Drink (4 page)

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.
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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 art 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:

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.

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 of 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: