Drink (8 page)

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 pulsations.” 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 discouraged, 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

In AD 369, the Christian poet Decimius Ausonius composed his magnum opus—
Mosella
, or the
Moselle
—an ode dedicated to the river of the same name. The ode describes at length the beautiful villas and vineyards that line the river’s banks and pays tribute to the civilizing forces that had combined to produce so charming a scene. Ausonius, a native of Bordeaux, was an exemplary neo-Roman. He wrote impeccable Latin, held estates and vineyards, exchanged homoerotic poetry with Bishop Paulinus of Nola, was tutor to the emperor Gratian, and was elected consul, the highest office in the imperial administration, in AD 379. The town of Trier, on the banks of the Moselle, where he conceived his most famous ode, was likewise an archetypal example of the cultural impact the combination of Rome and Christianity had had on the once-barbarous lands of western Europe. It possessed palaces, baths, chapels, and a basilica, and had served as an imperial residence during the reigns of Constantinus II, Valerian I, and Theodosius.

This civilized idyll was not destined to last. Within ten years of the death of the poet, the tranquil scenes he had described had become a war zone. On New Year’s Eve AD 406, the Vandals, a Germanic tribe, rolled across the frozen Rhine and devastated Roman Gaul. Trier was sacked; the villas Ausonius had praised were reduced to smoking ruins and the vineyards that surrounded them, populated, in the poet’s fancy, with satyrs and nymphs, were burned to their roots. According to an observer of the period, “All Gaul was filled with the smoke of a single funeral pyre.” Its population was slaughtered or enslaved, and the grandson of Ausonius was reduced to working in chains on the ancestral estates. By AD 450, the entire Roman Empire in the west had been shattered into fragments by the cumulative impact of wave after wave of barbarian invasions.