The Superiority of Wine
Beer was the drink of the masses throughout much of the ancient world, but it was not consumed at all in Greece and Roman Italy, the only societies to produce cereals without using them to brew beer. Climatic conditions on the two peninsulas (and their associated islands) were far more suitable for the cultivation of grapes than in any regions where wine had been produced to that time. Instead of drinking beer and wine, as Egyptians and Mesopotamians did, Romans and Greeks of all social classes consumed only wine, although there were significant class- and gender-specific distinctions in patterns of consumption. Not only did they drink wine exclusively, but Greeks and Romans constructed ideological and medical arguments that beer had harmful properties in general and was particularly unfit for civilized peoples like themselves. As part of their respective civilizing missions, they exported wine to predominantly beer-drinking societies throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond, and later they transferred knowledge of vine cultivation and winemaking to western and central Europe. Within the remarkably short period between 500 BC and AD 100, wine production had spread throughout Europe, to regions ranging from Spain and Portugal in the west to modern Hungary in the east, and from England in the north to Crete in the south.
Knowledge of grape cultivation and winemaking reached Greece from Egypt, by way of Crete. A wine trade between Egypt and Crete began as early as 2500 BC, and by 1500 BC grapes were being grown and wine made on the island itself. There is also some evidence, in the form of jars and jugs that seem to have held a barley-based liquid, that the Minoan inhabitants of Crete produced and consumed beer. Thus Crete was similar to Egypt and Mesopotamia in having an alcohol culture that encompassed both major fermented beverages. In this respect Greece stood out: there is no reliable evidence that the Greeks themselves drank beer before the introduction of viticulture and wine production, and they did not adopt brewing as a parallel activity to winemaking. It is probable that Greeks drank mead before wine entered their diet, as the Greek word for “intoxicant,” methu, is very similar to the word for mead in other languages. But they eschewed beer and, as we shall see, constructed elaborate arguments that beer was a beverage unfit for their civilization. The Greeks (known then as Mycenaeans) ruled beer- and wine-drinking Crete for about two centuries from 1420 BC, and there is plenty of evidence of wine-drinking in their palaces, as well as a reference to Dionysus (the Greek god of wine) on one of the Linear B tablets from that period. But there is no evidence that the Greeks drank beer while they occupied the island, even though it is possible that the indigenous Cretans continued to do so.1
If the Greeks did have contact with beer while on Crete, it must not have been a good experience, and they left the knowledge and technology of brewing behind when they left; they even apparently forgot it, for later Greek writers described beer in other societies as if they had never come across such a beverage before. The Greeks did, however, learn how to grow vines and make wine, and they transferred this knowledge to the mainland. Until this period, the cultivation of grapevines in western Asia and the Middle East had been largely restricted to the limited cooler areas of predominantly hot regions, such as the mountains to the north and west of Mesopotamia, the valleys on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and the Nile Delta in Egypt. But many regions throughout the Greek mainland were hospitable to vines, and by about 1000 BC, hundreds of vineyards had been planted close to cities such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Argos, which were the main markets for wine. Five hundred years later, the demand for wine had grown such that vineyards had to be established much farther afield, especially on the more distant islands. Some, like Thasos, Lesbos, and Chios, earned reputations for the quality of their wines. By 400–300 BC, a true wine industry, on a scale never seen before, had been established in Greece, and wine soon became, with olive oil and grain, one of the three main products of economy and commerce in the Mediterranean region.
Not only did Greeks export their own wine, but they extended viticulture under Greek ownership to new regions and expanded existing production elsewhere. As early as the fifth century BC, Greek wine was found in various regions of France and Egypt, around the Black Sea, and in central Europe. When they colonized Egypt from about 300 BC, the Greeks planted many new vineyards, and they also introduced vines to southern France (near Marseilles), Sicily, and southern regions of the Italian mainland. Southern Italy proved such a successful location for viticulture that the Greeks called it Oenotria, “the land of trained vines.” Viticulture became so important there that, in one southern Italian site dating from 400–300 BC, grapevine remains made up a full third of vegetation recovered by archaeologists.2
Yet the movement of viticulture and wine production was not unilinear. It is possible that viticulture was introduced to Spain not by the Greeks, as was once thought, but by the Phoenicians, or even that it was established independently of outside influences. Similarly, the Etruscans of northern Italy seem to have received winemaking knowledge from the Phoenicians, and Etruscan amphoras, the large ceramic jars used for shipping wine, were modeled on the Phoenician form.3 At the time Greeks were introducing vineyards to southern Italy, Etruscans were making wine and exporting it across the Alps as far as Burgundy, in France.
Even so, it was the Greeks who established the first major long-distance wine trade routes in the ancient world, and thousands of Greek amphoras—the clay jars used for transporting wine and other products until the first century of the Christian era—can be found throughout Europe. Ungainly looking objects, amphoras came in a variety of shapes and sizes, each typical of a producer or region of production, so that the origins of most can be fairly easily identified. Most amphoras held between 25 and 30 liters, and all had pointed bases, bodies that broadened toward the top, and two handles. Their design enabled them to be carried at both ends, because a full amphora was too heavy for one person to carry: an average amphora held about 30kg of wine, to which was added the weight of the amphora itself. The pointed ends made it possible to pivot an amphora, but they also made storage difficult, as amphoras could not stand upright without support. In wine cellars they generally leaned against one another, like so many drunks with bellies full of wine. When they were shipped, the ends were planted in a wooden framework or in a bed of sand. Amphoras were eventually replaced by wooden barrels, which had significant advantages in that they held more wine and could be rolled and pivoted by one person. But the adoption of barrels did historians no favors; unlike amphoras, which have survived for centuries as evidence of the early wine trade, the wooden barrels have rotted away.
Most ancient wine was transported on water, throughout the Mediterranean and its seas and along Europe’s rivers, because water was by far the cheapest medium for shipping anything. But it was a high-risk venture, and hundreds of thousands of Greek amphoras lie at the bottom of the waterways across which the Greeks traded. These are cargoes lost when ships sank during storms or were blown onto rocks, and heavy concentrations lie along the southern coast of France. One site includes as many as 10,000 amphoras, which would have contained about 300,000 liters of wine, the equivalent of 400,000 modern bottles. It is estimated that as much as 10 million liters of wine were shipped to Gaul each year through Massilia (Marseilles), the Greeks’ main trade gateway to Gaul. There is also evidence of the transfer of Greek wine-drinking culture, in the form of cups and bowls. At Châtillon-sur-Seine, in northern Burgundy, a massive krater (a vessel used for mixing wine with water) was located. It was clearly intended for decorative use, as it stands two meters high and has a volume of a thousand liters, but it speaks to the status of wine in Celtic Gaul.4
At home, wine was consumed among all levels of Greek society, but there were important differences in the quality of the wine consumed and the circumstances in which it was drunk. The most famous Greek wine institution was the symposium; the modern meaning of the word—a conference or meeting—is much diluted from the original. The Greek word symposion means “drinking together,” and it referred to a get-together of upper-class Greek men (usually between twelve and twenty-four of them) for a long night of wine consumption, discussion, and entertainment. Symposiums could also be rites of passage, occasions for the induction of young men into adult male society. A number of representations of the symposium have come down to us, and it is vividly portrayed on the ornate pottery jars and cups that were used as the night progressed. They show men wearing garlands on their heads, leaning on couches, drinking wine from shallow goblets (called kylixes), talking, and listening to singers and musicians. Some symposiums were serious affairs, as the men discussed politics and the arts through the night. Others seem to have been boisterous drinking parties where drinking as well as sex with prostitutes and boy servers took priority. Many symposiums were probably a blend of all these activities.
Although the format of symposiums varied, there were some standard features. The first cup of wine might be drunk straight, without any added water, but the rest was diluted. Greeks generally thought that drinking wine straight was barbaric (some writers argued that drinking wine straight, or even diluting it by half, could make the drinker insane), and they commonly added water (sometimes seawater) to their wine, as well as herbs and spices for flavoring. The host (symposiarch) of each symposium decided on the ratio of wine to water, but the water was always dominant. Ratios of 3:1, 5:3, and 3:2 seem to have been common, meaning that the participants drank a beverage that was between 25 and 40 percent wine. Because much of the wine favored by better-off Greeks was made from dried grapes, whose higher sugar concentration produces wine with higher levels of alcohol than wine made from fresh grapes, the diluted wines might well have had alcohol levels of between 4 and 7 percent, about the same as modern beer. Very likely the aim was to produce a drink strong enough to induce mild intoxication and a convivial atmosphere but not so strong that the participants became too intoxicated or fell asleep too soon. Clearly the intended strength or consumption sometimes went wrong, and the images on some vases and kylixes show men keeling over, holding on to one another for balance, and vomiting.
A number of contemporary works on the symposium suggest that the ideal was for participants not to drink to the point of serious intoxication. The Greeks prided themselves on drinking moderately and contrasted this virtue with the tendency of other cultures (such as the Scythians and Thracians) to drink to excess. The comic poet Alexis praised the Greek way of drinking moderately and described the practices of others as “drenching, not drinking,” probably because they downed their drink so greedily that they spilled it all over themselves.5 Of course, diluting wine with water (which was portrayed as mixing wisdom with pleasure) helped keep intoxication in the moderate range. Greeks criticized other drinking cultures for drinking their wine (and their beer) undiluted.
As the quintessentially civilized institution for drinking wine, the symposium was expected to be a relaxed but fairly sober occasion. A play attributed to the poet Eubulus sets out the effects of drinking successive kraters of wine. Just how much each member of the symposium consumed would have depended on the size of the krater and the number of participants. Eubulus’s argument need not be read literally but as a demonstration of the progressive effects as the participants moved from moderate to excessive consumption. He has the host of the symposium say,
I mix three kraters only for those who are wise.
One is for good health, which they drink first.
The second is for love and pleasure.
The third is for sleep, and when they have drunk it, the wise wander homewards.
The fourth is no longer ours, but belongs to arrogance.
The fifth leads to shouting.
The sixth to a drunken revel.
The seventh to black eyes.
The eighth to a summons.
The ninth to bile.
The tenth to madness, in that it makes people throw things.6
Quite clearly, the advice was that participants should stop drinking and go home after three kraters of wine had been consumed, for nothing good results from drinking more. “Hubris,” the result of the fourth krater of wine, was a civic offense in Greece, and it was a term that could encompass acts as serious as rape and adultery.7 By the eighth krater, the participants were in real danger of running into the law, while drinking all ten kraters drove men to madness. Here was a graphic portrayal of the way a pleasurable activity could degenerate into a violent one, simply through the consumption of too much wine, even when it was well diluted. It is a graphic reminder of the historic tension between the positive and negative perceptions of alcohol.
Wine was not merely the medium used for lubricating the sociability inherent to symposiums; its centrality to the occasion is suggested by the games the participants played. Some involved inflated wineskins, and in one game a skin was smeared with grease and players had to try to balance on it. In another game, called kottabos, players tossed small quantities of wine or wine dregs from their bowl at a bronze disc balanced on the top of a pole. The aim was to knock the disc off so that it fell and struck a larger disc fixed halfway down the pole, making it ring like a bell.8In yet another game, a saucer floated in a bowl of water, and wine and dregs had to be thrown so as to fill the saucer and sink it—a reminder that ancient wine was not the clear liquid it is today but contained bits and pieces of solid matter from the grapes and vines themselves, as well as from the additives, such as herbs. Games like these involved various motor skills, balance, and aiming accuracy, all of which were likely to be impaired by alcohol and increasingly impaired as the night wore on. Perhaps winning such games demonstrated the victor’s ability to hold his wine. As simple as they were, they underlined the centrality of wine to the symposium, and some also demonstrated that the participants and host were wealthy enough literally to throw wine away.
By convention, symposiums were confined to males, and any women present were musicians, servers, or prostitutes or sometimes looked after men who had drunk themselves sick. Women of the Greek upper classes also drank wine, but this practice was not looked upon favorably. A number of Greek writers—all male—alleged that while men drank their wine diluted, women preferred to drink it straight, with predictably unfortunate consequences. Whether or not this was true, the idea placed women on the same level as barbarians. One aspect of this belief was the often-expressed fear that women who drank wine lost their moral bearings and were prone to become sexually promiscuous. The association of drinking women and sexual activity is common in Western cultures and an excellent example of the double standard of sexual morality, which holds women to different standards of behavior from those permitted to men.
To men of the Greek elite, wine was clearly a special beverage, and while this can be said of elites in other societies where wine was consumed, none regarded wine so highly that they eventually vilified beer and the people who drank it. As the Greeks came into contact with the regions around them, they encountered peoples who drank solely beer or beer and other alcoholic beverages. Greek soldiers did drink beer and date wine when they were in regions where they were produced, but the first Greek reference to beer, specifically to beer-drinking by Thracians in the seventh century BC, is what one historian has called “infelicitous”: it likened their practice of drinking beer through a straw (to avoid the chaff and other debris that floated on top) to a woman performing fellatio.9
However, when the Greek general Xenophon traveled through Armenia about 400 BC and encountered beer drunk through reeds, he wrote about it in a fairly noncommittal way. “There was also some wheat, barley, pulse, and barley wine in mixing bowls. . . . And it was very strong unless one poured in water. And the drink was very good to the one used to it.”10 Armenian beer was strong enough that it could be diluted with water, as wine was in Greece, and Xenophon admits that it was very good, although the qualification “to the one used to it” might suggest that he himself didn’t like it.
This dispassionate description of beer contrasts with what became the common Greek attitude, for starting from the fifth century BC, Greeks began to denounce beer as making men “effeminate.” It is possible that the association of beer and effeminacy resulted from the humoral understanding of the body, where men were considered to be warm and dry and women to be cold and moist. Within the same conceptual framework, wine was considered to be a hot beverage (there were some exceptions), so that it aligned with men. Hippocrates considered cereal to be a cold substance, although hot when it was processed as bread. But when later medical writers wrote about beer (Hippocrates did not), they designated it as a cold beverage and therefore more like a woman than a man. In short, wine was considered a manly drink and beer a womanly or effeminate one.11 Beyond that, the Greeks thought that beer and wine were different beverages, as they were not aware that alcohol was the active ingredient in both. Aristotle classified wine with opium and other drugs but put beer in a separate category, and he thought that drinking them produced different effects. Anyone who drank wine to the point of intoxication fell flat on his face, because wine made one “heavy-headed.” In contrast, a man intoxicated by beer fell backward, because beer was “stupefying.”12 Statements like these might not make much sense, but they do show that the two beverages were considered to be quite different from each other.
Not only did they fault foreigners for drinking beer, but Greeks also deplored their drinking habits. As we have seen, barbarian peoples such as the Thracians and Scythians were portrayed as drinkers to excess; as messy, noisy drinkers; and as generally given to intoxication. To some extent, these drinking customs were attributed to climate. People who lived in cool climates, Greek philosophers argued, might be courageous in war, but they were also excitable and passionate, which led them to drink immoderately. If this were not bad enough, barbarians were promiscuous when it came to using intoxicating commodities, unlike the Greeks who drank only wine, the beverage of the civilized. The Scythians were perhaps the worst of the lot, for they not only drank wine and beer undiluted but also drank mead and fermented milk and used cannabis and other plants that seemed to have psychoactive ingredients.13
Moreover, belligerence and excessive drinking, which Greek writers thought resulted from living in cool climates, could be a toxic combination, and the Macedonian leaders Alexander the Great and his father, Philip II, made excellent examples. Philip was said to drink like a sponge and become intoxicated every day, including days when he led his troops into battle. He was also said to have forced Greek captives to labor in shackles in his vineyards.14 As for Alexander, he was said to be given to bouts of drinking that left him unpredictable, violent, and even homicidal. A later Roman commentator reported that Alexander “often left a banquet stained with the blood of his companions” and that he had killed his friend Clitus (who had once saved his life) during a drunken quarrel.15
The Romans carried on what was by then the Greek tradition of thinking of wine as a superior beverage. Like the Greeks, the Romans eschewed beer for wine and judged other cultures partly by what they drank and how they drank it. At first, one historian argues, the Romans were caught between wanting to be part of “the civilized symposiastic world” and resisting “the libidinous associations of vinous excess” cataloged by writers like Pliny the Elder.16 To resolve the tension, Romans stressed the role of wine in making life possible and highlighted the excellence of wine from their peninsula, and as they later extended their institutions throughout their empire, they transferred wine consumption to foreign elites in other societies. At first wine was traded, and there was, for example, a substantial wine trade between Roman Gaul and London about AD 70–80.17The Romans not only exported their own wine but extended viticulture and wine production throughout Europe. In this respect, they built on the earlier activities of Etruscans, who were actively trading with the French port of Lattara (near modern Lattes) as early as 500 BC. Excavations have revealed Etruscan amphoras from that period and a grape-pressing platform from about 400 BC. The latter suggests not only the earliest commercial wine production in France but also the transplantation of the Eurasian grapevine (Vitis vinifera), the main genus of grapes used in modern winemaking.18
But the Romans took their wine imperialism much further. By the beginning of the Christian era, Romans had sponsored the planting of vineyards in many of the best-known modern wine regions in France (including Bordeaux, the Rhône Valley, and Burgundy), as well as in England and many parts of central and eastern Europe. At first, vineyards were owned by Romans, but in time, non-Roman inhabitants of the empire were given rights of ownership. With due recognition to Greek influence in the south and Etruscan winemakers in the north of Italy, the modern European wine industry was kick-started by the growth of Rome and its enormous demand for wine.
It is possible that what became a massive wine market in Rome resulted from a shift in diet. For centuries, Romans consumed cereal in the form of gruel or porridge, known as puls, and bread was a relative latecomer to the Roman diet. Bread might have been baked in private homes, but the first public bakeries were set up between 171 and 168 BC.19 The shift from a wet food (puls) to a dry one (bread) required liquid to wash it down, and wine was the chosen beverage. Swelling from about 100,000 inhabitants in 300 BC to more than a million only three centuries later, Rome demonstrated an impressive thirst for wine, especially for cheap wine that the masses could afford. It is estimated that Rome imported some 1.8 million hectoliters of wine a year, almost half a liter of wine a day for every man, woman, and child in the city.20 Most came from vineyards around the city and from the coastal regions to the south, where vineyards had expanded rapidly during the second century BC.
We should note at this point that historical estimates of per capita consumption of wine or any alcohol, not only in ancient and classical times but right up to the present, must be treated cautiously. In most cases, until the twentieth century, they are based on estimates of both population size and the volume of alcoholic beverages available, and the margins of error in both are sizeable. In some places and periods, for example, wine was taxed when it entered a locality or a town, so we have fiscal records that document wine entering a community. But in such cases we have no idea how much escaped the tax records by being smuggled in, or whether the inhabitants went outside the city to drink less-expensive, tax-free wine. As for estimates of population, they are just that—estimates—until reliable censuses were taken. When both the base population and the volume of alcohol consumed are uncertain, per capita calculations are highly suspect.
But even if a figure of per capita consumption is statistically correct, it is not very useful, because it ignores the wide variations in alcohol consumption among different sections of the population. Historically, children have drunk less alcohol than adults, and men have drunk more alcohol than women. And among adult men, some—as individuals or as members of particular social classes—have historically drunk more than others. The result is that expressing consumption in broad per capita terms is as useful as describing a population that is composed in equal numbers of eighty-year-olds and one-year-olds as having an average age of forty-one years. It is true, but misleading and useless as a portrayal of the population.
Then there is the question of the alcohol content of the beverages in question. One reason to calculate per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages in the past is to get a sense of the volume of pure alcohol people were taking in; it makes a difference if someone drinks a liter of wine, a liter of beer, or a liter of distilled spirits each day. But we often have little reliable information on the alcohol content of alcoholic beverages in the past. Small errors in any estimates of probable alcohol content are amplified when they are generalized as per capita volumes on an annual basis.
All of these problems confront us in the case of Rome, where we can calculate that every member of the population had access to half a liter of wine a day by the first century of the Christian era. Yet we cannot be sure how widely wine was consumed, even though it seems to have been drunk from one end of the social spectrum to another. Romans had their own version of the Greek symposium, the convivium, but over time it gave way to a more formalized banquet model, which placed more attention on food and thereby diluted the primacy of wine.21 Women were occasionally permitted to participate in conviviums; but their inclusion was much debated, and the drinking of wine by married women was denounced by some men on the grounds that it led them into adultery. It is a reminder of the historical link between women drinking alcohol and sexual promiscuity, based on the assumption that women were essentially sexual and that alcohol dissolved the restraints that society had constructed to contain and channel sexual expression.
The poet Juvenal wrote, “When she is drunk, what matters to the Goddess of Love? She cannot tell her groin from her head.” At various times, Roman women were banned from any association with wine—including pouring wine libations at religious ceremonies—and in some periods, Roman law allowed a man to divorce his wife if she were caught drinking wine. (The last divorce on this ground was granted in 194 BC.) A more severe penalty was death. One story tells of a woman condemned by her family to starve to death simply because she was found in possession of the keys to the wine cellar.22 In Memorable Deeds and Words (first century AD), Valerius Maximus relates the story of Egnatius Mecenius, “who beat his wife to death with a club because she had drunk some wine. And not only did no one bring him to court because of his deed, but no one even reproached him, for all the best men thought she deserved her punishment for her example of intemperance. For assuredly any woman who desires to drink immoderately closes the door to all virtues and opens it to all vices.”23
So there must be some uncertainty about the consumption of wine by women in Rome, and if it were true that women were generally cut off from wine, males would have access to twice as much, a liter each day. But did all males drink wine? It is true that wine was consumed in all social strata; the well-off and the comfortable seem to have drunk wine regularly, and wine was also part of a soldier’s rations and a slave’s entitlement. Archaeologists have discovered hundreds of bars in Roman cities, and some 200 have been excavated in Pompeii, the major wine-shipping port buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. There were no fewer than eight bars in one seventy-five-meter-long stretch of one street.24
However much Romans drank, they deplored (publicly, at least) drinking to excess and intoxication, and allegations of drunkenness were harmful to anyone’s reputation. Cicero was especially fond of labeling his opponents drunkards. He alleged that Mark Anthony, his main rival, led a dissolute life at home and started drinking early each morning. To illustrate the point, Cicero cited the occasion when, supposedly as a result of drinking too much wine, Mark Anthony had vomited in the senate. Not only could excessive consumption lead to disgraceful scenes like this, but habitually heavy drinking, according to Roman commentators, could produce all manner of physical and mental ailments. Lucretius warned that wine’s fury disturbed the soul, weakened the body, and provoked quarrels, while Seneca wrote that wine revealed and magnified defects in the character of the drinker. Pliny the Elder, while praising quality wines, warned that many of the truths revealed under the influence of wine were better unspoken.25
But “wine” referred to many beverages in Roman Italy.26 The wine that Cato the Elder provided for his slaves was undoubtedly of poor quality, and for three months of the year they were given a concoction of which only a fifth of the volume was grape juice. Perhaps its quality explains Cato’s apparent generosity, as he allowed his slaves seven amphoras of wine (about 250 liters) each per year—the equivalent of about a modern bottle a day. We do not know the alcoholic strength of the wine, of course, nor was the ration distributed evenly throughout the year, as some was saved for major festivals.27
Many poorer Romans drank wine-based beverages such as posca, a mixture of water and sour wine (wine that had spoiled but had not turned into vinegar). Technically it was as much “wine” as the diluted wine served at a convivium or symposium; quality is not an issue here. Posca was much cheaper than unspoiled wine, and it was this that soldiers, too, were provided as part of their rations. Only when they were sick or wounded were soldiers given what we might think of as wine: made from fresh grapes, in good condition, and with higher alcohol content. Roman soldiers must have preferred it to the thin posca that was part of their daily rations, and it is reported that, in one case, troops stationed in northern Africa pillaged their locality in order to get slaves and livestock to exchange for wine. In 38 BC, Herod provided wine and other foodstuffs to Roman soldiers after they threatened to mutiny because of the lack of supplies.28 Another winelike beverage available in Rome was lora, which was made from soaking in water the solids (skins, seeds, vine matter) that were left over from winemaking. The result must have been pale and thin and barely alcoholic, but it was different enough from water to be viable. Cato reported providing his slaves with lora for three months after the grape harvest, while Varro gave it to his farmworkers during the winter.
So although it can be said that Roman men of all social classes consumed wine, this clearly meant one thing at the top of the social scale, where wine was full of flavor, color, and alcohol (even if it was diluted with water before consumption), and another thing entirely lower down, where wine was a thin, watery beverage that was all but bereft of alcohol. Sensory and aesthetic considerations aside, better-off Roman men consumed a lot more pure alcohol than those beneath them, although it is almost certain that all men, taken as a whole, consumed more alcohol than all women.
Although Romans did not consume beer, they encountered plenty of it as they advanced into Europe, and many of them commented on its qualities. Repeating the Greek refrain about the effects of not diluting beer, Pliny the Elder noted, “There is a particular intoxication too among western people, with soaked grains, [made] in many ways among Gauls and Hispanians. . . . The Hispanians have even taught the aging of such types [of drinks]. Egypt has also devised similar drinks for themselves from cereal, and intoxication is absent in no part of the world, since they drink such juices [from cereal] pure, not weakening it through dilution as with wine.”29 This was more a comment on the way beer was consumed than on beer itself; Pliny was quite positive, writing that as milk was good for the bones and water for the flesh, beer nourished the sinews.30 It was an argument for the inclusion of various beverages in the diet, and in general, the Romans took a more balanced view than the Greeks of wine. Although they reported and deplored the drunkenness they saw among beer-drinking peoples, they did not condemn beer itself as the Greeks did.
On the other hand, the Romans clearly thought wine was superior to beer. Not only did they not incorporate beer into their own diets, but they were influential in having foreign elites adopt wine as their drink of choice. When they occupied Egypt in the first century BC, they seem to have extended wine-drinking to a somewhat wider social group of Egyptians. Even so, the mass of the population must have continued to drink beer, because domestic wine production could not have supplied the whole Egyptian population, and imported Italian wine would have been too expensive for most Egyptians. We get a sense of the differential cost of beer and wine from the AD 301 edict that fixed maximum prices for various products throughout the Roman Empire. Beer made by the Celts cost 4 denarii for about a pint, compared with only 2 denarii for the same volume of Egyptian beer and 8 for the cheapest wine. For Egyptians, then, the cheapest wine was four times, and for others in the empire two times, the price of beer.31 It is a moot point whether the price differences reflected the respective costs of production and distribution (long-distance transportation, in the case of some wine) or whether there was a premium on wine because of its relative scarcity or its cultural cachet.
Part of the cachet resulted from wine’s religious associations. In Greece, the wine god was Dionysus, the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Semele. According to the story of Dionysus, Zeus was tricked into burning Semele while Dionysus was still in her womb, but Zeus rescued him and implanted him in his own thigh until he was born. Later, Dionysus was expelled from his home on Crete and fled to Egypt, where he learned to make the wine with which he was identified. This account parallels the transfer of winemaking knowledge from Egypt to Crete and then to Greece, and in fact Dionysus appears to have been a wine god in Crete as far back as the second millennium BC.32 The Greeks acknowledged Dionysus as having bestowed all the goodness of wine on them and frequently poured libations of wine in his honor. A cult that developed around him was initially opposed by the authorities; but it was eventually sanctioned, and Dionysus entered the Greek establishment, to the extent that his likeness appeared on some coins.
In Rome, the wine god Bacchus was widely celebrated, and by the third century BC, a cult that centered on him had emerged in central and southern Italy. It is not clear how extensive its membership was; but most of its adherents were said to be women, and they held festivals (called bacchanalia) that were often portrayed as sexual orgies fueled by wine and punctuated by animal sacrifices. In 186 BC the Roman senate banned the cult, but although the senate might have done so because of the cult’s supposed immoral activities, it is also possible that the cult of Bacchus was a form of protest against Roman authority. The structure of the Bacchic cells, with their oaths of secrecy, their hierarchical structure, and their funding and property holdings, cut across officially approved patterns of family and political authority. It is very likely that this, rather than any putative drunkenness, provoked the ban—although inebriation would also have been deplored, especially if women were involved.33
Despite some differences between the Greek and Roman wine cultures, they shared a number of common features, including production methods. Grapes for wine were often dried in the sun so that they lost water and shriveled, giving their juice the more intense flavor and higher sugar level that translated into wines with more concentrated flavor and higher alcohol content. This was ideal for wines intended to be consumed diluted, as the final beverage had good levels of both flavor and alcohol. Not only was the base wine high in alcohol, but it was often sweetened by unfermented grape juice (which would have reduced the alcohol level somewhat) and sometimes by honey. Apicius, the collection of recipes compiled in the late fourth or early fifth century, provided guidance for making spiced wine (with ingredients such as honey, pepper, laurel leaves, and saffron) and wine infused with rose petals and violets.34
One recipe that called for as much honey as wine must have produced a sweet, viscous beverage quite unlike any wine known today. But if attempts were made to appeal to the sweet tooth, there were also methods of reducing sweetness. Salt water was sometimes added in order, as the Roman poet Pliny said, “to enliven a wine’s sweetness,” perhaps meaning that the salinity counteracted it to some extent. Other additives included herbs and spices and also lead, which contributes some sweetness. Some recipes recommended boiling the grape juice in lead vessels, while others specified the addition of lead compounds to wine. Lead is a preservative that might have slowed the spoiling of wine, but it is also toxic and must have made many drinkers sick, if it failed to kill them.
It is impossible to reconstruct the flavor of ancient wine. For the most part, the contemporary writers describing them tended to locate wines on the two spectrums of sweetness and strength: wines were more or less sweet and more or less strong. The point of reference for sweetness was honey, and some wines were described as “honey-sweet.” Depth of color was appreciated, and it is possible that an association was made between color and strength. Few writers mentioned aromas, although Cato provided a recipe for imparting a “sweet aroma” to wine: add to the fermenting wine a tile that had been smeared with pitch and covered with warm ashes, aromatic herbs, rush (a flower), and “the palm that the perfumers keep.”35
Aroma was perhaps less important aesthetically than as an indicator that a wine was spoiling, and Cato also gave a recipe for removing a bad odor from wine. This is a reminder that, despite the use of preservatives such as resin, the wines of Greece and Rome were not stable enough to last a long time. Often the aim—which is very modest by modern standards—was simply to make a wine that would last the year before the next vintage was available. When Ulpian asked, “What is old wine?” he answered that it is wine that came from the previous vintage.36 The Greek writer Athenaeus gave the optimum age for the best wines as between five and twenty-five years, but the higher end appears entirely unrealistic for the period, and even five years seems an unlikely goal if we are talking about wine in good condition. Still, aged quality wines commanded higher prices than young, ordinary wines—although it is not clear whether the quality or age alone was the criterion. In AD 301, the Roman emperor Diocletian set the price of ordinary wine at between a half and a third the price of older wine.37
Preferences in color, strength, and flavor led to some wines winning accolades, and a number of Greek and Roman writers produced annotated lists of their preferred wines. In Greece, Mareotic wine from Egypt was widely praised, despite one suggestion that Cleopatra had become crazed under its influence. Athenaeus thought that Taeniotic wine, produced southwest of Alexandria, was even better than Mareotic; it was, he said, pale, pleasant, aromatic, and slightly astringent, with an oily quality that dissolved when gradually diluted with water. For his part, Pliny praised the wine of Sebennys in the central Nile Delta. As for the Greeks’ own wines, those from the Aegean island of Thasos won frequent praise. The rulers of Thasos might have produced one of the earliest wine laws when they set down regulations to govern the winemaking process, quality, and even sale: wine could be sold only in Thasian amphoras of a specified size and could not be diluted before it was sold. The prescribed winemaking process included drying the grapes and boiling the must, both of which would have increased the alcohol and sugar content. Thasos prospered for some time, but by the second century BC, its wines had faded in popularity and were overtaken by wines from the islands of Rhodes, Cos, Lesbos, and Skiathos.38
Roman writers, too, rated wine. As far as Italian wines were concerned, those from the south were preferred, especially from Latium and Campania, coastal regions south of Rome that supplied wine to the imperial capital. When wine production began to expand, there was some concern that quality might be sacrificed to quantity. Columnella, for one, wrote that while supplying wine to the population was important, producers should never compromise on quality, even to the point of retaining valued but relatively low-yielding grape varieties instead of planting new varieties that gave higher yields.39 One wine that stood out was from the Falernium vineyard, which lay on the border of those two regions. There are a number of references to the exquisite character of the wine and of the legendary 121 BC vintage, known as Opimian, after Opimius, who was consul that year. In his play Satyricon, Petronius has a banquet host bring out bottles labeled “Falernian. Consul Opimius. One hundred years old.” Clearly, Petronius expected his audience to understand the reference. As we would expect, Falernian wine commanded a premium price: in one of the many taverns of Pompeii that were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a measure of Falernian cost four times as much as ordinary wine and twice as much as “the best wine.”40
It was not only wine from their peninsula that Romans appreciated, for the selection available in the city was truly imperial in scope. When Pliny the Elder prepared a catalog of wines in the first century of the Christian era, he included 91 varieties of wine, 50 quality wines, and 38 kinds of foreign wines, as well as salted, sweet, and artificial wines.41 He was notable in ranking wines by grape variety as well as their region of production. Perhaps wine critics like Pliny the Elder were the Robert Parkers of their day, awarding Caecuban wine LXXXIX points and Falernian XCVI points out of C, recommending certain regions and vintages and perhaps driving up the prices of some wines in the process.
Flavor and strength were not the only criteria by which wine was judged, for many classical writers assessed wines as much for their supposed health benefits and medicinal properties as for the sensory pleasure they gave. Athenaeus described a Mareotic white wine as “excellent, white, pleasant, fragrant, easily assimilated, thin, not likely to go to the head, and diuretic.” Wine was generally seen as healthy when consumed in moderation, and Hippocrates, whose writings are fundamental to the Western medical tradition, recommended wine as an aid to digestion. But not all wines had the same effects. Echoing Egyptian beliefs in the laxative properties of wine, Hippocrates noted that “dark and harsh wines are drier, and they pass neither well by stool nor by urine, nor by spittle.” More productive were “soft dark wines . . . [which] are flatulent and pass better by stool.”42
The relationship between wine and digestion became a principle of Western medicine, as did the notion that wine was a “hot” substance. This was important when the body was understood as containing hot and cold elements that needed to be balanced. Wine was not recommended for bodies that were considered very hot by nature, as children’s bodies were thought to be, or hot through illness, as when a patient had a fever. In these cases, wine would add to the hotness and aggravate the imbalance, and this was one reason parents were advised not give wine to children. In contrast, wine was recommended for bodies that were naturally cold, as old people’s bodies were believed to be, as they approached the final coldness of death.
Physicians also warned against the dangers of wine, usually when it was consumed to excess. Among the wine-related ailments enumerated by Seneca and Pliny were memory loss, identity confusion, impaired speech and vision, narcissistic self-indulgence, antisocial behavior, a distended stomach, halitosis, quivering, vertigo, insomnia, and sudden death.43 Nor was substantial wine consumption recommended for athletes. Epictetus noted that successful Olympic competitors avoided desserts and cold water and drank wine only sparingly, rather than when they felt like it. Philostratus noted that athletes who drank too much wine “have an excessive paunch . . . and too much drinking is discovered by a fast pulse.”44
Like wine, beer was attributed both positive and negative medicinal qualities. As we have seen, Pliny thought beer was good for the sinews, and in the first century AD the medical writer Celsus ranked beer above milk and wine in nutritional value. On the other hand, most classical physicians wrote negatively about the physical effects of drinking beer. The Greek herbalist Dioscorides, who wrote soon after Celsus, thought that beer was a diuretic and variously affected the kidneys and sinews, was harmful to the membranes, and caused flatulence, headaches, bad humors, and elephantiasis. But beer, like wine, could be used as a medium for herbal and other remedies. One physician advised women who wanted good and plentiful breast milk to drink a mixture of beer with either the crushed unripe fruit of the sesame plant or five to seven earthworms of the type used by fishermen, along with palm dates. Another recommended using a suppository soaked in beer and herbs to deal with intestinal worms.45
Alcoholic beverages became a healthy choice in another respect, too: as a potable alternative to unsafe or polluted water. This is a common explanation for the apparent ubiquity of alcohol in parts of the world where available water supplies were, for one reason or another, either not safe to drink or believed to have been not safe to drink. Humans settled only where potable water was available, but the freshwater lakes, rivers, streams, and artesian wells that delivered this essential water often became, over time, contaminated by human, animal, and industrial waste. Eventually there seems to have emerged some awareness that while drinking the local water made people ill and sometimes killed them, those who drank beer or wine generally remained healthy. As far back as the classical period, there were warnings about the dangers of drinking water that had been exposed to lead, and by the early modern period (from about AD 1500 to 1800) most European doctors recommended that people abstain from water entirely.
The argument that alcoholic beverages became a staple of the European diet because they were safer than water is logical and persuasive, but it must be qualified. First, there were variations among alcohols. In the process of making wine, grape juice is exposed to a hot fermentation process that eliminates some bacteria, and to this extent it is safer than untreated water. If it were diluted with water, as it commonly was in Greece and Rome, it would be less safe, even though the alcohol and acid in the wine would neutralize some of the bacteria in the water that was added. Variants on wine, like the Romans’ posca, made by mixing sour wine and water, would also have had the alcohol and acidity to make it safer to drink—even if only marginally so—than untreated water alone. As for beer, water was used in brewing, and the warmth of the fermentation, plus the alcohol, rendered beer safer than the water used in its production. Overall, we can conclude that alcoholic beverages were safer than water, if not absolutely safe. (Distilled beverages, such as gin and whiskey, which were not widely produced until the sixteenth century, were even safer: distillation required heating the base fermented liquids until the alcohol vaporized, and the finished product was much higher in alcohol than any fermented beverage.)
It is one thing to drink alcohol for its medicinal properties, such as curing constipation or aiding digestion. It is quite another to drink alcohol because it was the safest beverage available. The first behavior treated alcohol as a beverage that might be drunk occasionally in addition to water. The second would lead one to drink alcohol exclusively. It is possible, then, to think of alcohol consumption as having gone through three stages in the ancient world: first, as a beverage consumed only rarely, and then mainly on ceremonial or festive occasions; second, as a beverage more generally consumed, partly because it was believed to have general health benefits; and third, as the only beverage consumed, because it was believed to be safer than water. The first two stages could easily overlap, but the third gave alcoholic beverages a quite different status: that of a staple element in the daily diet.
When might people have shifted from treating alcohol as a discretionary beverage to a necessary one? By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European doctors were almost unanimous in their belief that drinking water was dangerous, but it is difficult to know how far back that view went. Clearly, the quality of water must have varied from place to place, although it is possible that enough examples of localized or periodic pollution led to a cultural aversion to water that was geographically broader than the regions affected by poor water. It is also possible that, given a choice, people simply preferred beer, wine, or any alcoholic beverage—even miserable posca—to water, even when the available water was safe. Beer was certainly nutritious, and wine provided some nutrients, if not as many as beer. Both gave drinkers a sense of well-being and sometimes the pleasure of mild inebriation or the temporary enjoyment of severe intoxication.
We do know that water was frequently unsafe, but we are not sure where and when this happened. Did Mesopotamians turn to beer because the Tigris and the Euphrates were polluted? Did most Egyptians embrace beer because of the quality of Nile water? Or did they do so because beer provided everything they could reasonably ask for: it hydrated and nourished the body, it tasted good, and it delivered a pleasurable sensation that river water simply could not match. Water hydrated, but that was all. Why would anyone drink water if they could drink beer?
Romans certainly had problems supplying water to their burgeoning population, and the River Tiber, along whose banks the original city was built, was soon polluted—a process probably accelerated by the practice of throwing the bodies of executed people into it. To provide Romans with potable water (as well as water for public baths, fountains, and industries), eleven aqueducts were built in the 500 years between 312 BC and AD 226. Collectively, they delivered enough water for each of Rome’s million inhabitants to have about a liter a day. If that were all consumed, and the wine and food in the Roman diet contained the same volume of water, it might well have been enough for rehydration.
Another qualification to the assumption that Europeans began, en masse, to avoid water in favor of alcoholic beverages is that substantial numbers of them almost certainly, for cultural or financial reasons, did not drink alcohol. Children might have drunk some beer or wine; but there is no evidence that they consumed enough for rehydration, and parents were often advised not to give any alcohol to children. Women were often discouraged from drinking alcohol or were actually forbidden to do so, as they were at times in Rome. If children and women did not drink enough beer or wine to rehydrate, what did they drink, if not water? Milk was not produced in commercial volumes, fruit juices were rare, and hot water-based beverages such as coffee and tea did not reach Europe until more than a millennium later. As for the poor, they must have had no alternative but to drink water if alcohol was beyond their financial means.
We should conclude that consuming bad water contributed (along with poor nutrition and housing) to lower life expectancy among the poor and among women of all classes. It is reasonable to see water consumption implicated in the high historic levels of childhood mortality. Put another way, alcohol must have contributed to lower mortality and higher life expectancy among those who consumed it. But we can only speculate, and we certainly cannot isolate alcohol from the many variables that produced historic levels of morbidity and mortality. What is equally certain is that we cannot generalize about alcohol consumption and its effects without taking into account gender, age, and social position.
It is clear, nonetheless, that Greece and Rome developed cultures of alcohol consumption that were more extensive and elaborate than any before them. Not only did people from almost all social classes consume alcohol, but alcoholic beverages—especially wine and, to a lesser extent, beer—became important topics of discussion and analysis. The ways in which wine and beer were consumed became significant markers of social distinction within and between cultures. Moreover, Greek and Roman patterns of alcohol consumption and attitudes toward specific alcoholic beverages both informed the influential Christian doctrines of drinking and were the foundation for medieval drinking ideologies and practices.