A History of the World in 6 Glasses (6 page)

Adherence to the rules and rituals of wine drinking, and the ' use of the appropriate equipment, furniture, and dress all served to emphasize the drinkers' sophistication. But what actually went on while the wine was being consumed? There is no single answer; the
symposion
was as varied as life itself, a mirror of Greek society. Sometimes there would be formal entertainment, in the form of hired musicians and dancers. At some
symposia,
the guests themselves would compete to improvise witty songs, poetry, and repartee; sometimes the
symposion
was a formal occasion for the discussion of philosophy or literature, to which young men were admitted for educational purposes.

But not all
symposia
were so serious. Particularly popular was a drinking game called
kottabos.
This involved flicking the last remaining drops of wine from one's cup at a specific target, such as another person, a disk-shaped bronze target, or even a cup floating in a bowl of water, with the aim of sinking it. Such was the craze for
kottabos
that some enthusiasts even built special circular rooms in which to play it. Traditionalists expressed concern that young men were concentrating on improving their
kottabos
rather than javelin throwing, a sport that at least had some practical use in hunting and war.

As one
krater
succeeded another, some
symposia
descended into orgies, and others into violence, as drinkers issued challenges to each other to demonstrate loyalty to their drinking group, or
hetaireia.
The
symposion
was sometimes followed by the
komos,
a form of ritual exhibitionism in which the members of the
hetaireia
would course through the streets in nocturnal revelry to emphasize the strength and unity of their group. The
komos
could be good-natured but could also lead to violence or vandalism, depending on the state of the participants. As a fragment from a play by Euboulos puts it: "For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health, which they drink first, the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine anymore—it belongs to bad behavior; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness."

At heart, the
symposion
was dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, whether of the intellectual, social, or sexual variety. It was also an outlet, a way of dealing with unruly passions of all kinds. It encapsulated the best and worst elements of the culture that spawned it. The mixture of water and wine consumed in the
sym­posion
provided fertile metaphorical ground for Greek philosophers, who likened it to the mixture of the good and bad in human nature, both within an individual and in society at large. The
symposion,
with its rules for preventing a dangerous mixture from getting out of hand, thus became a lens through which Plato and other philosophers viewed Greek society.

The Philosophy of Drinking

Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom; and where better to discover the truth than at a
symposion,
where wine does away with inhibitions to expose truths, both pleasant and unpleasant? "Wine reveals what is hidden," declared Eratosthenes, a Greek philosopher who lived in the third century BCE. That the
symposion
was thought to be a suitable venue for getting at the truth is emphasized by its repeated use as a literary form, in which several characters debate a particular topic while drinking wine. The most famous example is Plato's
Symposium,
in which the participants, including Plato's depiction of his men tor, Socrates, discuss the subject of love. After an entire night's drinking, everyone has fallen asleep except Socrates, who remains apparently unaffected by the wine he has drunk and sets off on his day's business. Plato depicts him as the ideal drinker: He uses wine in the pursuit of truth but remains in total control of himself and suffers no ill effects. Socrates also appears in a similar work written by another of his pupils. Xenophon's
Symposium,
written around 360 BCE, is another fictional account of an Athenian drinking party where the conversation is rather more sparkling and witty, and the characters rather more human, than in Plato's more serious work. The main subject, once again, is love, and the conversation is fueled by fine Thasian wine.

Such philosophical
symposia
took place more in literary imagination than in real life. But in one respect, at least, wine could be used in everyday life to reveal truth: It could expose the true nature of those drinking it. While he objected to the hedonistic reality of actual
symposia,
Plato saw no reason why the practice could not, in theory, be put to good use as a test of personality. Speaking through one of the characters in his book
Laws,
Plato argues that drinking with someone at a
symposion
is in fact the simplest, fastest, and most reliable test of someone's character. He portrays Socrates postulating a "fear potion" that induces fear in those who drink it. This imaginary drink can then be used to instill fearlessness and courage, as drinkers gradually increase the dose and learn to conquer their fear. No such potion exists, of course; but Plato (speaking, as Socrates, to a Cretan interlocutor) draws an analogy with wine, which he suggests is ideally suited to instill self-control.

The Greek philosopher Plato, who believed that wine provided a good way to test a man's character

What is better adapted than the festive use of wine, in the first place to test, and in the second place to train the character of a man, if care be taken in the use of it? What is there cheaper, or more innocent? For do but consider which is the greater risk: Would you rather test a man of a morose and savage nature, which is the source of ten thousand acts of injustice, by making bargains with him at a risk to yourself, or by having him as a companion at the festival of Dionysus? Or would you, if you wanted to apply a touchstone to a man who is prone to love, entrust your wife, or your sons, or daughters to him, imperiling your dearest interests in order to have a view of the condition of his soul? . . . I do not believe that either a Cretan, or any other man, will doubt that such a test is a fair test, and safer, cheaper, and speedier than any other.

The
symposion
also lent itself to political analogies. To modern eyes, a gathering at which everyone drank as equals from a shared bowl appears to embody the idea of democracy. The
sym­posion
was indeed democratic, though not in the modern sense of the word. It was strictly for privileged men; but the same was true, in the Athenian form of democracy, of the right to vote, which was only extended to free men, or around a fifth of the population. Greek democracy relied on slavery. Without slaves to do all the hard work, the men would not have had enough leisure time to participate in politics.

Plato was suspicious of democracy. For one thing, it interfered with the natural order of things. Why should a man obey his father, or a scholar his teacher, if they were technically equals? Placing too much power in the hands of the ordinary people, Plato argued in his book
The Republic,
led inevitably to anarchy—at which point order could only be restored through tyranny. In
The Republic,
he depicted Socrates denouncing proponents of democracy as evil wine pourers who encouraged the thirsty people to overindulge in the "strong wine of freedom." Power, in other words, is like wine and can intoxicate when consumed in large quantities by people who are not used to it. The result in both cases is chaos. This is one of many allusions in
The Republic
to the
symposion,
nearly all of which are disparaging. (Plato believed, instead, that the ideal society would be run by an elite group of guardians, led by philosopher kings.)

In short, the
symposion
reflected human nature and had both good and bad aspects. But provided the right rules were followed, Plato concluded, the good in the
symposion
could outweigh the bad. Indeed, when he set up his academy, just outside Athens, where he taught philosophy for over forty years and did most of his writing, the
symposion
provided the model for his style of teaching. After each day of lectures and debates, he and his students ate and drank together, one chronicler noted, in order to "enjoy each other's company and chiefly to refresh themselves with learned discussion." Wine was served according to Plato's directions, in moderate quantities to ensure that the chief form of refreshment was intellectual; a contemporary observed that those who dined with Plato felt perfectly well the next day. There were no musicians or dancers, for Plato believed that educated men ought to be capable of entertaining themselves by "speaking and listening in turns in an orderly manner." Today, the same format survives as a framework for academic interchange, in the form of the scholarly seminar, or symposium, where participants speak in turn and discussion and argument, within proscribed limits, are encouraged.

An Amphora of Culture

With its carefully calibrated social divisions, its reputation for unparalleled cultural sophistication, and its encouragement of both hedonism and philosophical inquiry, wine embodied Greek culture. These values went along with Greek wine as it was exported far and wide. The distribution of Greek wine jars, or amphorae, provides archaeological evidence for Greek wine's widespread popularity and the far-reaching influence of Greek customs and values. By the fifth century BCE, Greek wine was being exported as far afield as southern France to the west, Egypt to the south, the Crimean Peninsula to the east, and the Danube region to the north. It was trade on a massive scale; a single wreck found off the southern coast of France contained an astonishing 10,000 amphorae, equivalent to 250,000 liters or 333,000 modern wine bottles. As well as spreading wine itself, Greek traders and colonists spread knowledge of its cultivation, introducing wine making to Sicily, southern Italy, and southern France, though whether viticulture was introduced to Spain and Portugal by the Greeks or the Phoenicians (a seafaring culture based in a region of modern-day Syria and Lebanon) is unclear.

A Celtic grave-mound found in central France, dating from the sixth century BCE, contained the body of a young noblewoman lying on the frame of a wagon, the wheels of which had been removed and laid alongside. Among the valuables found in the tomb was a complete set of imported Greek drinking vessels, including an enormous and elaborately decorated
krater.
Similar vessels have been found in other Celtic graves. Vast amounts of Greek wine and drinking vessels were also exported to Italy, where the Etruscans enthusiastically embraced the custom of the
symposion
to demonstrate their own sophistication.

Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece.

4

The Imperial Vine

Rome Versus Greece

B
Y THE MIDDLE of the second century BCE the Romans, a people from central Italy, had displaced the Greeks as the dominant power in the Mediterranean basin. Yet it was a strange sort of victory, since the Romans, like many other European peoples, liked to show how sophisticated they were by appropriating aspects of Greek culture. They borrowed Greek gods and their associated myths, adopted a modified form of the Greek alphabet, and imitated Greek architecture. The Roman constitution was modeled on Greek lines. Educated Romans studied Greek literature and could speak the language. All of this led some Romans to argue that Rome's supposed victory over Greece was, in reality, a defeat. As fine Greek statues were triumphantly brought into Rome after the sack of the Greek colony of Syracuse in 212 BCE, Cato the Elder, a curmudgeonly Roman who regarded the Greeks as a bad influence, remarked that "the vanquished have conquered us, not we them." He had a point.

Cato and other skeptics contrasted what they regarded as the weak, unreliable, and self-indulgent nature of the Greeks with the Romans' practical, no-nonsense manner. Although Greek culture had once had* many admirable qualities, they argued, it had since degenerated: The Greeks had become entranced by their glorious history and overly fond of wordplay and philosophizing. Yet for all these criticisms, there was no denying the debt the Romans owed to Greek culture. The paradoxical result was that while many Romans were wary of becoming too much like the Greeks, the Romans carried the intellectual and artistic legacy of the Greeks farther than ever before, as their sphere of influence expanded around the Mediterranean and beyond.

Wine offered one way to resolve this paradox, for the cultivation and consumption of wine provided a way to bridge Greek and Roman values. The Romans were proud of their origins and saw themselves as a nation of unpretentious farmers turned soldiers and administrators. After successful campaigns, Roman soldiers were often rewarded with tracts of farmland. The most prestigious crop to grow was the vine; by doing so, Roman gentleman farmers could convince themselves that they were remaining true to their roots, even as they also enjoyed lavish feasts and drinking parties in Greek-style villas.

Cato himself agreed that viticulture provided a way to reconcile the traditional Roman values of frugality and simplicity with Greek sophistication. Cultivating vines was honest and down-to-earth, but the resulting wine was a symbol of civilization. For the Romans, wine therefore embodied both where they had come from and what they had become. The military might of a culture founded by hardworking farmers was symbolized by the Roman centurion's badge of rank: a wooden rod cut from the sapling of a vine.

All Vines Lead to Rome

At the beginning of the second century BCE, Greek wine still dominated the Mediterranean wine trade and was the only product being exported in significant quantities to the Italian peninsula. But the Romans were catching up fast, as wine making spread northward from the former Greek colonies in the south—the region known to the Greeks as "Oenotria," or "the land of the trained vines," which was under Roman rule by this time. The Italian peninsula became the world's foremost wine-producing region around 146 BCE, just as Rome became the leading Mediterranean power with the fall of Carthage in northern Africa and the sack of the Greek city of Corinth.

Just as they assimilated and then distributed so many other aspects of Greek culture, the Romans embraced Greece's finest wines and wine-making techniques. Vines were transplanted from Greek islands, enabling Chian wine, for example, to be grown in Italy. Winemakers began to make imitations of the most popular Greek wines, notably the seawater-flavored wine of Cos, so that Coan became a style rather than a mark of origin. Leading winemakers headed from Greece to Italy, the new center of the trade. By 70 CE, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder estimated that there were eighty wines of note in the Roman world, two-thirds of which were grown in Italy.

Such was the popularity of wine that subsistence farming could not meet demand, and the ideal of the noble farmer was displaced by a more commercial approach, based on large villa estates operated by slaves. Wine production expanded at the expense of grain production, so that Rome became dependent on grain imports from its African colonies. The expansion of the villa estates also displaced the rural population as small farmers sold their property and moved to the city. Rome's population swelled from around one hundred thousand in 300 BCE to around a million by 0 CE, making it the world's most populous metropolis. Meanwhile, as wine production intensified at the heart of the Roman world, consumption spread on its fringes. People adopted wine drinking, along with other Roman customs, wherever Roman rule extended—and beyond. Wealthy Britons put aside beer and mead in favor of wines imported from as far away as the Aegean; Italian wine was shipped as far as the southern Nile and northern India. In the first century, wine production in the Roman provinces of southern Gaul and Spain was stepped up to keep pace with demand, though Italian wines were still regarded as the best.

Wine was shipped from one part of the Mediterranean to another in freighters typically capable of carrying two thousand to three thousand clay amphorae, along with secondary cargoes of slaves, nuts, glassware, perfumes, and other luxury items. Some winemakers shipped their own wine; wrecks have been found in which the name of the winemaker on the amphorae matches the name cast into the anchor. The amphorae in which wine was shipped were generally regarded as disposable, nonre-turnable containers and were usually smashed when they had served their purpose. Thousands of amphora handles, with stamps indicating their place of origin, contents, and other information, have been found on rubbish heaps in Marseilles, Athens, Alexandria, and other Mediterranean ports, and in Rome itself. Analyzing these stamps makes it possible to map patterns of trade and see the influence of Roman politics on the wine business. Amphora handles from a 150-foot-high rubbish heap at the Horrea Galbana, a huge warehouse in'Rome, are mostly Spanish during the second century CE, following a mysterious decline of Italian production, possibly caused by plague. In the early third century, North African wines start to dominate after the rise to power of Septimius Severus in 193 CE. The merchants of Roman Spain had supported his rival, Albius Clodius, so he encouraged investment in the region around his hometown, Lepcis Magna (modern Tripoli), and favored wines from there instead.

Most of the best wine ended up in Rome itself. Arriving at the port of Ostia, a few miles to the southwest of Rome, a wine ship would be unloaded by a swarm of stevedores, skilled in handling the heavy and unwieldly amphorae across precarious gangplanks. Divers stood ready to rescue any amphorae that fell overboard. Once transferred into smaller vessels, the wine continued its journey up the river Tiber to the city of Rome. It was then manhandled into the dim cellars of wholesale warehouses and transferred into vast jars sunk into the ground to keep the contents cool. From here it was sold to retailers and transported in smaller amphorae through the city's narrow alleyways on handcarts. Juvenal, a Roman satirist of the early second century CE, gives the following impression of the bustle of Rome's streets.

In our hurry by a surging mass before us, while the

great crowd

Crushes our backs from behind us; an elbow or a stick

Hits you, a beam or a wine-jar smacks you on the head;

My leg is caked in splashing mud, from every side

I'm trampled by shoes, and a soldier spears My foot with his spiked shoes.

A Drink for Everyone?

It is not often that choosing one wine over another is a matter of life or death. Yet that is what determined the fate of Marcus Antonius, a Roman politician and a renowned orator. In 87 BCE, he found himself on the wrong side of one of Rome's many interminable power struggles. Gaius Marius, an elderly general, had seized power and was ruthlessly hunting down supporters of his rival, Sulla. Marcus Antonius sought refuge in the house of an associate of far lower social status, hoping that nobody would think of looking for him in such a poor man's house. His host, however, unwittingly gave him away by sending his servant out to buy wine worthy of such a distinguished guest. The servant went to the neighborhood wine shop and, after tasting what was on offer, asked for a far better and more expensive wine than usual. When the vintner asked why, the servant revealed the identity of his master's guest. The vintner went straight to Marius, who dispatched a handful of soldiers to kill Marcus Antonius. Yet having burst into his room, the soldiers could not bring themselves to kill him, such was the power of his oratory. Eventually, their commanding officer, who was waiting outside, went in to see what was happening. Denouncing his men as cowards, he drew his sword and beheaded Marcus Anto­nius himself.

Like the Greeks before them, the Romans regarded wine as a universal staple. It was drunk by both caesar and slave alike. But the Romans took Greek connoisseurship to new heights. Marcus Antonius's host would not have dreamed of serving him the lesser wine he drank himself. Wine became a symbol of social differentiation, a mark of the wealth and status of the drinker. The disparity between Roman society's richest and poorest members was reflected in the contents of their wine goblets. For wealthy Romans, the ability to recognize and name the finest wines was an important form of conspicuous consumption; it showed that they were rich enough to afford the finest wines and had spent time learning which was which.

The finest wine of all, by universal assent, was Falernian, an Italian wine grown in the region of Campania. Its name became a byword for luxury and is still remembered today. Falernian had to be made from vines growing in strictly defined regions on the slopes of Mount Falernus, a mountain south of the city of Neapolis (modern Naples). Caucine Falernian was grown on the highest slopes; Faustian Falernian, deemed the best kind, was grown in the middle, on the estate of Faustus, son of the dictator Sulla; and wine grown on the lower slopes was known simply as Falernian. The finest Falernian was a white wine, generally aged for at least ten years and ideally for much longer, until it turned golden in color. The limited production area and the fashion for long aging made Falernian extremely expensive, so it naturally became the wine of the elite. It was even said to have had divine origins: The wandering wine god Bacchus (the Roman version of the Greek god Dionysus) supposedly covered Mount Falernus with vines in gratitude to a noble farmer who, unaware of the god's identity, offered him shelter for the night. Bacchus, the story goes, also turned all the milk in the man's house into wine.

By far the most famous Falernian vintage was that of 121 BCE, known as Opimian Falernian after Opimius, who held the office of consul that year. This wine was drunk by Julius Caesar during the first century BCE, and 160-year-old Opimian was served to the emperor Caligula in 39 CE. Martial, a first-century Roman poet, described Falernian as "immortal," though the Opimian vintage was probably undrinkable by this time. Other high-ranking Roman wines included Caecuban, Surren-tine, and Setine, which was popular in summer, mixed with snow brought down from the mountains. Some Roman writers, including Pliny the Elder, denounced the fashion for cold drinks prepared in this way as yet another example of the decadence of the times, complaining that it was unnatural, since it went against the seasons. And while traditionalists called for a return to old-fashioned Roman frugality, others worried that ostentatious spending on food and drink might provoke the wrath of the poor.

Accordingly, numerous "sumptuary laws" were passed to try to restrain the luxurious tastes of Rome's richest citizens. That so many such laws were passed demonstrates that they were rarely obeyed or enforced. One law, passed in 161 BCE, specified the amount that could be spent on food and entertainment on each day of the month; later laws introduced special rules for weddings and funerals, regulated what sorts of meat could or could not be served, and banned certain foods from being served altogether. Other rules stipulated that men could not wear silk garments; that gold vases were only to be used in religious ceremonies; and that dining rooms had to be built with windows facing outward, so officials could check that no rules were being broken. By the time of Julius Caesar, inspectors sometimes loitered in markets or burst into banquets to confiscate banned foodstuffs, and menus had to be submitted for review by state officials.

While the richest Romans drank the finest wines, poorer citizens drank lesser vintages, and so on down the social ladder. So fine was the calibration of wine with status that drinkers at a Roman banquet, or
convivium,
would be served different wines depending on their positions in society. This was just one of the many ways in which the
convivium
differed from its Greek prototype, the
symposion.
Where the
symposion
was, at least in theory, a forum in which the participants drank as equals from a shared
krater,
pursuing pleasure and perhaps philosophical enlightenment, the
convivium
was an opportunity to emphasize social divisions, not to set them aside in a temporary alcoholic haze.

Like the Greeks, the Romans drank their wine in the "civi­lized" manner, namely, mixed with water, which was brought into their cities via elaborate aqueducts. Each drinker, however, usually mixed wine and water for himself, and the communal
krater
was, it seems, rarely used. The seating arrangement was less egalitarian than that of the
symposion
too, since some seats were associated with higher status than others. The
con­vivium
reflected the Roman class system, which was based on the notion of patrons and clients. Client citizens depended on patrons, who in turn depended on patrons of their own, and each patron provided benefits (such as a financial allowance, legal advice, and political influence) to clients in return for specific duties. Clients were expected to accompany their patrons to the Forum each morning, for example; the size of each patron's entourage was a sign of his power. If a patron invited a client to a
convivium,
however, the client would often find himself being served inferior food and wine to those of other guests and might find himself the butt of the other guests' jokes. Pliny the Younger, writing in the late first century CE, described a dinner at which fine wine was served to the host and his friends, second-rate wine to other guests, and third-rate wine to freedmen (former slaves).