The Ancient Greeks had a secret to drinking in moderation
As a rule of thumb, a dinner party guest should be able to walk home unassisted unless very old.
This exhibition, filled with ceramic and glass objects, may seem at first sight to be merely a collection of old vessels. But like the perfume flask in Baudelaire’s Le Flacon which opens a world of memories, these containers are not merely objects of ancient craft, but clues to a whole world of civilisation whose heritage lives among us still.
Vessels, in fact, are inseparable from civilisation, for as soon as we begin to till the earth and develop cereal crops, we need means for storing surplus produce. Hunter-gatherers do not have surplus produce, and there is little or no concept of storage. But when, after the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago, we began to have harvests of grain that had to be managed to feed the population until the following harvest, while seed corn was selected and set aside even more carefully, storage vessels were essential. And that is why ceramics, the art of potting, is arguably the first and oldest craft of civilisation.
Cereal crops came first, but soon there were other products of the domestication of nature which are even more inconceivable without storage vessels: wine from the grape and oil from the olive, in particular. Milk and cheese, too, cannot be handled and processed without bowls and pails, and cooking remains very primitive without pans, dishes and cauldrons, first ceramic and later metal.
This exhibition, set in a handsome room in the Old Quad of the University of Melbourne, represents a collection of objects from the university’s rich archaeology collection which have been chosen to illustrate a number of practical and material aspects of ancient life in the Greek and Roman world. And it is accompanied by useful explanatory panels, maps and details of the individual items.
The first and perhaps most important theme is the production, distribution and consumption of wine, which was traditionally viewed, in Greek mythology, as one of the foundations of civilised life, together with cereal grains themselves; for we have to remember that none of these crops that we now take for granted exists in the wild state. All of them are cultivars, created by human ingenuity and selective breeding and an almost visionary degree of persistence over many centuries. This is most conspicuously the case with cereal crops, which humans developed from what in the native state are mere grasses. They are artificial and therefore quintessentially human, unlike the foods that we hunt like other animals.
Indeed Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans), god of the vine, was closely associated with Demeter (Ceres in Latin), goddess of corn, as patrons of human civilisation, especially in their mystery cults, in which initiation offered prosperity in this life and blessedness in the next. Later, at a more prosaic level, the Latin saying “sine Bacche et Cerere friget Venus” (literally, “without Bacchus and Ceres, Venus is frigid”), meaning that one doesn’t feel like making love until one has had something to eat and drink.
Wine was a central part of Greek culture, as we see already in both the Iliad and the Odyssey; it is used in libations to the gods, as well as the feasts of men; Odysseus uses it to make the Cyclops drunk and then kill him. It was always the focus of social life, and in the culture of the Greek polis that developed during the Archaic period and flourished in the Classical centuries, drinking was the basis of private sociability.
The symposium (literally, “drinking together”) was a private dinner party whose norms were clearly established and set down, for example, in a beautiful poem by Xenophanes in the early 5th century. Guests recline on couches around three sides of the dining room, and the servants lay out the food on little tables set before them. The food is eaten first, then water is brought around to wash hands, the floor is swept, and incense is burnt. Nuts, dried fruit and other forms of dessert are set on the tables.
Only then is the wine served, always mixed with water, and that is why one of the most distinctive Greek ceramic vessels used for these dinner parties is called a krater, a mixing bowl. One of the guests, not the host, would be appointed the symposiarch and he would tell the servants how much water to mix with the wine: usually more as the night wore on, so that guests didn’t get drunker than was pleasant. Indeed, Xenophanes suggests as a rule of thumb that a guest should be able to walk home unassisted unless very old.
The drinking phase of the party was the time for telling stories, reciting poetry, singing songs, etc. – which explains the modern meaning of the word. Xenophanes wisely suggests avoiding quarrels and arguments which will be exacerbated by inebriation. Conversation could be on serious topics, as presented in two philosophical dialogues both entitled Symposium, the better-known by Plato and the other by Xenophon.
There is a third and highly entertaining one, written about 600 years later by Lucian, also in Greek, which satirises the bad behaviour of philosophical guests who should know better, and reminds us that symposia could also, like drinking parties all over the world, involve rowdy or bawdy behaviour.
Among the objects in the exhibition is a beautiful red- figure drinking cup of the kind used at a symposium. In the centre it has the rather self-referential motif of a youth carrying a full wineskin. The form of the cup, known as a cylix, is wide and shallow, with handles on either side. Ancient vase paintings show how the cup could be drunk with a finger hooked through one of these handles, and inebriated guests would play a game of throwing the lees of the wine against a point on the opposite wall.
Other objects in the exhibition, apart from painted vases, include storage vessels, such as an amphora retrieved from a Roman wreck, testifying to the trade in wines around the Mediterranean, since then as now some vintages were far more highly considered than others. The best Greek wines seem to have come from the Ionian Islands, while the best Roman ones were from Sicily and the vicinity of Naples – areas settled by the Greeks long before Rome rose to prominence – as well as other regions where wine had been introduced, probably by the Greeks, such as the south of France, the coast of Spain and North Africa.
The conservation of wine in ancient times is an interesting question. Oak barrels, according to Pliny, were invented by the Gauls, and glass vessels, though produced by the Mesopotamians about 3500 years ago, are not suitable for large-scale storage. Ancient wine was thus stored and preserved in ceramic vessels, such as the amphora in the exhibition, which had to be sealed to prevent oxidisation. Clearly it was possible to preserve wine for some time in this way, and there are many references in ancient literature (in Horace’s Odes, for example) to fine wines that have been kept and aged.
The most intriguing reference to aged wine, though, is in the Odyssey, where Eurycleia refers to vintages that she has safeguarded since Odysseus’s departure for the Trojan War, and which would thus be some 20 years old by that point.
The exhibition reminds us, too, of the importance of wine in Christian belief, for Christ instituted the Eucharist using bread for his body and wine for his blood, the very same pair of substances that the Greeks had already regarded as fundamental to human life.
This meant that viticulture was an essential part of any Christian society, since the sacrament itself could not be administered without wine, and thus religion kept production going throughout Europe even in the hardest times of the dark centuries that followed the fall of the western Roman Empire.
The other main part of the exhibition is devoted to cosmetics, body adornment and perfumes. These, too, have an interesting connection with the theme of civilisation, since they speak of a sense of the body’s beauty, and a pleasure in eroticism, which are completely superfluous at simpler levels of cultural development. In a tribal society the process of finding a mate is highly regulated and determined by endogamic and exogamous rules as well as the will of family members and elders. There is no room for romantic let alone unrequited love, or for seduction, flirtation or illicit affairs. There are no strangers and everyone knows everyone’s else’s business. In more complex social worlds, both men and women come to see themselves, and each other, differently. The Greeks effectively invented the idea that the human body could be beautiful – as distinct from merely sexually attractive or not. The culture of the gymnasium produced the beautiful male body, and the many lekythoi in the exhibition, flasks for the oil with which athletes used to rub themselves, attest to the importance of that culture, which again the Greeks took wherever they settled, from Sicily to Afghanistan.
Presumably, if these belong mainly to a male world, the many other beautiful little vessels, quite a few in the ornamental Corinthian style, pertain to the domain of women. There are small dishes that may have contained face-powder and little perfume vessels with narrow spouts, just like today’s perfume bottles, and for the same reason, to let out the precious oil by drops and to prevent the aromatic essences from volatilising.
There is an interesting insight into the use of cosmetics in a legal speech by Lysias, the son of the man in whose house Plato’s Republic is set. Athenians had to speak for themselves in court, instead of being represented by a barrister, but they could commission a speech from an expert forensic author such as Lysias. In this case a man is defending himself against the charge of murdering a man he caught in flagrante delicto in his wife’s bed. The law allowed this to be considered justifiable homicide as long as there were witnesses, which is why he had dragged the neighbours in to witness the unedifying sight of his wife’s faithlessness.
He was able to do this because he had been tipped off about her behaviour, and then had persuaded the wife’s personal maid to co-operate in setting a trap for her. But before he realises what is going on there is a slightly pathetic episode when, as he relates in the speech, his wife tricks him into thinking she is going downstairs to attend to the baby but is really sleeping with her lover in his very house. He is surprised later to find she is powdered and made up – and no doubt perfumed – but it is only in hindsight, like so many betrayed lovers, that he joins the dots.
No wonder early Christians such as Saint Jerome suspected that cleanliness was not next to godliness, but rather to debauchery.
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