its founder, Christians could be found in almost every corner of the empire.
The rapid dissemination of Christianity was in part a consequence of the duty Christ had laid upon his followers to propagate his message. This was something of a theological innovation. Judaism, which Christianity acknowledged as its source, and as sharing the same single God, did not seek converts. Moreover, it laid obstacles in the path of those wishing to become Jews, including circumcision for men and strict dietary taboos. Christianity had no such barriers to entry. The matter had been debated and settled by the apostles: Anyone could become a Christian, and every convert was expected to spread the good news.
The early rituals of the new faith were also far simpler than those of Judaism. The single most important rite of the Christians was the ceremony of the Eucharist, at which they gathered to share bread and wine, in accordance with the instructions of their founder. This ceremony placed the consumption of wine at the heart of the new religion and made it a duty to drink. Christianity added a new dimension to the relationship between humanity and alcohol. Not only could it relieve thirst, inspire joy, and ruin livers, but it might also, in the form of wine, represent the transubstantiated blood of the son of God. This potential was made apparent by Christ to his disciples at the last supper he spent with them, to celebrate the Jewish feast of Passover. After filling his cup with wine, he shared it with them and explained the significance of this act: “And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many.” (Mark 14:23-25)
The Eucharist was not the only link between Christianity and wine. Jesus had used the care of a vineyard as the theme for one of his most famous parables, and the grapevine as a metaphor for the relationship between himself and his converts. Moreover, the first miracle he had performed had been the transformation of six jars of water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana. Indeed, so pervasive was wine in the teachings of the new religion that the apostle Paul had felt it necessary to make clear that its role was principally symbolic and that the Eucharist should not be taken as an invitation to gluttony or drunkenness, “For he that eateth or drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself [for] not discerning the Lord’s body.”
By AD 139, Christians were common enough for the emperor Marcus Aurelius to commission Pliny the Younger, nephew of the historian killed at Pompeii, to investigate the sect. Were they terrorists? Did they kill people and eat their bodies and drink their blood? Pliny ordered the torture of two Christian deaconesses and found them to be simple, respectable, and poor, as were the cousins of Jesus, who owned and worked a small farm. This inquisition prompted a response. Christians were growing in confidence as well as numbers. Justin Martyr (AD 100-165), an uncircumcised Syrian convert, addressed a letter to Marcus Aurelius in which he advised him that his traditions, gods, and institutions were all absolutely worthless and that he, his friends, and family were condemned to go to hell after death, where they would suffer forever in the company of their most distinguished ancestors, and their slaves. The letter, styled as an apologia, ended with a warning to the most powerful man in the world: Christianity was now everywhere. “We are but of yesterday, and we have filled every place among you—cities, islands, fortresses, towns, marketplaces, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, forum— we have left nothing to you but the temples of your gods.”
The proliferation of which Tertullian boasted had been accompanied by an increase in the sophistication of the Christian canon. The fathers of the church had been forced to devise official doctrines, including appropriate provisions toward alcohol, in order to guide their plethora of converts. The New Testament was silent on the secular use of wine, beyond St. Paul’s advice to St. Timothy to “drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” Should all Christians therefore use wine to settle their stomachs? The matter was addressed by St. Clement of Alexandria (AD 150-215), who produced a comprehensive Christian etiquette on drinking in his Pedagogia . Clement was Greek by origin and Alexandria, where he taught in the early 200s, was an important center of learning, with schools of classical, Judaic, and Christian philosophy. His work shows the particular influence of Plato, and illustrates how much the author of the Symposium contributed to Christian thinking about alcohol.
The Pedagogia commenced with a brief history of what the Christian canon permitted the faithful to drink. In the beginning, Clement argued, the natural, temperate, and healthy beverage for the thirsty was water, because water was supplied by the Lord to the Hebrews on their journey to the promised land. However, once they had reached their destination, indicated by the presence of the giant grapes, it became a sacred duty to drink wine, a duty confirmed by Jesus, who compared wine to his own blood, and “to drink the blood of Jesus is to become partaker of the Lord’s immortality.” Having established a Christian obligation to drink, Clement proceeded to examine how this obligation should be met. He was of the opinion that the duty to consume (with the exception of sacramental wine) varied with age. Young Christians should be kept away from recreational drinking altogether, for it caused their “members of lust” to come to maturity sooner than they ought. “The breasts and organs of generation,” he explained, “inflamed with wine, expand and swell in a shameful way, already exhibiting beforehand the image of fornication.” Such tumescence was inevitably accompanied by “shameless pulsatio
ns.” Ergo youth plus alcohol equaled un-Christian behavior. Proceeding from adolescents to adults, Clement recommended that the latter steer clear of wine during meals and while at work, but that they might take a cup to ward off the cold evening air. The elderly, however, and Clement was of advanced years at the time of writing, were advised that wine was the “milk of old age” and that they should drink every day for the sake of their health, in order to “warm by the harmless medicine of the vine the chill of age, which the decay of time has produced.”
Lest Christians were tempted to disregard his guidelines, Clement provided a portrait of the damage drink could wreak. Heavy topers who ignored the rules were distinguished by their red demonic eyes, like those of corpses, which signified that they were dead to both the Word and the Lord. They made an ugly, if instructive, spectacle: “You may see some of them, half-drunk, staggering, . . . vomiting drink on one another in the name of good fellowship.” Their red eyes rolling and seeing double, these monsters found it impossible to stay upright or speak anything but “maudlin nonsense.” “It is well, my friends,” Clement concluded, “to make our acquaintance with this picture at the greatest possible distance from it, and to frame ourselves to what is better, dreading lest we also become a spectacle and laughingstock to others.”
Clement also addressed the matter of women drinking, on which he also followed Plato. While female Christians must, of course, drink sacramental wine, they should otherwise be kept away from the fluid: “An intoxicated woman is great wrath.” Sexual discrimination in terms of access to wine was a retrograde step. Women had played a prominent part in the early church, enjoying an equality they were denied by other faiths. This freedom, however, was eroded as the Christian church grew in power and sophistication, and shaped its doctrines to Hellenic models, which accorded a diminished status to the fairer sex. Clement did, however, differ from his Greek authorities on the matter of fine wines. He warned good Christians not to fret if they could not get their hands on “the fragrant Thasian wine, and the pleasant-breathing Lesbian, and a sweet Cretan wine, . . . and Mendusian, an Egyptian wine, and the insular Naxian, the ‘highly perfumed and flavored,’” or other such rare and costly vintages, with which he betrayed an evident familiarity. Luxurious tastes were as sinful as overindulgence. The old men Clement envisaged as doing most of the drinking in Christendom were advised to accept whatever was put in front of them and to consume it in a dignified manner: “We are to drink without contortions of the face, not greedily grasping the cup, nor before drinking making the eyes roll with unseemly motion; nor besprinkle the chin, nor splash the garments while gulping down all the liquor at once. . . . Eagerness in drinking is a practice injurious to the partaker. Do not haste to mischief, my friend. Your drink is not being taken from you. It is given you, and waits you.”
The third century AD, in which Clement had composed his Pedagogia, was a period of mixed fortunes for the Christians. While they continued to multiply in number, they were subject to sporadic persecution under the emperors Maximin, Decius, and Diocletian. The last great purge of Christians occurred in the final two years of the reign of Diocletian, who instructed his officials “to tear down the churches to the foundations and to destroy the sacred scriptures by fire.” Before, however, they could complete their task, Diocletian abdicated, and his resignation marked a turning point in the history of Christianity.
Diocletian’s final act as emperor had been to divide his empire into three portions comprising western Europe, Italy and North Africa, and the Roman East. The division was implemented because imperial Rome had become too unwieldy to be managed by a single ruler. Whereas its hinterlands had once been home to submissive barbarians who kept to their hovels and paid their taxes, centuries of Roman occupation had been a significant economic stimulant, and the barbarianshad taken to growing cash crops, drinking wine, wearing togas, and building cities. Former backwaters such as Gaul demanded the full-time attention of the imperial administration—it was no longer sufficient to send a letter or a legion every now and then. Moreover, the non-Romanized barbarians beyond the outer limits of the empire were becoming more numerous, and more aggressive. In the East, the Sasanids of Persia were seeking to reclaim the empire Asia had lost to Alexander the Great; in the center and to the west, various tribes were making raids across the Danube and the Rhine. No single ruler could counter all these threats at the same time.
No sooner had Diocletian partitioned his dominions and retired to a splendid villa in Salona than the rulers of the new divisions attacked one another, each with the aim of governing the entire empire alone. The victor was Constantine, the first Roman Christian ruler. A vision on the eve of an engagement at Milvian Bridge, in which a cross had appeared in the heavens, persuaded him to adopt it for the standards of his legions. He won the battle and converted to Christianity out of gratitude. Thereafter, the fortunes of his adoptive religion flourished. It received the imperial seal of approval in 313, when Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which proclaimed that it would be legal throughout his dominions.
However, at the time of the edict, the Christian population was no more than a fifth of the total of the western part of the empire and a third of that of the East. The pagan majority resented the preference that had been given to what they saw as an intolerant and upstart creed. They bombarded Constantine and his successors with petitions: Pagan senators demanded that they be allowed to worship their ancestors in a traditional manner, souvenir sellers from the temple of Diana at Ephesus complained that Christianity was driving them out of business. They found a last champion in a brilliant, if short-lived, emperor, Julian, who confiscated the wealth of the Christian church and revoked the privileges of its clergy. But Julian ruled for only two years, and no subsequent emperor supported the pagan cause. In AD 392 the coemperors Theodosius and Valentinian II prohibited any form of pagan worship, even sacrifice to the lares (the household gods), who used to receive daily offerings of incense, flowers, and a few drops of wine. The temples of antiquity were converted to churches or left to fall to ruin. Their demise, and the neglect of the idols they contained, was celebrated by the Christian historian St. Jerome: “They who were once the gods of the nations . . . dwell with the owls and bats under their lonely roofs.”
Not every deity in the Roman pantheon was left to the company of owls and bats. Bacchus survived the purge, at first in abstract form. His journey to respectability commenced in the catacombs—the labyrinth graveyards underneath Rome where Christians, in the days that they were clandestine, assembled to worship and laid their dead to rest. The themes of renewal and salvation, central to their faith, could not be expressed with overtly Christian symbols, so they resorted to metaphor, and the vine—Bacchic emblem of rebirth—adorned many of the stone sarcophagi in which they were entombed. Moreover, the paintings that decorate later tombs in these refuges, when the faith of their occupants could be expressed, also contain Bacchic references. The last supper, a popular theme, usually showed Jesus and his disciples arranged and posed as if they were participating in a symposium. This borrowed imagery continued to be incorporated into the symbolism of the church as it developed its own visual identity.
The integration of the pagan god of wine into Christianity extended beyond the figurative. Some of the poetry written in his praise was found to contain sufficient Christian sentiments to inspire St. Gregory of Nazianzus (AD 325-389) to use entire passages from the Bacchae of Euripides in his Passion of Christ. Moreover, the name Dionysus 4 never fell out of fashion, indeed, was common, and graced a number of saints, commencing with St. Dionysus, first bishop of Paris, who had been martyred in AD 274.
The influence of Christianity, in its formative centuries, over the drinking habits of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire was evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. The new religion assumed the generally positive views toward wine held by Judaism, to which it added a duty to drink, yet differentiated this sacred obligation from secular tippling, which it discourag
ed, except in moderation. This adopted philosophy had a calming effect on drinking in general. Moreover, as the Christian church grew in power, it organized its hierarchy along imperial lines and adopted classical imagery to express its precepts, so that by the time that it had become the official religion of the empire, it had been transformed from the faith of a breakaway sect of Jews to a thoroughly Romanized institution, whose bishops owned vineyards and slaves and splendid cellars, and whose adherents were buried in tombs adorned with vine leaves carved in stone.
5 BARBARIANS
The public halls were bright, with lofty gables,
Bathhouses many, great the cheerful noise . . .
Till mighty fate brought change upon it all.
Slaughter was widespread, pestilence was rife,