Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [27]
This all unpacks rather nicely. Given what we think we know about the ancient Greek symposium—literally, a “drinking party”—we might assume that any not entirely sober-minded person would take care to build up a head of steam before arriving. The proceedings seem, initially at least, pretty strait-laced, verging on the stupefyingly dull. Like so many aspects of life in ancient Athens, the drinking party was, theoretically at least, as highly ritualized and rigidly organized as any Rotary Club dinner.
We know a reasonable amount about what they actually drank. They preferred a degree of sweetness in their wine but didn’t attach so much value to its age (perhaps because of cellaring problems; a few hundred years later, the Roman Cicero wrote that “just like wine, so not all men turn sour with old age,” suggesting that an old wine was not necessarily a good wine). The best wines were said to come from the islands, especially Chios, Thasos, Lesbos, and Cos. Chian wine could be dry, medium, or sweet, but it was generally white and light-bodied, and much favored in Athens. It might or might not be resinated, and it could be very expensive. Thasian wine was noted for its fragrance, with a hint of apples. It was usually red or even black; in Thasos itself it might be sweetened with honey. Coan was white and strongly flavored with seawater; Lesbian wine also had a flavor of the sea but was not mixed with seawater. Some of it was on the light side, but Lesbos also produced one of the greatest wines of the Greek world, Pramnian. This was rather like Tokaji Essence today, made from the syrup oozing from the grapes under their own weight, before the grapes were pressed.
To choose the wine, a symposiarch, or master of ceremonies, was appointed in advance. The symposiarch decided what wine would be drunk (Thasian, Chian, Lesbian, or whatever suited his taste), to what degree it would be diluted with water, and whether that water would be fresh or seawater, a very strange idea to our tastes. He would also decide upon the topic of conversation, and who would speak when. Imagine listening to a man in a beard explaining that tonight “we shall consume a rather, em, agreeable wine from the Isle of Cos, diluted in, um, a ratio of, I suggest, er, two parts seawater, three parts freshwater, and two parts of wine, except for the after-dinner libation to Agathos Daimon, of course, ha ha. Then the conversation will be upon, ahem, sex …”
And after that there would be the songs, and then the flute girls, and the hetaerae (a sort of courtesan-cum-geisha). It is all too easy to imagine the weary guest thinking, “Merciful heavens, do we have to have the flute girls …?”
One way of dealing with it was, as Alcibiades worked out, to stoke up before you arrived. But the ritual and particularly the dilution of the wine (the libation was the only point where neat wine passed the lips) were all part of the Athenians’ golden rule that the worst thing a man could do was lose control. Remaining in command was the vital thing for these people: in command of the body, in command of the thoughts, in command of one’s speech, in command—as much as was compatible with the caprices of the gods—of one’s destiny (though not, perhaps, quite as much