The place where winemaking – the fermentation of grape juice – was originally discovered is disputed: Georgia (on the Black Sea) versus Greece. In either case, it was made several thousand years BC. Language favours Greece. Oinos in Homeric and classical Greek, v/winum in Latin, vin, vin(h)o, et al – all are Indo-European language words for ‘wine’ (same root). In formal Greek today, a wine-shop is an oinopōleion, a ‘wine-selling place’. Yet the modern Greeks in their everyday common parlance have another word for wine: krasi. How come? It’s a matter of culture, not nature. Krasi is cognate with ancient Greek krasis, a mixture or process of mixing. The ancients mixed their wine with water, usually in a proportion of three to one. Modern Greeks are sociable people: to stand a round of drinks is, literally, ‘to mix’. The emblematic sociably consumed Greek beverage is, still today, wine – hence krasi.

Wine flowed throughout the Homeric epics. Places are labelled ‘vine-ful’ and ‘many-graped’. We hear of a golden vineyard full of silver-poled vines in the ideal world depicted on the shield made by the craftsman god Hephaestus for Achilles. Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ is a formulaic phrase, oinopa ponton, that handily filled the last two feet of a dactylic hexameter, five times in the Iliad, 12 times in the Odyssey. In a way, though, that’s an over-translation, since oinopa (oin-opa) meant literally ‘wine-faced’ or ‘wine-surfaced’. Odysseus was once entrusted with a skin of ‘black’ wine, and dark-red varieties do seem to have been preferred. Wine had many functions in Homer, mostly positive: a catalyst for celebration and hospitality, for exploration of emotions, for social communication more generally. But drinking in the wrong ways – alone or to excess – was abhorred. The locus classicus of how not to do it was circle-eyed, antisocial giant Polyphemus, who – horrors – took his wine neat, unmixed, with unmentionable consequences.

Homer does not name a wine from the island of Crete specifically, but a wine that he gives the appellation ‘Pramnian’ was often thought to be from (among other possible origins) Crete. Like wine itself, this type of wine had its good and its bad faces. Slave Hecamede, originally from the island of Tenedos, was taken into servitude at the palace of Nestor in Pylos (southwest Peloponnese) where she used Pramnian as the base of a concoction called a kukeōn that had both ritual and secular uses. Likewise, however, witch Circe brewed a kukeōn, as part of her beguilement of Odysseus and his all too innocently trusting seamen. Another locally named wine variety in the epics was the ‘Ismarian’ from the north shore of the Aegean (round Maroneia) – this was the uber-powerful kind that Odysseus employed to make Polyphemus dead drunk and so vulnerable to having his one eye scorched out using a fire-heated sharpened stake. Ouch.

Hippocrates from the island of Cos was hailed as the Greek father of medicine. Certainly, he was the acknowledged founder of a medical school in the decades round 400 and of a lasting medical tradition. A multitude of writings have come down to us credited to him, though by no means all are actually by him. In them can be found many references to wine, not surprisingly, because, besides Cos itself, the famed wine-growing island of Thasos in the northern Aegean was a noted Hippocratic centre. Hippocrates and his followers emphasised wine’s positive functions: antiseptic, diuretic, and antipyretic. All those adjectives are of Greek etymology.

Another positive vinous function, purgative, has a Latin etymology, reminding us that Hippocrates’ greatest successor – and fan – was Galen, who, besides his voluminous writings, was personal physician to Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. But Claudius Galenus, though a Roman citizen, was a Greek from Pergamon in what is now northwest Turkey and proud to build on what he had received from his preceding Hippocratic physicians and medical theoreticians. He rated wines according to their consistency: watery (weak), firm (strong), bitter, and so on. Unlike the Hippocratics, he himself had a preference for working with white and dry wine, reflecting his access to the finest wines of second-century AD Italy.

Pindar, a Greek lyric praise-poet of the sixth/fifth century BC, opened the first of his ‘Olympian Odes’ with this ringing declaration: ‘Water is best.’ Competitors and spectators at Olympia at the height of a Peloponnesian summer will have fervently agreed. I imagine a vision of lees-filled wine, rather sludgy at the bottom, especially after being decanted from a pine resin-caulked wooden container. It’s true that, in normal circumstances, Greeks drank their wine mixed with water, the latter being perhaps twice or more the quantity of the latter. And drinking wine neat, waterless, was considered the height of barbarity, but it was probably vin ordinaire, vin plonk, rather than top-class ‘Ismarian’ or ‘Pramnian’ that actually required straining as well as mixing before drinking. However, there is a category of metal artefact excavated in tombs or from religious sanctuaries that modern archaeologists dub ‘strainers’. There’s a particularly fine silver example in the Getty collection, Malibu, California, dated c. 300 BC.

Dionysos – connected etymologically (Dio-) to his father Zeus – was also known as Bachkos/Bacchus (hence bacchanalia) and as Iachhus (a religious ritual name). According to a version of his myth exploited by Euripides, this younger God came from somewhere in Asia, to east of mainland Greece. But hard, documentary fact – the official Mycenaean-era palatial records inscribed on clay in the 13th century BC – tells us that already by then he was firmly domesticated on the Greek mainland and was an object of Greek religious worship as far south as Crete. But he did retain a strong northern Greek association, being especially beloved in the Macedonian ambiance within which Euripides both wrote and set one of his most famous plays. Dionysus is often thought of today as being ‘the god of wine’, but actually he was more essentially, more fundamentally, the divinity of metamorphosis, transformation, both physical and spiritual. Wine was just one medium, if a privileged one, that enabled physical and/or spiritual transformation by mortal humans.

Hence his uniquely exclusive association with Greek (and Roman) theatre, where male human actors impersonated a variety of social statuses and roles – from the humblest servants and slaves at the bottom to kings or queens, heroes or heroines, even gods and goddesses at the top. The ancient Greek for a ‘role’ was – by metaphorical transference – a mask, signifying the full head-masks that actors wore to transform themselves from men to women, rich to poor, humans to gods and heroes, free to slave, and vice versa.

All ancient theatre was religious in the sense that plays were enacted within the context of religious-ritual festivals staged in honour of one or other Dionysus (he had a variety of epithets, e.g Bromius, noisy, boisterous). But there was also another, less communal, more optional way in which worshippers, both men and women, could pay their respects to Dionysus in hopes of receiving something in return from him. That was by joining a private cult-group known as a thiasos that would meet, often in secret, to carry out Dionysiac religious rituals, in hopes of securing thereby not only a happier life on earth but a more blessed afterlife down below the earth’s surface in Hades, ideally in the Elysian Fields.

Thanks to imbibing Dionysus’ holy fermented grape-juice, humans might enjoy or suffer (the same Greek verb meant either) the following two bodily or out-of-body experiences: ecstasy (ek-stasis) and enthusiasm (enthousiasmos). That is, properly controlled alcoholic intoxication might enable one somehow to stand outside oneself, on the outside looking in, experiencing out-of-the-ordinary ecstatic joyfulness. Alternately, one might metonymically imbibe Dionysus himself, so that one became en-theos, ‘having the god within oneself’. Throughout ancient Greek culture there runs a deep longing for a human being ideally to become a god or, if that wasn’t on, godlike, as much like a god or goddess as was possible for a human – whether in strength, or in beauty, or intelligence, or whatever the desired quality or power might be. But there were limits – limits that if not duly observed might lead to catastrophe.

In Euripides’s last play Bacchae (406 BC), tragically, the imbibing of wine causes both enthusiasm and ecstasy, but not in a good way – as the alternative name for the eponymous chorus of Bacchae, the Maenads or ‘Mad(dened) Women’, spells out. One of those Mad Women unfortunately happened to be mother of the (mythical) Theban King Pentheus, who, being straitlaced and chauvinist, was appalled that so many elite Theban women, including even his own mother Agave, had succumbed to Dionysus-Bacchus’ fatal charms. Stone-cold sober, Pentheus was mistaken by drunken and spellbound Agave for a wild beast and not only killed by her with her bare hands but also torn to pieces by her fellow Maenads, leaving her holding just her son’s head. That was a myth, a fiction, set among the ruling royal family of an enemy Greek city. But as a character in a play of Aeschylus, one of Euripides’ predecessors, put it: one learns through suffering. Lesson: drink in moderation, nothing to excess.

This is almost, alas, a trick question: being ‘mysteries’ – derived from the ancient Greek word for initiates in a secret religious ritual (mystai) – the Mysteries celebrated twice a year at Eleusis not far from Athens were, by definition, secret. It seems that many, if not most, adult Greeks, both male and female – and indeed non-Greeks, if they could understand sufficient Greek to follow and participate in the rituals – had themselves initiated at Eleusis. This to secure the benefits of a blessed afterlife as well as to enjoy the pleasures of solidarity above ground. Sworn to secrecy, under pain of death, it is to their credit that, almost without exception, none of them breathed much of a word about what actually happened in the Initiation Hall at Eleusis. What we are told in any detail – but how much if any of it should we believe? – we ‘learn’ from pagan-hating Christian sources all too eager to spill the beans so as to show up the rituals as either ridiculous or ineffectual or both. However, given that it was featured in the epics for good and for ill, there seems reason to believe that the wine-based concoction called kukeōn, which may have contained psychotropic hallucinogenic ingredients such as ergot, was indeed served to Eleusinian initiates.

There were wine-connoisseurs – and wine-snobs – in ancient Greece. But it is not until the Romans get in on the act that we hear of a taste for special vintages, that is vintage-years in specially favoured vineyards. The favoured or famous wine-making areas in ancient Greece are as follows: Maroneia has already been mentioned, likewise Thasos and Cos; and Lesbos and Chios will be mentioned in detail below. That leaves chiefly three. First, Mende in the crablike Chalcidice peninsula of the northern Aegean. This city in the fifth century BC struck fine series of silver tetradrachms (four-drachma pieces) showing on the obverse (front side) Dionysus reclining on a donkey (doubtless in a drunken stupor) and on the reverse a grapevine. Then there’s the volcanic isle of Lemnos in the northeast Aegean, devoted to the Greek god of volcanoes (and craftsmanship), Hephaestus. Volcanic soils notoriously produce fine wine-grape varieties – as witness the Naples (Vesuvius) area in Italy and the Etna area of eastern Sicily. Finally – and triumphantly – there’s the largest island of the Cyclades group, Naxos, of which Dionysus was worshipped triumphantly as the island’s patron divinity. It was here that he married Cretan princess Ariadne – but then rather ignominiously dumped her, too.

The science of the ancient Greeks had much to say about wine-making. Where better to begin than Theophrastus, the reputed father of Botany, who wrote two major treatises on plants, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, both extant. He came originally from the wine-growing island of Lesbos, but achieved his scientific reputation in Athens, where he succeeded Aristotle as head of the Lyceum institute for advanced study. Among his vast contribution to the study and practice of viticulture was his identification, avant la lettre, of the idea of a terroir: a zone or region peculiarly suited thanks to its soil, climate and other environmental factors to growing particular local varieties of wine-grape.

The processing of grapes into wine, and then the modes of consumption of the finished product – they would take almost another book to do them justice. Of the ancient Mediterranean dietary triad – cereals, especially barley and wheat, olive oil and wine – it was growing wine that was by far the most labour-intensive, hence the need for extra hands at vintage time, and the use of slaves throughout the growing seasons by the biggest landowners. Mostly, they will have proceeded by trial and error, using tried and tested traditional techniques. The wine trade will be discussed below, in connection with shipwrecks, but that was for the wines of superior quality, not the local plonk that was what most Greeks mostly drank, and which was mostly not stored for very long, let alone because it was ‘vintage’ quality.

For storage, vessels of clay known as amphorae and pithoi (jars) were employed. But barrels of wood are known too, often caulked with pitch-pine. For transport vessels terracotta was the usual medium, though smaller quantities could be carried in goatskin leather containers. To get the liquid from storage vessel or container to lip and gullet a quite remarkable array, a veritable panoply of instruments and vessels might be employed. Different shapes of drinking cups or goblets each had their special name. If the wine was to be cooled before being poured it would be emptied into a psukhtēr. When it was to be mixed with water, the krasis (mixing) was done in a kratēr, mixing-bowl. Drinking wine alone was frowned upon, especially if taken neat. A ‘drinking-together’ was a sumposion – but that word acquired a particular sense that will be fully discussed in our next answer. Not every act of sumposion was a ‘symposium’, shall we say.

The philosopher Plato was born in Athens, into a haute aristocratic family, in about 428 BC. He lived a long, but bachelor, life until about 347 BC. He was not known to be crapulent, as his older contemporary the comic poet Cratinus most certainly was. He founded a philosophical school, the Academy, that numbered among its many pupils over the years Aristotle (384-322 BC), who joined aged 17 and left some 20 years later. Plato was above all else a pedagogue, carrying on where his mentor Socrates left off perforce (self-executed by hemlock for irreligion in 399 BC). Socrates never wrote down – at any rate not for publication – any of his philosophical ideas or teachings. Every single one of Plato’s 20-plus written works has survived, so beautifully written were they considered to be. His preferred pedagogical modes were the dialogue and the elenchus (both ancient Greek words): two or more interlocutors, almost always led by a fictional Socrates, are set, by Plato, a topic for investigation and debate, a question often without a single or agreed conclusive answer, for instance, ‘what is justice?’ (the set topic of his Republic).

Almost as famous – and insightful – as the Republic is his Symposium: set topic, ‘what is Love?’. This is not the place even to try to summarise this exceptionally complex dialogue. For a start, ancient Greek had several words that can be translated as ‘love’; and the one word that this work is focused on could be and is taken in several different ways. What concerns us is that the imagined setting of the dialogue (supposedly occurring when Plato was himself at most an early teenager) is the very special type of elite male drinking party called sumposion. Very few Greeks had either the leisure or the wealth to indulge in such a party. Even fewer such parties would in reality have taken the philosophical form of Plato’s imagined party.

Let’s hear it for the sub-philosophical kind. The venue might typically be the ‘men’s room’ of an elite citizen’s private home. Space – and couches – being restricted, there might be a gathering of 14. They were assisted by male or female household slaves as wine-pourers and general dogsbody clearers-up of mess, and, it might be, by bought-in female slave sex-workers. The free citizen symposiasts would formally elect a ‘king’, usually the host, to direct proceedings, who would begin by announcing how many kratēres would be filled – and drunk. Here is a contemporary comic poet’s take (very much not Plato’s) on sympotic proceedings, the character quoted speaking as ‘king’:

I mix three kraters only for those who are wise: one for good health, which they drink first / the second for love [i.e. sex] and pleasure [sexual] / the third is for sleep… / the wise then go home / HOWEVER the fourth belongs to arrogance / the fifth leads to shouting / the sixth to drunken revel [kōmos, the basis of ‘comedy’] / the seventh to black eyes / the eighth to a [legal] summons / the ninth to bile / the tenth to madness.

Enough said.

Aristotle was the greatest polymath of the entire Greek world of his day. A northern Greek by origin, he gravitated in his later teens to the cultural capital, Athens, and to Plato’s Academy. Like his mentor he wrote on ethics and politics but usually in the treatise form rather than the dialogue mode. His settled, principled position on anything was to be moderate, his advice always to hit the golden mean between two extremes of excess or deficit, in this case libertine alcoholism and puritanical temperance. In the matter of the ethics of wine-drinking he – literally – doubled down: in his view, the penalty for a crime committed under the influence of excessive intake of wine should, if it was monetary, be doubled. Severe indeed, but the sorts of people he had in mind to restrain were what we would call the 18-34 age-group, consisting of young, often unattached males, sowing their wild oats, aided in their endeavours by the excess consumption of wine, not always of the finest quality. One particular context that for elite Greeks lent itself to such antisocial behaviour – one that the Athenian statesman Pericles famously avoided – was the symposium.

Alcaeus from the island of Lesbos flourished around 600 BC. Being a Greek at that era, he wouldn’t have known Latin, but it is indeed to him that the original Greek version of ‘in vino veritas’ (‘in wine, there’s truth’) is often traced (oinos kai aletheia). The noun for ‘truth’ in ancient Greek, alētheia, meant literally ‘not forgetting’, so there’s an irony in its association with wine-drinking that the savvy Alcaeus would have appreciated. Even if he didn’t actually utter the tag, he was no stranger to the delights of the wine-grape, being a cantankerous aristocrat, who, when not composing the lyric verses he sang for his drink buddies, liked nothing better than downing a kylix (goblet) or more of the (‘Pramnian’) wine for which his island was famed. My other favourite wine-drinking motto is also Latin (a lapidary language): nunc est bibendum (now we absolutely must booze – Horace).

Drinking wine unmixed with water was considered barbarous and barbaric, so it was a useful slur on people whom one wished to denigrate, dethrone or just despise. Cleomenes I, King of Sparta (c. 520-490 BC) was said to have learned the habit from his encounter with non-Greek Scythians (horse-riding nomads who roamed the steppelands north of the Black Sea). That was said to be one of the reasons for the madness that justified his imprisonment and explained his gruesome suicide. For some other Greeks, the Macedonians of the northern part of the Greek mainland were seen as a people not really, or not quite entirely, Greek. So we have to treat any allegations of barbarian (non-Greek) behaviour among the Macedonians with a large dose of Attic (Athenian) salt.

However, even if they or some of them did sometimes dilute their wine, they often drank until they were seriously drunk – and organised drinking parties for that very purpose – to make entirely plausible the accusation that Philip II (r. 359-336) and his son and successor Alexander III ‘the Great’ (r. 336-323) were heavy drinkers. One modern historian has even argued that heavy drinking was Alexander’s besetting vice, and one that eventually did for his sanity and life.

Given their equally fiery temperaments – and the fact that Philip fell out definitively with Alexander’s mother, Olympias – we are not surprised to learn of occasions for drunken quarrels between father and son. During one of these bouts Philip was allegedly so incensed he drew a weapon on Alexander and made to assault him, only to trip en route and crumple into an ingloriously drunken heap. But what if his weapon had reached its mark? On the other hand, what if Philip had not been assassinated by a bodyguard, and had gone on to lead the anti-Persian Greek expedition himself, leaving the 20-year-old Alexander behind as his regent in Macedon? Of such imponderables is sober history made.

Alexander waited to take a wife until after the Persian Great King had been conquered and he himself was well and truly in the saddle as the new Persian king-emperor. By then he was in his later 20s, just the time that many Greek young adults who were not kings or princes did in fact get married. But where Alexander was massively un-traditional was in taking for his (first) wife an oriental lady, the daughter of a Bactrian (Afghan) local potentate. Allegedly (as in the case of his father’s marriage to Olympias), it was a love-match, but I don’t think so. Alexander was hard-headed enough to see the practical benefits of having Oxyartes as his father-in-law at a crucial moment of his campaign to bring all the Persian Empire – and more – under his own personal sway. The marriage would have been conducted according to local, Bactrian, non-Greek rites. (He was to do the same a few years later in 324, when he took two further – royal Persian – brides.) In all cases the nuptials would have been liberally laced with wine in some form or other. A story was current among the Greeks – perhaps just a yarn – that the old Persian kings and court used to deliberate and decide a matter first when drunk, then revisit their decision when sobered up. Whatever the truth of that, Persians and other Asiatic peoples of that day were by no means wine-abhorring teetotallers, permanently on the wagon.

Hephaestion was Alexander’s best friend from childhood. They had been taught together by Aristotle at Mieza when they were both early teenagers. As Alexander’s Asiatic campaign proceeded, so Hephaestion was successively promoted higher and higher, from top cavalry commander to member of Alexander’s elite bodyguard and a marshal of the entire empire. But in October 324 – following the extraordinary mass wedding ceremonies held at one of the former Persian Empire’s capitals, in which both Alexander and Hephaestion acquired new Persian wives, he took ill and died, probably of typhoid fever, at Ecbatana (modern Hamadan, northern Iran). Alexander, then at Babylon in southern Iraq today, was utterly devastated by the loss. But had Hephaestion after falling sick behaved with the utmost good sense? Hardly. Against sound medical advice – of which there was plenty on offer – he had dined plentifully on chicken washed down with quantities of Dionysus’s patent and all too potent beverage.

Sic periit Hephaestion – thus perished Hephaestion, Alexander’s dearest comrade and likely former lover, on whom posthumously Alexander bestowed the highest honour available, the status of a semi-divine hero. Gods – as Alexander became both before and after his death – were worshipped with animal blood-sacrifice on altars and received on high the incense-laden smoke from the combustion of the victims’ carcases. Heroes, like Hephaestion, resided underground after their death, and the typical way of paying religious cult to them was – you’ve guessed it – by pouring a libation of wine on their grave.

Ancient Greek shipwrecks and wine-amphorae go together like a horse and carriage. One thinks at once of an area of the Aegean around the islet of Fourni where no fewer than 60 wrecks of different eras have been located. One particular pays d’origine has excited the special interest of archaeologists and epigraphers (experts in written texts), and that’s the island of Chios. This is because, like other producing regions heavily involved in the wine-trade, growers and their agents took to stamping the handles of the distinctively shaped wine-amphoras (so called because they had two handles at the top so that they were ‘carried on both sides’). A particularly spectacular find of thousands of amphoras including Chiot examples, dated around 400 BC, has been made off the islet of Peristera opposite Alonnisos in the northern Aegean. These are now available for inspection by curious divers.

My favourite ancient Greek shipwreck of all is really Roman: although the wreck is located off the Greek islet of Antikythera between Crete and the southern Peloponnese, the ship went down somewhere around 70 BC when Greece was under Roman imperial occupation. It was loaded with treasures, a.k.a. loot, destined ultimately for Roman villas, possibly in the bay of Naples area (where even emperors such as Claudius had their luxury villas). Some of the loot dated way back to the fourth century BC (a lifesize male bronze youth), other items were as contemporary as could be, such as the ‘Antikythera Mechanism’, a sort of analogue computer, extraordinarily sophisticated, to be used for predicting eclipses, the dates of religious festivals that went on a lunar cycle, and other astronomical phenomena. Among the amphorae discovered were, predictably, Chian-type vessels, but by comparison to the statuary and the Mechanism they were insignificant.

Canadian archaeologists did indeed excavate a wine-shop in ancient Sicyon in the northeast Peloponnese of Greece, near the isthmus of Corinth. They found traces of presses for making either olive oil or wine, and grape pips, though they were unable to identify the grape variety. The ancient Greek word for a wine-shop or tavern was kapēleion, literally a place of retail sale or trade: a clear indication of their ubiquity. By AD 400 Greece was entering on what’s called its Late Antique period, or early phase of its Byzantine history. In 400 wine-drinking showed no signs of being about to go out of fashion. Think only of Communion wine…

Now let’s zoom forward from the early fifth to the early 19th century, a mere 14 centuries. Lord Byron, as an undergraduate student at Trinity College Cambridge, didn’t do much actual studying, but he did encounter the then Regius Professor of Greek (and specialist in the metre and prosody of Greek poetry) Richard Porson. Porson was a drunk; or, as Byron deliciously put it, he could hiccup Greek like a Helot – an allusion to the slaves of the Spartans, who allegedly were deliberately intoxicated by their masters as an example to the Spartan young of how not to behave.

As a young, romantic, free spirit, Byron became enamoured of the cause of Greek liberation from the imperial yoke of Ottoman Turkey (since 1453): the cause for which, in 1824, he was to meet his end, some eight years before its objective was achieved. In 1819 he embarked on a mightily ambitious multi-volume poetic juggernaut entitled Don Juan (the title-character a surrogate for the poet himself – not entirely inaptly). Canto III was published in 1821, the year the Greek War of Independence began. Into this Canto, Byron inserts a meditation, a dream of future Greek independence, entitled ‘The Isles of Greece’. One of those isles was Samos – just off the Turkish coast – famous since antiquity for producing a widely exported sweet variety of wine. Hence we find the following two lines, as his Don Juan rouses the land to shake off the yoke of Ottoman servitude: ‘Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!’ and then, the very last line of the inserted poem: ‘Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!’. Let us go and do likewise – in Aristotelian moderation, of course.

This essay is edited from remarks made by Paul Cartledge in conversation with Richard Marranca, whose collection, Speaking of the Dead: Mummies & Mysteries of Egypt, will be published soon by Blydyn Square Books.