Drink (3 page)

The conceit that the purpose of alcoholic beverages was to make people drunk rather than merely to nourish them was also apparent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean during the late Neolithic era, notably among the Mayans of Central America. The Mayans were a sophisticated civilization who, by 1000 BC, had established large cities with monumental architecture and who had developed the arts to a very high degree of excellence. They were a mead-drinking culture, who flavored their mead with the bark of the balche tree. In addition to collecting wild honey, they kept hives of a native species of stingless bees in and around their huts to provide a secure source of raw materials for their brews. They also made a fermented drink from corn, whose intoxicating properties are confirmed in their creation myth, the
Popol Vuh.
Mayan drinking appears to have been a ceremonial as well as hedonistic activity. It was an act of communicating with the spirit world, and compulsory on certain ritual occasions. They do, however, seem to have viewed drunkenness in a comical as well as serious light, and produced beautiful glazed cups, some of which depict humorous scenes of drinkers, and also grotesque pottery figurines of inebriates.

Similar evidence as to the preparation of alcoholic drinks in ancient times has been found in India and other Asian countries, and in Nubia in Africa. Indeed, by about 1000 BC, all over the world, wherever humanity had settled in villages or towns, alcohol was consumed. The parallel evolution of drinking in such disparate cultures as Pharaonic Egypt and Neolithic Scotland implies that our predecessors in all these places made a special place for alcohol in their cultures, whether as food, as an intoxicant, as a medicine, or as a status symbol. Despite, however, the wealth of archaeological evidence, we have no direct proof as to their feelings about this equivocal fluid. Did they attribute a spiritual significance to every drop they swallowed, as if it were a magic potion? Were any of them critical of drinking and drunkenness, or was intoxication considered to be a commonplace and wholly natural condition?

2 BACCHANAL

The first civilization to leave a coherent account of its thoughts on alcohol, and to enumerate its benefits and detriments, was that of classical Greece—a loose association of city-states united by language, religious beliefs, and culture, located on the edges and islands of the Aegean Sea. These states appeared around the twelfth century BC and, by 700 BC, had so prospered that they had established a network of colonies throughout the Mediterranean—in Sicily, France, Spain, and North Africa. Alcohol, specifically wine, played a pivotal role in Greek culture. Our word
wine
derives from their
oin,
whose consumption was considered to be both one of the defining characteristics of
Hellenic
civilization and a point of difference between its members and the population of the rest of the world, whom they termed
barbaroi,
or barbarians. Wine was omnipresent in Hellenic society. It was used as an offering to their deities; as a currency to buy rare and precious things from distant countries; and it was drunk formally, ritually, as a medicine, and to assuage thirst. In some Greek states such as Athens its consumption could be a civic duty. At the great public feasts officials known as
oinoptai
oversaw its distribution and ensured that all present got their fair share, and such equality of portions was the seed from which grew the concept of
demokratia,
or “people power.”

The central place of wine in Greek civilization was established during its heroic age and is apparent in its earliest literary works. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
the two great epic poems of Homer, which tell of the siege of Troy by a Greek army and the voyage home of one of its leaders, Odysseus, are suffused with references to wine and its powers, and set out the etiquette surrounding its consumption. They evoke a warrior ethos, which venerated mortal combat, meat feasts, and the liberal consumption of wine. Wine was the drink of fighting men, the indispensable lubricant of their culture of death and honor, of sacking cities, of carrying off armor, cattle, and women. All their rituals were punctuated with libations of wine—the gods did not pay attention otherwise. Drink also had the power to sanctify the words of men. Wine made warriors speak the truth, and an oath sealed with wine had greater weight than one celebrated with a cup of water.

When Greece passed from its heroic to its classical age, its inhabitants were struck by an outburst of creativity unprecedented in the history of humanity. Science, philosophy, the decorative and figurative arts, and the concept of democracy were invented, examined, or practiced with more imagination and success than ever recorded before. The principal source of this torrent of inspiration was the city-state of Athens, acknowledged among its peers in the fifth century BC to be the leader in matters cultural. This century, so rich in stimulating events (Athens was at war on average once every decade), and this town, where it would have been possible to have known Socrates, Praxiteles, Plato, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Hippocrates, and Anaxagoras, together have left a treasure trove of opinions about alcohol, specifically wine. From this cultural age of gold a coherent portrait emerges. Poets, playwrights, politicians, and philosophers set down their feelings about wine, which generally were enthusiastic. Their compliments were almost universal, their warnings few, if dire. Wine was a force for good, a substance that enabled people to relax while simultaneously elevating their minds, inspiring drinkers to “laughter and wisdom and prudence and learning.” According to the epic poet Panyasis:

Not only were the Greeks passionate about wine, they were also discriminating drinkers. Like the Egyptians, with whom they traded and from whom they may have learned some of the skills of winemaking, they believed certain vineyards had been blessed with magical soil and that their vintages cast a spell on people lucky enough to drink them. Instead, however, of labeling them
nfr nfr
and leaving it at that, Greek poets rhapsodized over their favorites:

While some vineyards produced wine with sensational flavors, others were believed to generate peculiar side effects, not all of them desirable. The wine of Heraea in Arcadia, for example, was reputed to “drive men out of their senses and make women inclined to pregnancy.” Moreover, certain vintages were reckoned to possess specific medicinal qualities. There were special wines for loosening the bowels or calming their wind, for sweetening the breath, and for healing wounds and cancers. Indeed Hippocrates (d. 370 BC), the father of Western medicine, advocated the use of wine to treat every illness he had identified, bar one—should a patient be suffering from “an overpowering heaviness of the brain,” then “there must be total abstinence from wine.”

Notwithstanding the care taken in their manufacture, the taste and appearance of Greek wines would shock modern palates. Archaeological evidence suggests that most were resinated—i.e., were treated with and flavored by the gum of the terebinth tree. The purpose of this additive was to retard the oxidation process and prevent the wine from becoming vinegar. Other common additives included seawater, spices, and honey. Furthermore, wine was not filtered when it was made and had to be strained before being served, lest the drinker choke on stalks, pits, and other such detritus.

As a general rule, the Greeks did not drink their beloved nectar straight but mixed it with water. This habit, according to the physician Philomides, could be traced back to a happy accident—once upon a time in the heroic age, while a group of Greeks were drinking by the seashore, a violent thunderstorm broke out that drove them undercover and topped up their wine bowl with water. When they returned after the storm had passed, they tasted the mixture and found it to be far more pleasant, and far less inflammatory, than neat wine. Inspiration for the beverage was credited to Zeus, the Thunderer, king of the gods, who ruled the world from Mount Olympus; and who was toasted thereafter at formal gatherings “as the originator of rain-storms, [and] the author of the painless mixture derived from the mingling of wine and rain.”

The Greeks considered the consumption of unmixed wine to be not only uncivilized but also perilous. The risk it posed to manners was documented by the philosopher Plato: “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.” The danger it represented to unwary drinkers was proven by the example of the Spartan general Cleomenes, who had been sent to sack the city of Argos but had destroyed instead the shrine of the god of the same name, then led his forces home, claiming to have been distracted by an omen. Cleomenes went mad and died shortly afterward, and his “own countrymen declared that his madness proceeded not from any supernatural cause whatsoever, but only from the habit of drinking wine unmixed with water, which he learnt of the Scythians.”

There were also risks associated with drinking mixed wine, and although the Greeks generally considered it to be liquid joy, they acknowledged it was capable of producing painful and sometimes dangerous side effects. The tendency of drinking to cause a hangover was noted, and Greek literature contains advice on how to avoid, and how to cure, the headaches and nausea that followed a binge. The key to avoidance was quality—good wine was less likely, according to the poet Philyllius, to make the drinker “feel seedy.” As for cures, boiled cabbage eaten the following day was considered to be the best way to clear a fuzzy head, although some drinkers felt the cure was more painful than the ailment, and the combination of rank-smelling cabbage, a sore brain, and a sense of queasiness to be an unnecessary compound of evils—“stern misfortune’s unexpected blow,” in the words of the poet Amphis.

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:

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:

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: