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By Root 505 0

It may be derived from the Greek for “immortal”—hence its association with the gods—but is far more likely to come from the same root as amber and to mean “sweet-smelling.” A similar word—amrita—is used for the food of the Hindu gods, and the most probable explanation is that both ambrosia and nectar are forms of honey. The drink of the gods, therefore, was mead, an ancient alcoholic drink made from honey fermented with water and yeast, and frequently flavored with fruits and herbs or secondarily fermented with raisins. Mead has been around for at least three thousand years: Pliny and Aristotle both discuss it (Pliny called it militites and differentiated it from honey-sweetened wine), and Anglo-Saxon heroes drank and roared in the mead hall. Though largely obliterated in modern Europe by wine and beer, it has ironically returned to public consciousness—at least in certain quarters—by its reappearance as the drink of choice in Dungeons & Dragons games, pseudo-medieval fantasy fiction, and the many computer games that echo the genre.

Curiously, some sources won’t have it. In this translation by James Davidson, Hermippus, the one-eyed Athenian comedy writer of the fifth century BC, has the god Dionysos talking about wine, including the Mendaean wine,

with which 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.

This last suggests that even Dionysos himself, the god of wine, was not immune to hangovers.

Did Clarence really drown in a butt of malmsey?

ACCORDING to Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Richard III, Act I, Scene IV, George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward IV and of the soon-to-be King Richard III, is murdered in the Tower of London in the following manner:

SECOND MURDERER: … Come, shall we fall to work?

FIRST MURDERER: Take him on the costard [head] with the hilts of thy sword, and then chop him in the malmsey-butt in the next room.

SECOND MURDERER: O excellent device! and make a sop of him.

[…]

SECOND MURDERER: Look behind you, my lord.

FIRST MURDERER: (Stabbing him.) Take that, and that. If all this will not do, I’ll drown you in the malmsey-butt within.

(Exits with the body.)

The Duke of Clarence, age twenty-nine when he died, was a turbulent, treasonous nuisance. Shakespeare has him dream, on the night before he was killed, about drowning in the sea (prescience!) and going to Hell, where the ghost of a man he had killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury calls him “false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence.” He had joined with his father-in-law, the Earl of Warwick, the most powerful man in England save the king, in attempting to overthrow his brother King Edward IV, imprisoning Edward and executing Edward’s father-in-law and brother-in-law. Although forgiven by Edward, Clarence continued to involve himself in other plots and conspiracies during the Wars of the Roses, always hoping to supplant him as king. He was arrogant and unstable, wholly lacking in political skills, and full of wild talk. By 1477, he was morbidly—some say paranoically—suspicious, convinced that Edward wanted him murdered. He even burst into a session of the Privy Council, shouting wild accusations against some of Edward’s followers. Edward had had enough, and in January 1478, he charged him with treason. The Bill of Attainder (an Act of Parliament used to convict political opponents of treason without having to go to the bother of putting them on trial) was passed by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and on February 18, 1478, he died—or, as it was put, Clarence was no more. The story that he was killed as tradition says has some contemporary support. Dominico Mancini, an Italian scholar who visited England from about late 1482 until just before Richard’s coronation, wrote five years after the event that Clarence was “plunged into a jar of sweet wine;” Philippe de Commynes wrote in his Mémoires fewer