LITMIR.BIZ

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the fair seasons of many years.

      Wine’s ability to age well drew some unfavourable comparisons with the human species. A character in a play of Eubulus, for instance, remarks on how the hetaeras esteem old wine, but not old men. A fragment of Cratinus conjures up a more sophisticated deployment of the human lifetime analogy. He talks of ‘Mendaean wine coming of age’ (hēbōnta, literally ‘in bloom’ or ‘pubescent’), thereby bringing to mind modern maturity charts of the ‘life’ of a wine divided into periods of maturation: ‘Ready’, ‘Peak’, ‘Tiring’, ‘Decline’.⁵

      The vast bulk of the wine consumed was undistinguished local produce from the harvest of small unspecialized holdings. This was what the Athenians called trikotylos, or ‘litre wine’ (literally, three half-pints) because, according to the lexicographer Hesychius, you could get three half-pint measures of it for only an obol. Some, however, was of a much higher quality imported from areas famous for their wines and grown on large estates. These wines are often found listed along with other fine foods in comedy, although the top rank contains rather fewer specimens than the number of fishes, for instance, at the poets’ command, rarely amounting to more than three or four at a time. Membership of this elite is not always consistent, but the wines of Thasos, Chios and Mende, a city in the Chalcidice, are the most prominent for most of the classical period. These are joined by the wines of Lesbos which are occasionally found in lists as early as the fifth century BCE, although Pliny has the impression that their reputation dated only from the end of the fourth. Characters in the plays discourse freely on the peculiar qualities of each wine, its characteristic colour and scent, its sweetness, as in this speech of Dionysus from a play of Hermippus: ‘With … Mendaean wine the gods themselves wet their soft beds. And then there is Magnesian, generous, sweet and smooth, and Thasian upon whose surface skates the perfume of apples; this I judge by far the best of all the wines, except for blameless, painless Chian.’⁶

      The fine wines of the classical period have left traces of their popularity not only in the remnants of ancient literature, but also in fragments of amphoras, dug up around the Athenian Agora and elsewhere. Each of the great wine-exporting cities packaged its wine in distinctive and more or less uniformly-shaped vases, which can be differentiated by archaeologists. The Chians even used their amphora as an identifying symbol on their coinage. This confirms what the comic fragments suggest, that these city wines were specific products, with recognizable characteristics. Some cities specialized in producing only one kind of wine, others produced more. Chian wine, for instance, came in three types, austēros (dry), glukazōn (sweet), and one called autokratos in between the two. The individuality of these wines can be explained as the result of the natural prevalence of particular varieties of vine and certain traditional methods specific to a region. It is not a coincidence that the sources of these distinctive wines are, without exception, isolated agricultural economies, literally in the case of islands like Thasos and Chios, or, like Mende, surrounded by barbarians. It is significant, in this respect, that Lesbian wine takes its name from the island itself, the geographical entity, rather than from the cities, the political entities, Mitylene, Eresus and Methymna, that divided the territory between them. Some very occasional references indicate ancient recognition of that rather less tangible quality of terroir, the magical influence of specific plots of land. The best Chian wine apparently came from an area in the north-west of the island, and was known as Ariusian. We also hear of a wine called Bibline which, contra Archestratus, probably came not from Phoenician Byblos, but from an area in Thrace opposite the north-western part of Thasos, and which probably belonged to the territory of one of the cities in the area, perhaps to Thasos itself.⁷

      Thasos also provides, in contrast, the best evidence for highly organized viticulture carried out on a large scale, the haphazard blessings of sound traditional methods and good soil supplemented with legislation. A series of inscriptions from the island reveal that political intervention in the wine trade could be intense and far-reaching. The overall concern of the laws seems to be for quality, a consideration which benefited not only the Thasian consumers of Thasian wine, but the exporters too, whose success depended on maintaining the island’s reputation for high standards.⁸

      THE SYMPOSIUM

      The most formal context for the consumption of wine in the Greek world was the drinking-party or symposium, a highly ritualized occasion and an important crucible for the forging of friendships, alliances and community in ancient Greece, an almost perfect example in fact of the anthropologists’ commensal model of drinking in which socializing is paramount. Its practices can be pieced together from a number of accounts. The space in which it took place was the ‘men’s room’, the andrōn, a small room with a slightly raised floor on all sides, which makes it one of the most easily identified spaces in the archaeology of the Greek house. This ledge provided a platform for the couches, which usually numbered seven, sometimes eleven, and occasionally as many as fifteen. Each couch could take two people, reclining on their left sides. The arrangement was more or less a squared circle but the seating was not for that reason undifferentiated. The circle of drinkers was broken by the door, which meant that there was a first position and a last and places for host, guests, symposiarchs, honoured guests and gate-crashers. Wine, song and conversation went around the room from ‘left to right’, that is, probably, anti-clockwise. The arrangement was less a static circle of equality than a dynamic series of circulations, evolving in time as well as in space, with the potential for uncoiling into long journeys, expeditions, voyages.⁹ Within the little andrōn the drinkers could travel long distances.

      The symposium occupied a space perfectly commensurate with the walls. The atmosphere was correspondingly intense and intimate. ‘Nothing takes place behind the drinkers; the whole visual space is constructed to make sightlines converge and to ensure reciprocity.’¹⁰ The sympotic space conspired with the effect of the alcohol to create a sense of entering a separate reality. The managers of modern nightclubs and casinos make sure there are no windows or clocks to remind their clientele of the time-zone outside. In the symposium a similar severing of ties to the extramural world was effected with a repertoire of images and discourse peculiar to itself, reflecting the symposium and reflections of the symposium en abîme. In the men’s room they would recline and drink from cups decorated with images of men reclining and drinking from decorated cups; they would recite sympotic poetry and tell anecdotes about other drinking-parties in other times and other places. They never need stray from the sympotic themes of love and sex, pleasure and drinking. In fact, it could be said that the symposium for the period of its duration, symbolically constituted the world.

      A bizarre story told by Timaeus of Taormina illustrates graphically the sense of separation between the world within and the world without the drinking-party:

      In Agrigentum there is a house called ‘the trireme’ for the following reason. Some young men were getting drunk in it, and became feverish with intoxication, off their heads to such an extent that they supposed they were in a trireme, sailing through a dangerous tempest; they became so befuddled as to throw all the furniture and fittings out of the house as though at sea, thinking that the pilot had told them to lighten the ship because of the storm. A great many people, meanwhile, were gathering at the scene and started to carry off the discarded property, but even then the youths did not pause from their lunacy. On the following day the generals turned up at the house, and charges were brought against them. Still sea-sick, they answered to the officials’ questioning that in their anxiety over the storm they had been compelled to jettison their superfluous cargo by throwing it into the sea.

      The story belongs to a rich Greek tradition of marine metaphors for the sympotic community.¹¹ The high sea represents the boundlessness of wine, the obliteration of points of reference. The metaphor is captured with characteristic economy inside a cup of the archaic painter Exekias. He

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