Drink (6 page)

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 by 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.

The tone for this latter feast is set when the heroes of the
Satyricon
meet their host at the baths, where he is playing ball. Exercise over, Trimalchio urinates in a silver chamber pot carried around by a dedicated eunuch, wipes his fingers in the eunuch’s hair, and leads his guests home in a little dogcart pulled by a matching pair of slaves. The former have their toenails cut on arrival and are offered a glass of sweet wine as an aperitif. The dinner that follows is comprised of a series of culinary prodigies accompanied by spectacular vintages. Trimalchio opens a glass jar of Opimian Falernian (“Guaranteed one hundred years old!”), while his guests talk about money and death. He leaves the table midmeal to ease his bowels and advises his guests to follow his example (“There’s not a man been born yet with solid insides”). His wife, meanwhile, an equal paragon of bad taste, drinks herself into a frenzy in his absence. Upon his return to the table, she accuses him of preferring the bodies of young boys to her own, then attacks him with her fingernails. Peace is only restored when Trimalchio commands for his will to be brought in and read out. It frees some of the slaves present, who burst into tears of gratitude. The dinner ends in drunken chaos: Trimalchio commands his band to play a funeral march; the neighbors mistake it for a fire alarm and break down the door with axes, enabling the better-mannered guests to escape.

Trimalchio, the epitome of the new Roman model of inebriate, made his money in the wine trade, which had gone from strength to strength under the early emperors. Its vintners, like their Greek and Egyptian predecessors, had begun to focus on quality as well as volume. Around AD 60, a Roman Spaniard, Columella, wrote a new treatise on winemaking, which superseded Cato’s
De Agri Cultura.
While much of his advice regarding the situation of vineyards and the management of slaves was little different, Columella recognized at least twenty types of wine grape, including the Bumast (“full breasted”), and the “wooly” Aminean, against Cato’s mere half dozen. Moreover, their juices could be combined to make more than a hundred kinds of wine, a figure confirmed by the historian Pliny.

Columella was also an early prophet of genetics and advised his readers to consider each vine as an individual and to breed only from the best of them, for just as “those who contend in the sacred games protect with watchful care the progeny of their swiftest race horses, and upon the multiplying of offspring of noble stock they base their hope of future victories, we, too, for a reason like theirs in selecting the progeny of victorious Olympic mares, should base our hope of a bountiful vintage upon the selection of progeny of the most fruitful.”

His treatise was political as well as practical. Columella saw viticulture as the potential salvation of Rome, now up to its neck in decadence. Its emperors had gone from bad to worse: Whereas Augustus, the first Caesar, had been abstemious and had forced himself to vomit if occasion demanded he drink more than a pint of wine, his successors had gloried in excess. Caligula, the third emperor (d. AD 41), “assumed the entire garb of Bacchus and made royal progresses and sat in judgment thus arrayed”; Nero (d. AD 68), the next Caesar but one, had married himself, as a woman, to one of his knights, consecrated the marriage, also as a woman, and, when Rome had been devastated by a fire, had embarked on a drinking binge while he serenaded the flames with his harp. Rome’s citizens, meanwhile, as the
Satyricon
implied, were hell-bent on following the examples set on high.

In the opinion of Columella, the empire could only save itself from decadence by making wine instead of drinking it. He pictured the vigorous good health enjoyed by vintners and contrasted it with the weakness of his fellow Romans who wasted their hours in the circuses and theaters rather than in the grainfields and vineyards. “We spend our nights in licentiousness and drunkenness, our days in gaming or sleeping, and account ourselves blessed by fortune in that ‘we behold neither the rising of the sun nor its setting,’” he regretted, and concluded that in consequence “the bodies of our young men are so flabby and enervated that death seems likely to make no change in them.”

The decadent style of drinking lamented by Rome’s poets, satirists, and gentlemen farmers was nowhere more in evidence than in Pompeii, center of the Roman wine trade. The vine had first been cultivated in the region by Greek colonists, and by the age of the Caesars the town had become one of the principal sources of Italian wine. Although some of its vintages were respected by connoisseurs, its main business was in bulk wine for export. According to Pliny, “Wines from Pompeii are at their best within ten years and gain nothing from greater maturity. They are also observed to be injurious because of the hangover they cause, which persists until noon on the following day.” Hangovers notwithstanding, Pompeiians were furious drinkers, who seem to have measured the appeal of wine by the quantity they drank. In order to realize their ideal, they cooked themselves in the municipal baths to sweat out previous binges, then, “without putting on a stitch of clothing, still naked and gasping, [would] seize hold of a huge jar . . . and, as if to demonstrate their strength, pour down the entire contents . . . vomit it up again immediately, and then drink another jar. This they repeat two or three times over, as if they were born to waste wine and as if wine could be disposed of only through the agency of the human body.”

Pompeii and the neighboring town of Herculaneum were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, AD 79. Pliny was killed by poison fumes, and the degenerate Pompeiians were buried alive under a layer of mud, lava, and ashes. The resulting time capsule has preserved the scenes of their excess. The grander villas of the town have frescoes depicting the production of wine, or the adventures of Bacchus, including one important series from the so-called House of the Mysteries, which shows, in sequence, a young woman being stripped, whipped, and initiated into the arcania of a Bacchic sect. Also preserved are the town’s 118
tabernae,
or taverns, where the poorer citizens drank. A typical example consisted of a single, open room, with a counter to one side, behind which amphorae were stored on their sides on racks, rather like the barrels of beer in an English country pub. Wine was dispensed from these into pottery
cucumas,
or carafes, and was available in a range of qualities—as evinced by the bill of fare chalked onto the blackboard of one such establishment:

The Romans continued the Greek habit of mixing their wine with water, and despite the abundance in Pompeii of the former,
tabernae
keepers were not above overdiluting their vintages with the contents of the town aqueducts, as a piece of graffiti from another tavern indicates: “Curses on you, Landlord, you sell water and drink unmixed wine yourself.” Some
tabernae,
known as
popinae,
also doubled as brothels and were graced with splendidly candid frescoes of fornicating couples on the walls of their back rooms.

While most of the public drinking in Pompeii took place in its
tabernae,
wine was also served, sometimes for free, in its amphitheater. The Roman culture of spectacle entertainments, in particular the spectacle of death, has few parallels in history. Tribal society everywhere was brutal, public executions were a common feature of most ancient civilizations, but the organization, the scale, and the frequency of bestiaria (shows in which wild animals were killed), gladiatorial contests, chariot races, and other such extravaganzas placed Rome in a category of its own. These spectacles were staged to purchase the affection of the masses. The republic was dead, but its façade was preserved and Romans fought for election to various public offices through largesse. Whoever put on the best show gained the greatest number of supporters. The most extreme entertainments were staged in the capital and were accounted by the epigrammatist Martial to be the greatest wonder of the world, which drew an audience from throughout the empire. Farmers from the provinces, Egyptians, Jews, Scythians, Greeks, and Gauls all flocked to Rome’s amphitheaters to satisfy their curiosity and bloodlust. Since most of the spectacles were competitive, in that their sponsors vied with each other for attention, novelty was the watchword. According to Martial, “Whatever Fame sings of . . . the arena makes real.” Participants in the shows were dressed as historic or mythical figures, ancient battles on land and sea
³
were reenacted, people who had killed, or been killed by, lions in legend were impersonated in appropriate costumes, by criminals or slaves, who were compelled to slay or to die. The old myths were not only staged by the book, but also in sensational variations and ridiculous combinations. Martial records one combat between Daedalus, the legendary Greek who built himself a pair of wings to fly away from captivity, and a wild boar. The boar won: “Daedalus, now thou art being so mangled by a Lucanian boar, how would’st thou wish thou hads’t now thy wings!”

Writers such as Martial and Columella were the sternest critics of Roman degeneracy. While they delighted in drawing attention to domestic vices, the reputation of the empire’s legions suffered little among its enemies abroad. Roman armies seldom lost battles, and if they did, they were always avenged. The legions maintained the austere principles of the republic, and the depravity that characterized the capital and towns like Pompeii was absent from their camps. The wine rations that they carried served functional rather than hedonistic purposes: Wherever they campaigned they added wine to their drinking water, and its bactericidal properties protected many against the waterborne illnesses that were one of the greatest hazards of warfare in the ancient world. By the end of the first century AD, Roman rule had been extended over much of western Europe, and France, Belgium, parts of Germany, and the British Isles all paid tribute to or professed allegiance with the eternal city.