Not by Bread Alone;

The Essential Character of Wine in Archaic Greece

Paper read to the Conference “In Vino Veritas: A Symposium on Wine and the Influence of Bacchus from Classical Antiquity through the Eighteenth Century,” sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Binghamton University (SUNY), Binghamton, NY, April 24-25, 2009

 

{Note to website viewers: The text below is substantially what I read at the conference, apart from a few corrections, from inserting quotations directly into the text that appeared there as slides, and from footnotes explaining where to find images that were shown.  The handout supplied on that occasion is given here, in a pdf format to ensure that your browser will read the Greek characters correctly.  (This means that to return to this page you will need to use your “back” button, since pdf does not allow for hyperlinks.)}

          To begin on a light note, the ancients did love their wine according to Hollywood.  Among all the gladiators fighting one another and lions eating Chris­tians in what my classicist colleagues affectionately call “toga and sandals epics,” here and there we do encounter the potion.  Thus in this production still from the 1951 Technicolor blockbuster Quo Vadis, although here in black and white for some reason, emperor Nero has a cup at the ready as he consults with his advisor Petronius.[1]  Or in the 2005 television series “Rome,” and to supply a bit of continuity with last year’s CEMERS Conference on “Venus and the Venereal,” you can see Julius Caesar’s niece Atia taking refreshment following sex.[2]  And our actual written sources show much the same state of affairs: Plato’s dialogue Symposium has notables like Socrates and Aristophanes high-mindedly discussing love over a cup or two, late in the 5^th century Before the Common Era.  Thus we read (handout#1):

 

When Socrates had lain on a couch and dined with the others, and they had made an offering and had sung to the god, and the rest that is customary, they turned to drinking.

 

As the narrator says, after such preliminaries as eating, “they turned to drinking.”  Although the scene may have been invented, the customs it portrays were surely historical.  And wine itself was discussed in philosophical terms, even well before Plato.  An anonymous ancient commentator on his dialogue preserves the opening of a poem by Alcaeus from a century or so before the purported banquet, that is, during what is called the archaic period of ancient Greece.  Aside from a good deal that Alcaeus says about the stuff elsewhere, here he opines that (still handout #1):

 

wine, my child, is truth.

 

The commentator thinks the idea is that it is difficult to fabricate a lie when you are drunk.  However that may be, the connection with truth developed in later antiquity into our theme this weekend: in wino weritas, if I may be permitted the original Latin pronunciation.

Now what I want to do this afternoon is consider the beverage in the earliest literature of classical antiquity, that is, from another century or so before Alcaeus.   Thus I go first to Homer, who often mentions the Greek word oinos, the root of such terms as “oenophile” and “oenology,” and sometimes the synonym methu, which turns out to be cognate with the Renaissance English word “mead” for a different alcoholic mixture.  The very first citation of either term in what is thought to be the earlier of Homer’s two epics is already interesting.  A few hundred lines into the Iliad we read of wine poured over burnt meat offered to the god Apollo to get him to end the plague that has decimated the Greek camp on the beach near the Trojan war site (handout #2).  Just so you can experience Greek once today, let’s listen to Stanley Lombardo reciting the text given below,[3] while you can view the translation to its right[4]:

 

 

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ΄ εὔξαντο καὶ οὐλοχύτας προβάλοντο,   αὐέρυσαν μὲν πρῶτα καὶ ἔσφαξαν καὶ ἔδειραν,   μηρούς τ΄ ἐξέταμον κατά τι κνίσῃ ἐκάλυψαν δίπτυχα ποιήσαντες, ἐπ΄ αὐτῶν δ΄ ὠμοθέτησαν∙ καῖε δ΄ ἐπὶ σχίζῃς ὁ γέρων, ἐπὶ δ΄ αἴθοπα (ϝ) οἶνον λεῖβε· …

Thereupon, when (the Greeks) had prayed and strewn barley (over the animals),                              they first drew back their heads and cut their throats and flayed them,                         and they cut out the thighs and covered them with fat, doubling it, and laid raw flesh on them. And the old man burned them on wood billets, and poured shining wine over them in libation.

And if you will forgive me another fine point, Lombardo does not pronounce the phoneme ϝ beginning the last word of v. 1.462, called digamma, because it had disappeared from the Greek language by the time our written texts appeared, but one can tell from the verse’s meter that it was still pronounced for some time during the early oral transmission.  All of which means that the original word here and in some other epic verses was not oinos, but woinos, closer to our word “wine.”  Such examples illustrate wine’s ritual role, and for further details of it I refer you to Geoffrey Kirk in the standard Iliad commentary, as listed among other references under the text in the handout, for you to inspect at your literature should you choose.  But another example highlights the ritual’s importance.   In Book 12 of the Odyssey, Odysseus’s men ate the forbidden cattle of the Sun at one point on their way from Troy, but before doing so (still handout #2), “they did not have wine to leave on the burnt offerings, but poured water after roasting the entrails.”  After they actually ate, Sun angrily asked Zeus to send a storm, which killed everyone but Odysseus himself.  The eating aspect of the episode is widely noted, for example in a volume on the history of excess in consumption co-edited by Professor Grieco, from whom we will hear this evening; however, as Mario Zambarbieri puts it, the lack of wine “sottolinea l’irritualità della cerimonia”; that is, this was not a proper ritual, and I also believe Homer is thinking that this impropriety added to Sun’s anger, lending impetus to his appeal to Zeus.

It is natural to ask why the Greeks followed this custom. The handout references cite some theories, but I’m sorry to say that none of them are convincing.  For example, some moderns, following some ancients, think the idea is that gods and humans had once dined together, so that the sacrifice connotes a sort of nostalgia for a lost communion.  This is similar to a common strain of explanation of the sacrifice in the societies that anthropologists study, and the Greeks certainly had their tribalisms.  Indeed, a passage in Iliad 3 looks like the heritage of an even more primitive religious sentiment than worship of anthropomorphic deities.  Menelaus, the original husband of the focus of the war Trojan Helen, and the brother of the Greek leader Agamemnon, is about to fight a duel with the Trojan prince who had taken Helen away, called Paris or Alexander (still handout #2):

 

The parties promise that the duel will decide Helen’s fate and each of the Achaeans and each of the Trojans prays, saying:

 

“great honored Zeus, and the other immortal gods, as to whichever of the two sides may first bring harm to the oaths, may their brains thereby flow to the ground like this wine, and their children’s, and may their wives be enslaved to others.”

 

That is, they conduct a ritual and ask the gods to ensure that if anyone breaks this oath, “may their brains flow to the ground like this wine.”  The duel and the oath will actually prove indecisive, because the goddess Aphrodite will spirit Paris away just as Menelaus is about to kill him.  But as to the prayer itself, Walter Burkert plausibly suggests that it is an inheritance of sympathetic magic: when you pour wine on the ground during an oath you are also spilling out the brains of anyone who breaks it.  But the real problem is that, whatever the case in hunter-gatherer cultures, Homer’s gods don’t need the wine.  In Iliad 5 the great Greek warrior Diomedes actually wounds a god fighting on the Trojan side, but Aphrodite’s gash does not yield normal blood, and an aside tells us that this is because gods do not eat bread nor drink wine (still handout #2):

 

Forthwith the spear pierced (Aphrodite’s) flesh through the immortal robe that the Graces themselves had toiled to make, just above the palm of her hand; and the immortal blood of the goddess flowed: ichor, just such as flows in the blessed gods.  For they eat no food, they drink no shining wine, wherefore they are bloodless and are called deathless.

 

  So how can offering it to them be a substitute for communion with them?

The last example does suggest that we ought not consider wine in isolation from its complement: food.  Homer frequently pairs oinos or methu with sitos, which formally means “bread,” although often it stands for food in general.  From this point of departure Jean-Pierre Vernant infers that to Homer sitos and oinos are what define the human as opposed to the divine on the one hand, and the lower orders on the other.  But the problem here is that for the lower orders sitos alone seems to do the job.  In Book 9 of the Odyssey Odysseus says that the subhuman Cyclops did not resemble a man who was sitophagos, “bread-eating” (handout #3):

 

Odysseus tells the Phaeacians he met the Cyclops, and says:

 

“For indeed this marvel turned out to be so enormous that he did not resemble what would be a bread-eating man, but a wooded peak of the high mountains, one which is such as to loom apart from the others.”

 

But as to wine we will see in a moment that the ogre acknowledges Odysseus’s wine as better than his island’s variety, implying that he has drunk that.  Other epic locations listed in the handout reinforce this picture.  And sometimes ordinary animals drink.  In this connection, the critically-acclaimed Kurdish film from the year 2000 whose title translates as “A Time for Drunken Horses” shows smugglers operating in the region bordering Iran, Iraq, and Syria spiking the water of their pack mules with liquor, to get the animals to work in the rugged terrain.[5]  But we already have a precedent in Homer: at one point the chief Trojan warrior Hector goes into battle, and demands that his horses now earn their keep, saying faceti­ous­ly that when his wife Andromache gave them fodder, she “mixed in wine to drink when the spirit moved her, more than for me, the very one who I swear is her stalwart husband” (still handout #3):

 

“Xanthus and you, Podargus, and Aethon and good Lampus, now repay me for your care, where Andromache, daughter of great-hearted Eetion, put a great deal of honey-hearted grain before you, and mixed in wine to drink when the spirit moved her, more than for me, the very one who I swear is her stalwart husband.”

 

            We are on safer ground in discussing the concrete importance of wine to humans.  Of course, Homer’s people drink the stuff in addition to offering it to gods, and there is a detailed discussion of his descriptions, incorporating archaeological evidence, in a 2004 article by Sue Sherratt that I only discovered two days ago.  This was too late to include it in your handout, but I can give the reference to anyone who wants it.[6]  Aside from description, though, Homer’s characters also speak of wine directly, saying that it is beneficial to quotidian well being, if taken in moderation.  In later Greece the Hippocratic texts will cite particular medicinal uses, but the sentiment already appears in early epic if less specifically.  As one example of many, Hector’s mother opines that “wine greatly increases the strength of a weary man” (handout #4):

 

Hector returns from the battlefield and Hecuba says:

 

“stay, so that I may bring you honey-sweet wine, that you first offer to father Zeus and the other immortals, and then that you yourself may also profit when you drink.  Wine greatly increases the strength of a weary man, whereas you are weary from defending your townsmen.”

 

            Aside from that basic point, the archaic Greeks knew gradations in the quality of wine, as in our distinction between fine wine and table wine.  Handout #5 begins with an extended quotation where Odysseus describes the background of the wine he will use to incapacitate the Cyclops by getting him drunk, albeit he did not yet know this, and speaks of simply preparing for an encounter with possibly prestigious people.  He says namely that the wine was a reward along with other valuables for saving their donor’s family, and that it was “black sweet wine” and “a wonderful drink”:

 

Odysseus says they decided to investigate an island’s inhabitants, and then:

 

“I took a goatskin bag of black sweet wine, which Maron, the son of Euanthes and priest of Apollo, who cared for Ismarus, had given me because we had reverently protected his wife and son.  For he lived in the wooded grove of Phoebus Apollo; and he granted me splendid gifts: he gave me seven talents of well-wrought gold, and he gave me a silver bowl, and then he drew pure sweet wine into all of twelve jars, a wonderful drink.”

 

The Cyclops for his part will compare it to divine nectar (still handout #5):

 

Odysseus says the Cyclops said:

 

“‘kindly give me more, and tell me your name right now so that I can give you a token of hospitality you’ll enjoy.  For the grain-giving earth bears wine-capable grapes also for the Cyclopes, and Zeus’s rain makes them grow; but this is straight from ambrosia and nectar.’”

 

And in a segment I will come back to, another poet wishes for a feast involving “wine of Biblos,” as if he were speaking of Bordeaux or Beaujolais, while Homer himself cites a wine possibly identified by place, “Pramnean,” which was pretty good.

            Another issue is wine as a component of gluttony.  To cite one location among others, the swineherd Eumaeus tells the disguised Odysseus upon his homecoming that in the absence of Odysseus certain men are suing for his wife Penelope’s hand, and meanwhile are laying waste to his estate.  Thus their table is positively weighed down with bread and meat and wine (handout #6):

 

“Their well-polished table is weighed down with bread and meat and wine.”

 

Then the issue of gluttony naturally leads to the issue of drunkenness, and one example underscores the subject’s importance.  Here, just as he often does, Homer expresses a moral point by having a character give an aetiological myth, originally a story that explained why things are the way they are today by virtue of events in the past, but augmented with a moral.  Penelope has relented and promised herself to whichever suitor can string the powerful bow that belonged to her husband.  There is squabbling over whether or not the apparent beggar who is really her husband should be let into the contest, and in that context, a suitor accuses him of being drunk for believing he could be strong enough.  The suitor offers the case of a centaur who was invited to a gathering, but in his drunkenness smashed the hall where it took place.  The human guests maimed him, and that is why centaurs and men are at odds to this day, albeit the moral is that you should not get drunk (still handout #6):

 

“The honey-sweet wine wounds you, just as it also harms any other whom greed seizes and he does not drink suitably.  Indeed, wine deluded the famous centaur Eurytion in the great palace of great-hearted Peirithous when he visited the Lapiths: since he deluded his mind with wine he madly did damage in the house of Peirithous; and distress seized the heroes and they lifted him and took him out through the gate and lopped off his ears and nose with the pitiless bronze; and although his wits were deluded they did get to the ruin that is endured with a silly mind.  Since then centaurs and men have made war, but he was first to find evil in heavy drinking.”

 

           One could go on with other aspects of Homer’s wine, such as using it to extinguish funeral pyres, but what is its essence to him?  The one generalization I infer is that whatever the details of his thought, he lacks our perception that food is a necessity but wine only a luxury: both are needed.  Here one can add the small point that he cites oinos without sitos more often than the reverse, 110 times to 47:

 

	Iliad	Odyssey	Total
oinos total	47	89	136
oinos without sitos	35	75	110
sitos without oinos	10	37	47

 

 

I do have to offer a caveat that this is not always so in individual portions of the poems.  In particular, when the disguised Odysseus is given hospitality, sitos is set before this supposed beggar in a number of places (handout #7), including this one:

 

Telemachus asks Eumaeus to care for the stranger at his hut, and says:

 

“I will send all the clothes there, and food to eat,”

 

while oinos goes unmentioned, so you might claim that beggars as opposed to the rich only needed food.  Still, in one such place wine is implicit after all, so perhaps it is implicit in the other places but is not cited for some technical reason such as what would fit the meter.

            Now Homer is trying to remember a world that had vanished, but the epic poem called Hesiod’s Works and Days directly treats the world of the time, which was probably the earlier half of the 7^th century B.C.E.  A major portion of this composition looks into what a year in the farmer’s life was like then, as in particular in a section about collecting the fruits of his labor.  This section is organized into five sub-sections that are described thematically as mostly pruning vines, harvesting, midsummer, threshing grain, and making wine:

 

Structure of Hesiod, Works and Days 564-614a

 

 

Segment:	Thematic  Content:	Structural Element:
564-70	spring description; pruning vines	A
571-81	harvesting	B
582-96	summer description; food and wine picnic	C
597-601, 606-8,    602-5	threshing-storing; relations with servants and animals	B
606-14a	wine-making	A

 

 

As to this, the often unacknowledged fault line in Hesiod scholarship over the past 200 years has been between traditionalists who see the author as an aphorist who happened to use epic meter, and those including me who see him as an epic poet whose subject matter happened to include aphorisms.  My works listed in the handout references cover the textual details, but the issue can be cast succinctly in terms of 19^th century art history:  Here is a ceiling painting of the Muse visiting Hesiod by the Romantic Eugène Delacroix, showing the goddess directly confronting what is clearly a peasant, and here is a later work by the Symbolist Gustave Moreau, with what is clearly a poet i.e., with a lyre, simply being guided by the deity.  From something like the latter viewpoint my 2005 article finds it easy to note that our piece follows an ABCBA pattern, what Homerists call ring structure, or in music, what Bela Bartók called an “arch” form.  The 2^nd and 4^th parts deal with the grain out of which food comes, but the 1^st and 5^th with either wine or the vines that lead to it.  The 5^th in particular ends the piece emphatically, in that it calls wine a “gift of Dionysus,” the Greek form of Bacchus (handout #8):

 

Show (your grapes) to Sun for ten days and ten nights; shade them for five; and on the sixth draw the gift of Dionysus the great cheerer into jars.

 

But I actually want to read the middle portion for you (still handout #8):

 

“At the point of the cycle that the thistle blooms and the shrill cicada ‘sits on its tree’ and showers down its ‘clear song,’ in fast beats from under its wings in the season of exhausting summer, then goats are fattest, and wine is best, while women are at their lustiest but hey, men their weakest, since Sirius dries out their head and knees, and yes their skin is parched under the heat – but would that there be just then a shady rock and wine of Biblos! And a milk-cake and milk from goats about to dry up, and meat from a cow that ate in the woods, not yet calved, and from newborn goats too; and you can sit in the shade, sated with food, and drink shining wine: turn your face to the west wind’s breeze and you can pour out three parts of water from an ever-flowing and running, untroubled spring, and throw in a fourth of wine!”

 

No translation of these 15 lines is adequate, but you can tell that the person who composed them was no country bumpkin who had merely learned how to versify a farmer’s almanac. In addition, there are subtle effects such as that the cicada will have reminded the expert archaic listener to scenes like the “clear song” of the Sirens leading sailors to their doom in Odyssey 12.  And the picnic at the shady rock concludes most decisively, first with water of qualities much like what the manufacturers of our Evian or Dasani claim for their product, and then by employing a certain word pattern to lend emphasis: a cardinal number followed by the next highest ordinal is common in epic, and especially, as Kirk observes, often an Iliad character will attempt some action three times, whereupon the fourth is decisive, be it success or failure.  Thus a stress on our fourth part, wine, is built-in from the epic context.  In passing, since that is so we cannot follow any almanac notion to say that 75:25 is seriously meant as the ideal proportion for the usual Greek habit of mixing water into their wine.  The author may well have believed that the correct recipe was, say, 60:40, but felt that the poetically dictated choice was close enough.  In any case, it is clear from the emphasis and from the section’s overall structure that he thought wine was at least as important as food.

To conclude, neither Hesiod nor Homer is yet disposed to enunciate a metaphysics of wine, such as to say that it amounts to truth, but they lay the groundwork for doing so.  They establish the substance as a vital component of life during the earliest part of the Greek literary-historical record, however one might attempt to define this vitality.