Alcohol: A History PDF

Alcohol 2 Alcohol A History Rod Phillips The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill 3 © 2014 ROD PHILLIPS All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Designed by Sally Scruggs and set in Calluna by codeMantra. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Jacket illustration © benidio/Stockphoto.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phillips, Roderick. Alcohol : a history / Rod Phillips. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4696-1760-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4696-1761-9 (ebook) 1. Alcohol—Social aspects—History. 2. Drinking of alcoholic beverages— Social aspects—History. 3. Alcoholic beverage industry—History. I. Title. GT2884.P45 2014 394.1′3—dc23 2014013124 18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1 4 TO RUTH Companion to many archives, companion in many glasses 5 Contents Introduction 1. ALCOHOL IN ANCIENT WORLDS Nature and the Human Hand 2. GREECE AND ROME The Superiority of Wine 3. RELIGION AND ALCOHOL The Paths of Christianity and Islam 4. THE MIDDLE AGES, 1000–1500 The Birth of an Industry 5. EARLY MODERN EUROPE, 1500–1700 Alcohol, Religion, and Culture 6. DISTILLED SPIRITS, 1500–1750 Threats to the Social Order 7. EUROPEAN ALCOHOL IN CONTACT, 1500–1700 Non-European Worlds 6 8. EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1700–1800 Alcohol, Enlightenment, and Revolutions 9. ALCOHOL AND THE CITY, 1800–1900 Class and Social Order 10. THE ENEMIES OF ALCOHOL, 1830–1914 Temperance and Prohibition 11. ALCOHOL AND NATIVE PEOPLES, 1800–1930 Race, Order, and Control 12. THE FIRST WORLD WAR, 1914–1920 The Battles against Alcohol 13. PROHIBITIONS, 1910–1935 Noble Experiments, Ignoble Failures 14. AFTER PROHIBITIONS, 1930–1945 Normalizing Alcohol 15. ALCOHOL IN THE MODERN WORLD Trends in Regulation and Consumption Conclusion 7 Notes Select Bibliography Index 8 Alcohol 9 Introduction Ever since humans began to consume alcohol, they have had a difficult relationship with it. Alcohol is a colorless liquid that has, in itself, no material, cultural, or moral value. But like many other commodities, it has been ascribed complicated and often contradictory sets of values that have varied over time and place, and that are interwoven with the complexities of power, gender, class, ethnicity, and age in the societies in which it is consumed. All these values derive fundamentally from the action of alcohol on the human nervous system. Readers who have consumed alcohol will recognize one or more of the stages of intoxication that begin with the first sip of alcohol, whether it is beer, whiskey, wine, a cocktail, or a beverage made from the myriad commodities used to produce alcohol. A small volume of alcohol generally gives the drinker a sense of well-being, and further drinking can lead, in turn, to feelings of euphoria, relaxation of social inhibitions, loss of balance and coordination, slurred speech, vomiting, and loss of consciousness. Severe cases of alcoholic poisoning can be fatal. Needless to say, not all consumers of alcohol drink so much that that they experience anything more than a pleasant and uplifting sense of well-being. Not only did that sense became highly valued and much sought-after, but the state of euphoric otherworldliness that came with further drinking has been, in some cultures, thought of as spiritual and as bringing the consumer closer to the gods. In other cultures, the potential of 10 alcohol to harm its consumer produced dire warnings about excessive consumption and various punishments for becoming perceptibly intoxicated. The result was a polarity of views toward alcohol. On one hand, alcoholic beverages have been widely employed as a social lubricant and adhesive in daily interactions, as varied as Russian workers drinking in their factories in the nineteenth century to women gathering at an all-female dramshop in London to drink gin in the early 1700s. Alcohol has historically played a role at marriages and funerals, and it has commonly marked commercial, political, and other events. Madeira was used to launch one of the U.S. Navy’s first frigates in 1797, while some East African peoples celebrated marriages with banana beer. Alcohol has often been provided to pay for work, and it was widely used as currency when Europeans extended their economic activities to the wider world; whiskey, gin, and rum bought slaves and commodities as varied as beaver pelts and copra, influence, and land. Alcohol helps people relax and sometimes to forget their cares. Alcoholic beverages, especially beer and wine, have often been associated with divinity, and they have historically been credited with having medicinal or therapeutic properties; it is hard to think of an illness, disease, or physical pathology that has not, at some time, been treated by some form of alcohol. It has been credited with ridding the body of worms and cancer, aiding digestion, fighting heart disease, and turning back old age and extending life itself. On the other hand, alcohol has been described as a menace, not only to the individual consumer but to the society in 11 which it is consumed. It has been described as evil, as the gift of a devil rather than of any god. Some nineteenth-century Christian theologians were so horrified at the thought that their god might have approved of alcohol that they reinterpreted the Bible to show that Jesus’s first miracle was to turn water into grape juice, not wine. Islam and some other religions banned the consumption of alcohol and other intoxicants. Alcohol has been blamed for illnesses, insanity, accidents, immorality, impiety, social disorder, catastrophes, crime, and death. From the Middle Ages to the present, it has been a convention for some commentators to see alcohol as the core problem from which all other problems flow. Many critics of alcohol have acknowledged that, consumed in moderation, alcohol need not have dire consequences. Reflecting this position, most authorities have historically tried to mitigate the worst effects of alcohol by surrounding its production, distribution, and consumption by regulations. They have included controlling the alcohol content of beverages, forbidding drinking by children, and limiting the hours of taverns and bars. Other authorities have shown little confidence that men and women can voluntarily limit their intake of alcohol and have deemed it better for everyone to abstain from alcohol completely. Such prohibition rules have been implemented at various times among small Jewish and Christian sects, over vast stretches of the Muslim world, in countries as varied as the United States, Belgium, India, and Russia, and among numerically significant denominations such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). 12 A key theme in the history of alcohol, then, is its regulation, for there are few societies where alcohol has not been restricted in some way. These regulations have taken many forms, such as banning the consumption of alcohol for sections of populations defined by age (children), gender (women), or ethnicity/race (such as Native Americans). In some cases, patterns of alcohol consumption have been regulated informally by social pressure that might be reinforced by social ostracism. In other cases, regulation has taken the form of legislation backed by punishments for disobedience. Drinking by children was for thousands of years discouraged by physicians who warned of the dangers of alcohol on children’s bodies. Only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were minimum legal drinking ages defined by law and enforced by the courts. The other attributes ascribed to alcohol form other themes in its history. Alcohol was positively associated with gods in ancient cultures, and wine was embraced by mainstream Christianity, which incorporated wine into its most important rituals. But religious organizations have also been prominent critics of the personal and social effects of immoderate alcohol consumption. Similarly, while physicians have for thousands of years considered some alcoholic beverages as having medicinal value (during prohibition in the 1920s, half of American doctors thought whiskey was therapeutic, and a quarter thought the same of beer), they have also warned of the dangers to health of excessive consumption. An important dimension of the history of alcohol, then, is its contested status and the struggle to find a way to realize its benefits while minimizing its dangers. It might be argued that prohibitionists simply gave up and advocated the position that 13 it was better to deprive moderate drinkers of their alcohol than to allow irresponsible drinkers to misuse it and to place themselves and social order at risk. On the other hand, few people, even the most ardent opponents of prohibition, have ever adopted the opposite position, that all restrictions ought to be removed from alcohol. These debates on alcohol did not take place in a material or cultural vacuum. Alcohol was a potent signifier of status and power in almost all societies. In many early societies, such as ancient Egypt, beer was consumed by all classes, but wine was also consumed only by the elites. In Greece, only wine was consumed, but it varied hugely in quality; the wine consumed by the elites bore little resemblance, in flavor, texture, and alcohol content, to that consumed by the lower classes. In some cases, alcohol was (in theory, at least) reserved for dominant, colonizing populations: some British administrations in Africa imposed prohibition policies on the indigenous peoples while themselves drinking alcohol, and white governments did the same to native populations in the United States and Canada. At the material level, until the nineteenth century, alcohol (mainly beer and wine) was widely consumed by Europeans and North Americans for hydration because so many sources of water were unsafe to drink. Within centuries of being founded, Rome had to be supplied with potable water from aqueducts because the River Tiber was polluted. Major waterways and wells in urban centers in Europe (from the Middle Ages) and the Americas (from the eighteenth century) were too contaminated to be sources of safe drinking water. Fermented alcoholic beverages were safer to drink because the process of fermentation killed many harmful bacteria, as 14 did distilled alcohol when it was added to water. Alcohol seems to have become a default beverage to the point that “alcohol” and “drink” became synonymous: the debate on alcohol was called “the drink question,” and “heavy drinking” did not refer to water or tea. The usefulness of alcohol as a safe form of hydration was a compelling argument for its availability, and no government could adopt prohibition policies unless there was an alternative in the form of reliable supplies of potable water or other nonalcoholic beverages. It is no coincidence that the temperance and prohibition movements arose at the same time that municipal governments in Europe and North America began massive projects to provide urban populations with supplies of safe drinking water, and as coffee, tea, and other nonalcoholic beverages became widely consumed. At the same time, even though “drinking” generally refers to drinking alcohol, we must be careful not to assume that, before safe water was available, everybody drank alcohol for hydration purposes. Water, potable or not, was free, but alcohol was not. The poor must have consumed any water that was available, a practice that undoubtedly contributed to their low life expectancy. Nor did children often drink alcohol, and in many societies, women were either forbidden or strongly discouraged from doing so. The commonly accepted generalization that everyone in earlier societies consumed alcoholic beverages must surely be wrong, and that is one of the issues addressed in this book. This is a survey of the ways that alcohol was situated in the various cultures within which it was consumed, and a description and explanation of how alcohol related to 15 structures and processes of power and to issues of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and generation. The focus of the book is Europe, and there is extensive treatment of North America, too. The justification is that, even though alcoholic beverages might have originated elsewhere, and were certainly consumed throughout most of the world, Europeans integrated alcohol more extensively, and in greater volumes, into their cultures than people of any other region. In time, they extended their alcoholic beverages and, to some extent, their alcohol cultures to the wider world. Alcohol became one of the fields of contact, cooperation, and conflict that engaged Europeans and others in the processes of imperialism, colonization, and eventually, decolonization. I have tried for a global perspective in this book, but in doing so I have given priority to the story of the expansion of European alcohol, rather than to analyzing drinking cultures in regions such as Asia and the Pacific, in their own right. I think that approach makes the book thematically more coherent. I wish to acknowledge the authors of all the material I have used and to thank the staffs of the various libraries and archives I have used. They include the British Library and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, and a number of Archives Départementales in France. My colleagues Matthew McKean and Michel Hogue gave useful advice, Dr. Rob El-Maraghi helped with some medical issues, and I am very grateful to David Fahey and Thomas Brennan, who made innumerable helpful comments and suggestions on the text. Of course, any errors and omissions are all my own work. Finally, it was a great pleasure to work with the helpful, friendly, and efficient people at the University of North 16 Carolina Press. Chuck Grench, who signed me on for this book many years ago, deserves a medal for his patience. A Note on Usage ALE AND BEER I have referred to grain-based fermented drinks as “beer” in all periods, apart from the Middle Ages. There, I make a distinction between “ale” (which was made without hops) and “beer” (which was made with hops), so as to highlight the transition from ale to beer in many parts of Europe in the late Middle Ages. It would be more consistent to refer to these beverages as “ale” in earlier periods (such as Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, and early medieval Gaul) and in cultures (such as many in sub-Saharan Africa) where hops were not used. But historians have consistently used “beer” as the generic term, and I have followed suit. WHISKEY AND WHISKY Although it is common to use “whiskey” to refer to certain spirits from some regions (such as Ireland and the United States) and “whisky” for other regions (such as Scotland and Japan), there are no hard rules. I have used “whiskey” as a generic term throughout the book. 17 1: Alcohol in Ancient Worlds Nature and The Human Hand We can trace alcoholic beverages made by humans to about 7000 BC, nine millennia ago, but it is almost certain that prehistoric humans consumed alcohol in fruits and berries many thousands of years earlier than that. When fruits and berries pass the point of optimum ripeness and sweetness and start to decay, wild yeasts begin to consume the sugars they naturally contain and to produce alcohol by a spontaneous process of fermentation. The alcohol thus produced in the flesh and juice of rotting fruits often reaches levels of 3 or 4 percent and sometimes goes higher than 5 percent, giving them an alcoholic strength similar to that of many modern beers. 1 Any fruit or berry is capable of going through this kind of fermentation, as long as two conditions are satisfied. First, the fruit must have a reasonable sugar level, and one that will attract yeasts. Sugar levels rise as fruit ripens, making it sweeter, and ripe fruits typically have sugar concentrations of between 5 and 15 percent of their mass. 2 Second, there must be ambient wild yeasts (on the skin of the fruit or in nearby trees and bushes) that can gain access to the sugars in the flesh of the fruit once its skin splits. Various mammals, birds, and butterflies are known to eat decayed and fermented fruit and to experience varying degrees of intoxication. The Malaysian tree shrew, the poster animal for alcohol consumption, often feeds on fermented flower nectar, which can reach an alcohol level of almost 4 18 percent. This animal probably has an interesting perception of the world. Yet its agility as it leaps from tree to tree seems unimpaired by its alcohol intake, and there is no evidence that it engages in the risky behavior often associated with intoxication. Other creatures consume alcohol only periodically and opportunistically. A New Orleans newspaper reported in 1954 that thousands of migrating robins were getting drunk on the overripe berries on the bushes in city parks. A local birdwatcher noted that the blackbirds that followed could hold their alcohol better than the robins: “The blackbirds fall off into the grass and then wallow around to sober up. But the robins! I saw three big fat robins topple into the gutter and just lie there.” 3 Videos of supposedly intoxicated animals have become popular viewing on the internet, and although many seem to be authentic examples, scientists are skeptical about widespread and long-standing reports of African elephants getting tipsy on the rotting fruit of the marula tree. The scenario is somewhat improbable because elephants prefer their marula fruit ripe, rather than overripe or rotting. But even more unlikely, an adult elephant would have to avoid water and eat marula fruit with a minimum alcohol level of 3 percent at more than 400 times its normal maximum food intake in order to achieve a blood-alcohol level that would make it perceptibly inebriated. 4 Simply because of their body size, smaller creatures are more likely to feel the intoxicating effects of eating fermented fruit. In prehistoric times, primates and humans were almost certainly among them. 19 As long as 20 million years ago, our primate forebears lived primarily on a diet of fruit and berries: early human tooth structure was similar to that of modern apes, which gain almost all their calories from fruit, and the modern human genome is close to that of chimpanzees, which feed almost exclusively on plants, mostly fruit. Like other mammals and birds, humans might well have preferred fruit that was optimally ripe, when it was brightly colored and eye-catching, rather than when it was either underripe or beginning to rot. Yet they might also have gathered the more easily accessible overripe—and possibly fermenting—fruit from the ground where it had fallen and have thus consumed alcohol on an occasional or regular basis at the end of each ripening season. If they made the connection between eating overripe fruit or berries and feeling a pleasant sense of light-headedness, they might well have made it a regular practice and looked forward to each year’s vintage. But although we are talking of the prehistory of alcohol, it is important to stress that before there was any beer or wine, there was water. Water is a requirement of life on earth, and humans need to consume water regularly to compensate for what they lose daily, mainly in the form of perspiration, urine, and feces. The volume of water humans need to rehydrate themselves varies according to the climate, their diet, and their patterns of physical activity, but water is always needed—about 2 liters a day for adults in modern Western societies. Until methods of delivering drinking water over long distances were devised, humans lived only where there was regular access to fresh water in the form of rivers, streams, lakes, springs, wells, or precipitation as rain or snow. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans relied on water, both for individual rehydration and to support the 20 supplies of fruit, vegetables, berries, meat, fish, and other items in their diet, all of which not only required water but also contained water. If alcoholic beverages became part of the prehistoric diet, they must have made a negligible contribution to rehydration at first (and for tens of thousands of years), because nomadic populations would not have been able to produce significant volumes of alcohol while constantly on the move. Everything changed in the Neolithic period (about 10,000 to 4000 BC), when humans began to build permanent settlements, cultivate cereals and other crops, and keep livestock. Domesticated varieties of many kinds of crops began to appear, including cereals that were suitable for making beer and grape varieties that were selected for wine production because they were easier to propagate and had a higher ratio of flesh to seeds than many wild grapes. In this period we find the earliest evidence of beer and wine, partly because Neolithic cultures also began to produce pottery; it is in clay pots and jars that archaeologists have found some of the oldest evidence of alcoholic drinks, in the form of seeds, grains, yeasts, acids, and other residues. These discoveries raise the question of whether evidence of wine and beer dating to pre-Neolithic times (further back than about 10,000 BC) will ever be found, simply because the vessels used to hold the liquids—perhaps made from wood or leather—have totally disintegrated. So at least 9,000 years ago—but almost certainly much earlier—a human history of alcohol was added to the natural history of spontaneous fermentations in rotting fruits and berries. It began when the first winemaker or brewer crushed grapes or other fruit, or processed barley or another cereal, 21 and let the liquid stand until it fermented. Fermentation was not explained as a biological process until the middle of the nineteenth century, when French scientist Louis Pasteur carried out his experiments with wine. Yet thousands of years earlier, someone, somewhere—northeastern China and western Asia are currently considered the most likely locations—seems to have made a historic observation: if the juice of fruit or berries (or a mixture of water and honey or processed cereal) were left for a short time in warm enough conditions, it began to bubble or froth. Once the bubbling subsided, the resulting beverage produced a pleasant feeling when consumed in small volumes and a sense of otherworldliness when those initial small volumes were followed by more. The world has not been quite the same since. For some people, the discovery of alcohol and methods of producing it created new opportunities for health and pleasure: alcoholic beverages were found to be generally more nutritious than the produce they were made from; they were for centuries safer than the polluted water that was available for drinking in many parts of the world; they gave their consumers a feeling of well-being; and they were quickly associated with positive qualities like conviviality, fertility, and spirituality. In contrast, other people have found history since the advent of alcohol resembling one long hangover for humanity: alcohol has long been ascribed negative associations such as social disruption, violence, crime, sin, immorality, physical and mental illness, and death. We will never know who gave birth to these contested histories by intentionally producing the first alcohol, and the 22 further back we take the history of alcohol, the more speculative it becomes. It might well have begun with an unplanned yet observed fermentation. If the first alcohol was wine, the history of alcohol might have started when wild grapes collected by prehistoric humans for consumption as fresh fruit were placed for safekeeping in a wooden or leather container or in a bowl-shaped indentation in a rock. The grapes at the bottom of the pile would have been squashed by the weight of those on top, producing juice that fermented when it attracted the wild yeasts living on the skins of the grapes or in nearby trees or bushes. Or it might have started with another fruit, like pomegranates or haws (the fruit of the hawthorn tree). Or it might have begun with something entirely different, such as honey, treasured as a food because of its sweetness, that was liquefied and diluted by rain and then fermented into the alcoholic beverage that later became known as mead. (Honey needs to be diluted by about 30 percent water before it ferments.) All these products, as well as many grains (such as barley and rice), were used in some of the earliest alcoholic beverages that have been identified by archaeologists. As long as the product possessed sugars, was liquefied, and was left long enough in warm enough conditions for wild yeasts to do their work, fermentation would take place and an alcohol-bearing liquid would result. This liquid might have had a low level of alcohol and its flavor and texture might have been quite unrecognizable to us as beer, wine, or other common alcohol, but it would have been an alcoholic beverage. The next step in the story of the earliest alcohol takes us from this unintended fermentation to a process engineered by a human. After having one or two tastes of this fermented 23 liquid and experiencing its pleasing effects, our accidental winemaker who had gathered and stored the grapes, the fruit, or the berries might have tried to replicate fermentation, even though he or she was completely unaware of the biological process involved. After piling grapes or other fruit into a container several times to produce the juice that turned into this pleasing beverage, he or she might have shortened the process by simply squashing all the fruit or berries—maybe by hand, maybe by foot—thus increasing the volume of wine produced. Making beer would have been more complicated, as the cereals it is made from contain very little fermentable sugar. They do have sugars and starches, but these are almost completely insoluble and must be made soluble before yeasts can turn them into alcohol. (A beverage with traces of alcohol can be made from unprocessed grain, but it would not have had the impact on the drinker that made beer and wine so attractive.) The sugars in cereal can be converted if one chews the grains: an enzyme in human saliva is effective, and chewing grain and spitting it out was one way alcoholic beverages were made in various Caribbean, Latin American, and Pacific cultures before European contact. The more common process is to malt the grain (soak it in water until it germinates, then dry it) and mash it (soak it in warm water) to produce a liquid containing soluble sugars that can be fermented. This is clearly a much more complex process than fermenting fruit, berries, or honey. Although beer might have been produced spontaneously—if grains successively fell from or were blown off the stalk, were rained on, then sprouted, were dried by the sun, were rained on again, and finally were 24 fermented by wild yeasts—and was consumed, it is difficult to see how drinkers would have known how to replicate the process. Eventually, of course, the process was mastered, but the relative simplicity of fruit and honey fermentation argues for fruit- or berry-based wine, or perhaps mead, to have been made before beer. The human history of alcoholic beverages might have begun by these various accidental fermentations. Or perhaps not, because such scenarios, suggesting that the first deliberate production of alcohol followed upon the observation of unintended fermentations, are entirely speculative. We can no more know the circumstances in which the first beer, mead, or wine was made than we can know who first baked bread or first boiled an egg. Yet there has been some compelling need to explain the inexplicable, and many cultures have produced stories that set out the origins of alcoholic drinks. Some attribute the advent of wine and beer to gods rather than humans. A song (dating to about 1800 BC) to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, describes how beer is made and the pleasures of drinking it. In Egypt, Osiris, the god of the underworld and also the source of all life on earth, was credited with bestowing wine and beer on humans. In Greece, wine was associated with Dionysus, and in Rome, with Bacchus. Jews and Christians, on the other hand, traced wine to a mortal, Noah, who was said to have planted vines on the slopes of Mount Ararat, where his animal-laden ark came to rest once the Great Flood had subsided: “Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard,” says the Old Testament. 5 In the Babylonian version of the flood story, in contrast, wine and beer were provided to the workers building the boat before the flood occurred. 25 Although Noah seemed to know intuitively (or by divine revelation or guidance) how to make wine from his grapes, other accounts stress the accidental character of the first fermentation. One narrative sets it in the court of the Persian king Jamsheed, who was so fond of fresh grapes that he kept jars of them in order to have supplies out of season. When he found one lot no longer sweet because, unknown to him, the grapes had fermented, he had the jar labeled “poison.” Soon after, a woman from the royal harem, suffering from a terrible headache, drank some of this “poison” in order to kill herself and end her misery. Overcome by the alcohol, she fell asleep, and when she woke and (counterintuitively) found her headache gone, she told the king of the magical cure. He promptly ensured that more of his grapes were allowed to ferment. 6 In contrast, a Chinese account suggests that the first product to be fermented was rice, and that it occurred “when discarded rice was fermented and it accumulated a rich fragrance after a long period of time in an empty trunk.” But an eleventh-century Chinese treatise on wine takes a more pragmatic view: “As for who was the first one who invented wine, I can only say that it was a certain wise person.” 7 Accounts like these often point us to some of the enduring cultural associations of wine—such as its religious and medicinal properties—but they do not bring us much closer to an understanding of the historical origins of alcohol more generally. For that, we look to archaeologists, some of whom have turned the quest for the earliest alcohol into a small industry. They search for evidence of alcohol, generally in the 26 form of remains of the fruit, berries, or cereals used or the chemical residues of liquids that had been absorbed into the interior walls of pottery jars and vats. The residues of grape wine generally take the form of grape seeds, tartaric acid (which occurs naturally in grapes and some other fruit), yeasts, and malvidin, a pigment that black grapes share with few other fruits. Although unfermented grape juice and even fresh grapes might leave the same evidence as wine, grape juice would almost certainly have quickly fermented in the warm climatic conditions that prevailed in China and the Middle East, where most of this sort of evidence has been collected. Other evidence of alcoholic beverages that can last for thousands of years includes calcium oxalate (or “beerstone,” which often accumulates in vessels that have been used for brewing); grains of cereals used in brewing (such as rice, barley, millet, and emmer); wax from honey; and tree resin, which was often used to seal the inside of pottery jars and to preserve the alcoholic beverages they held. The findings that make up the earliest known history of alcohol—from about 7000 BC to the beginning of the Christian era, a little more than 2,000 years ago—produce a continually changing narrative. Archaeologists, historians, linguists, chemists, and other scholars regularly report finding evidence they claim to be the earliest example of this or that aspect of alcohol. The earliest evidence of any form of alcoholic beverage has been found in northern China, while the earliest known wine production facility is claimed for Armenia. There is evidence that of one of the earliest commercial breweries was located in Peru 27 8 and a suggestion that the first evidence of distilling alcohol is to be found in the regions now occupied by Pakistan and northern India. 9 The earliest known alcohol in liquid form, preserved in airtight bronze vessels and dating back an astonishing 4,000 years, was found in central China. Many of these findings have shifted some attention from the Middle East, which was long assumed to be the birthplace of beer, wine, and distillation—and which gave us the Arabic origin of our word “alcohol”—even though there is an important concentration of evidence of ancient alcohol in that region. Yet although we should expect to see the history of ancient alcohol continually revised, as researchers develop new analytical techniques and investigate new sites, there is probably a practical limit to the historical depth of our knowledge. As most of the evidence of the earliest alcoholic beverages takes the form of residue in pottery jars, we should not expect to find evidence before the widespread use of pottery in the Neolithic period. Before clay was used to make vessels for holding liquids, alcoholic beverages would have been stored in containers made from wood or leather, or perhaps from textiles, all materials that have long rotted away and taken their all-important residues with them. It is not surprising, then, that the earliest evidence of an alcoholic beverage was found in a dozen pottery jars from the early Neolithic village (about 7000–5600 BC) of Jiahu, in Henan province of northern China. Judging by the residue, the beverage in question was wine made from a combination of rice, honey, and fruit—probably grapes or haws because both have high levels of tartaric acid. The rice might have been exposed to a fungus that made its sugars suitable for 28 fermentation. As for the honey, it might have been added last to sweeten the beverage, but it might also have been added before fermentation to attract wild yeasts to the unfermented liquid; although grapes and haw berries can play host to yeasts, rice does not. 10 There is no way of knowing the social context in which this beverage might have been drunk, but later evidence of Chinese wine was found in a large number of bronze vessels, suggesting that alcohol in ancient China was particularly associated with the wealthy. Dating from about 1900 BC (4,000 years ago), these vessels had not only held fermented beverages, but some still contained liquid after thousands of years; they were initially well sealed and later corrosion made them perfectly airtight. One vessel gave up 26 liters (equivalent to about three dozen standard wine bottles) of what was described as a liquid with “a fragrant aroma,” but the sensory evidence was short-lived because the compounds that convey aromas and flavors volatilized within seconds of being exposed to air. 11 In China, as in contemporary Egypt, wine was buried with the high-ranking dead for consumption in the afterlife. There were also ceremonies in which people drank wine to achieve a mind-altered state that would enable them to communicate with their ancestors. 12 More evidence of the funerary purposes of wine-drinking emerges from the later Shang dynasty (1750–1100 BC). Excavations of thousands of tombs show that wine vessels were often buried with the dead, not only with the powerful (70 percent of the bronze vessels buried with the queen of 29 King Wu-ting are wine containers) but even with some of the poor. 13 In the Chou dynasty (1100–221 BC), there is less evidence of wine being used for funerary purposes but a strong emphasis on drinking at festive occasions, if not on an everyday basis. Poems describe drinking “sweet wine” at parties after hunting for boar and rhinoceros, and the number of different names for wine—or the number of names for different wines—proliferated. Although the earliest evidence of alcohol in China suggests that it was made from rice, honey, and fruit, later references to production commonly refer to cereals (wheat and millet), and the process—malting, cooking, and fermenting grain—indicates that it was beer rather than wine that was being produced. Our present knowledge suggests that China has had the longest continuous evidence of alcohol production, starting with the residues of a 9,000-year-old fermented beverage made from several products and continuing unbroken to the burgeoning Chinese wine industry of the early twenty-first century. Yet there is also widespread evidence of early alcohol production (although beginning three or four thousand years after the earliest known alcohol in China) in western Asia, in regions occupied by modern Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia. In some of these areas, alcohol has had a discontinuous history because of the Islamic prohibition of alcohol in the seventh century and the alcohol policies enacted by successive Muslim administrations. At the present time, for example, alcohol consumption is forbidden in Iran and by citizens in Saudi Arabia (some allowance is made for foreigners), while Turkey has a significant wine industry. 30 The earliest western Asian evidence of alcohol dates from 5400 to 5000 BC (about 7,000 years ago) in Hajji Firuz, a community in the Zagros Mountains, which run along the frontier between modern Iraq and Iran. Telltale residues in the pottery vessels found there indicate both beer and wine. Beer can be deduced by the presence of oxalate ion, a common residue from brewing, on the inside of a jar and the presence of some carbonized barley at the same location. Wine, on the other hand, left grape seeds, tartaric acid, and tree resin inside pottery jars. While it is possible that the jars contained unfermented grape juice rather than wine, in the warm conditions of the region, the sugar-rich juice would almost certainly have attracted yeasts and quickly started fermenting. The traces of resin also support the conclusion that the jars held wine, as tree resin was widely used in wine as a preservative—a practice that continues today (but for flavoring, not conservation purposes) in resinated wines of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Greek retsina. The beverages these jars contained were thus made from single products, rather than from several fermented fruits and cereals, as in the earliest Chinese finding, although they might well have been mixed with other beverages or additives before they were consumed. The total volume of the Hajji Firuz wine jars was 54 liters (the equivalent of 72 standard bottles of wine). This would not have gone far, given that wine had to last a year (until the next vintage), although we do not know if the community had access to a little or a lot more wine than these six jars represent. The fact that the wine jars were found close to jewelry and other luxury artifacts suggests that the wine was owned by a well-off household. 31 14 More earthenware wine vessels containing tartaric acid from wine, this time dating from 3500 to 3000 BC, were found in Godin Tepe, a trading post and military center to the south of Hajji Firuz. These jars held between 30 and 60 liters each, and the vertical patterns of the internal staining showed that, after being sealed with clay stoppers, the jars had been stored on their sides, just like modern bottles with cork closures. In the same community, archaeologists also found a large basin that might have been used for fermenting grape juice and a funnel that might have been used in winemaking. However, an earlier and much more complete winemaking facility, dating from 4100 to 4000 BC, was found near the village of Areni, in the Little Caucasus Mountains of southern Armenia, not far from the Zagros range where Hajji Firuz and Godin Tepe were located. It consists of a shallow basin in which grapes would have been crushed (probably by foot), with a hole allowing the juice to flow into an underground vat, where it fermented. These vessels, along with cups and bowls, showed evidence of malvidin, and grape seeds, pressed grapes, and dried grapevines at the site further support the belief that this was a winemaking facility. The scale of production suggests that by this time, 6,000 years ago, grapes suitable for wine might well have been domesticated. 15 As we can see, two regions in Asia—an area of northeastern China and a relatively small area of western Asia bounded by the Caucasus Mountains, eastern Turkey, eastern Iraq, and northwestern Iran—have surrendered the very earliest signs of alcohol. This is not to say that alcohol was not produced as early in other places, for societies in most parts of the world 32 fermented some of their local resources into alcohol. The Nahua of Central America fermented the juice of a variety of agave, and many African societies fermented the sap of palm trees. Apart from the anomaly of most of North America, where there is no evidence of native peoples making alcohol despite the availability of suitable raw materials, the cultures that did not acquire the knowledge and technique of making alcohol lived in environments—such as the Arctic and the Australian desert—where no suitable fruit or cereals grew. That said, it has proved impossible, in many of these cases, to determine how far back alcohol production went. Although alcoholic fermentation might have been practiced first in Africa or the Americas, the greatest certainty lies with the Chinese and western Asian evidence that dates back to the period between 7000 and 3000 BC, some 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. The regions involved lie many thousands of kilometers apart, but they were connected by the Silk Road and by other trade networks for thousands of years before that. It is possible, then, that knowledge of fermentation was developed in one region and transferred to the other. Alternatively, each region might have started to practice fermentation independently, or the process of making alcohol might have been discovered in a third, as yet unidentified, region of Asia and then transferred to other parts of the continent. Brewing and winemaking, the processes that produced the two most common alcoholic beverages in the ancient world, seem to have followed different paths of diffusion and development. The transfer of winemaking knowledge and technology seems fairly linear, as it moved from western Asia to the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, and from there to 33 Crete, Greece, and southern Italy, before reaching the rest of Europe about 2,000 years ago. Winemaking knowledge seems to have reached the Etruscans of northern Italy by a different route, as they were producing wine at the same time as the Greeks, and it is possible that the Phoenicians transferred the same knowledge directly to Spain. Brewing, in contrast, was being practiced at a number of locations at about the same time. In addition to the early evidence of millet beer in China and barley beer in Godin Tepe, which dates from 3500 to 3000 BC, there are signs of brewing in Upper Egypt (3500–3400 BC) and in Scotland (about 3000 BC), where honey and herbs were added to the beverage. 16 This wide but contemporaneous dispersal suggests that brewing was discovered by a number of cultures independently; but the evidence is scattered and uneven, and drawing firm conclusions from it is risky. 17 Much more reliable evidence of the production of alcohol and of cultures of alcohol consumption emerges from about 3000 BC onward. There is detailed pictorial evidence of wine production in Egypt by 3000–2500 BC, and an Egyptian census from 1000 BC lists 513 vineyards owned by temples. Most were located in the Nile Delta, but there were also scattered vineyards at oases farther south. Everywhere, grapevines tended to share space with other plants and trees (which provided habitat for the yeasts needed for fermentation), as in a two-and-a-half-acre block that belonged to a high official of Saqqara in 2550 BC: “200 cubits long and 200 cubits wide... very plentiful trees and vines were set out, a great quantity of wine was made there.” 34 18 The grapes in Egyptian vineyards were grown on trellises or up trees, and when they were ripe, they were picked and taken in baskets to be crushed by foot in large vats. Wall paintings show four to six men treading the grapes, each holding on to straps hanging from overhead poles so as not to slip on the skins and fall into the juice. Sometimes the workers trod grapes to a cadence set by women singing songs, such as one dedicated to the goddess of the harvest: “May she remain with us in this work.... May our lord drink [the wine] as one who is repeatedly favoured by his king.” Wine is invariably shown as red or a dark color in Egyptian wall paintings, which suggests (unless it is an artistic device) that black grapes were used and that there was skin contact before or during fermentation, because red wine gets its color from pigments in the skins of dark grapes. Fermentation might have begun in the crushing vat, but it continued and ended in the large clay jars used to store wine. Once each jar was full, it was sealed with a pottery cap and made airtight with a lump of Nile clay. Small holes were made near the top of the jar to enable the carbon dioxide (along with alcohol, a product of fermentation) to escape while the fermentation was in progress, so that the jars did not crack or explode under pressure of the gas. The holes were later closed to protect the wine from air, which would oxidize and spoil the wine. Finally a clay seal—a forerunner of the modern wine label—was fixed to the cap. It was etched with information that might include the vineyard the wine came from, the name of the winemaker, the year of vintage, and even the quality or style of the wine. One such seal on a jar in the tomb of King 35 Tutankhamun reads, “Year 4. Sweet wine of the house-of-Aton—Life, Prosperity, Health!—of the Western River. Chief winemaker Aperershop.” Seals on jars in other locations read variously, “Wine for merry-making,” “Very good wine,” “Wine for offerings,” and even “Wine for taxes.” 19 It is not clear whether wine used to pay taxes in kind was superior or mediocre in quality; perhaps its quality determined its value as a tax payment in kind. Wine was drunk only by the elites in Egypt, as it was in many ancient cultures. The scarcity of wine probably gave it cultural value everywhere because it was made only once a year, unlike beer, which could be made continually, year-round, in small batches using stored-up grain. Moreover, suitable grapes—grapes with a high flesh-to-seeds ratio that yielded plenty of juice—ripened successfully in fewer regions than cereals could be cultivated. Made in few places and produced in small volumes that had to last for a whole year until the following vintage, wine was far less likely than beer to be readily available, and its scarcity must have made it more expensive, even when it did not have to be transported to consumers in places where grapes did not grow. These two related qualities, scarcity and cost, contributed to the social cachet of wine and perhaps to its eventual associations with religion and spirituality. Unlike beer, wine was sometimes traded over long distances (down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, for example), and it was drunk by the elites and used in festivities and ceremonies. Thus wine was more likely to enter the historical record, with the result that we know more about ancient wine than about ancient beer, even though beer was far more commonly consumed. 36 The Code of Hammurabi, issued in Babylon about 1770 BC and one of the earliest known codifications of law, regulated the price and strength of beer. Although these laws refer to “wine-shops,” it is clear that, for the most part, these establishments sold beer. There is an implication here and elsewhere that public drinking places in Mesopotamia were generally run by women and were often associated with prostitution. 20 This is an early expression of themes that run through the longer-term history of alcohol: the production of alcoholic beverages by women and the association of alcohol with sexuality. Not only did beer become relatively plentiful in the ancient world, but (unlike most modern beers) it was remarkably nutritious. The malting process raised the caloric value of the base cereal, giving beer more calories than bread made with an equivalent amount of grain. In addition, beer was rich in carbohydrates, vitamins, and proteins. It also gave its drinker a pleasant feeling. Although we cannot know for certain the alcohol level in ancient beer, it was probably high enough to make an impact but not so high that drinking a liter or two a day—making it excellent for hydration—would prevent anyone from getting on efficiently and safely with daily life. It was probably tasty, even though it was not filtered, and would have been cloudy, with bits of husk and stalks floating on its surface. But ancient alcohol producers and consumers were no purists. Not only did they co-ferment various fruits, berries, cereals, and honey, but when they did make straight beer, they regularly flavored it with coriander, juniper, and other additives. In Egypt, beer was made from barley, although wheat, millet, and rye were occasionally used. It was provided to workers and slaves (such as those constructing 37 the pyramids) as part of their salary and was also attributed medicinal properties, especially as a laxative and purgative. 21 Beer, then, was a smart drink from almost every perspective—health, nutrition, hydration, and pleasure—and it soon became the universal drink, despite the common belief that the masses drank only beer and the elites drank only wine. In fact, everyone who drank alcohol drank beer, but whereas the wealthy supplemented their beer with wine, the bulk of the population did not. Wall paintings from Egypt in the second century BC show scenes of banquets where members of the royal family and their entourage are drinking two beverages. One, probably beer, was drunk from large jars through straws or tubes, probably to prevent the drinkers from ingesting the husks and stalks that floated on the surface. The other beverage, probably wine, was sipped from cups. 22 These different modes of drinking suggest that beer was consumed in greater volumes than wine, even though both beverages were consumed on these occasions. One reason why wine was monopolized by the wealthy and powerful in ancient societies was simple cost. It cost more to produce, and its relative scarcity raised the price further. In Mesopotamia the price of wine was inflated by the need to ship it to the towns where the elites were concentrated. Although beer was readily produced from barley grown on the plains near southern cities such as Babylon, Ur, and Lagash, wine was produced in the mountains to the northeast and then shipped downstream along the Tigris and Euphrates. This is the first known example of a long-distance wine trade, but its extent was limited by small production and its high cost structure. Wine and other goods were easily sent to 38 market on the south-flowing rivers, but the purpose-built wine barges were broken up after each trip because they could not return north against the current. The end price of goods thus included the capital cost of the barge. But wine was clearly a lucrative trade for merchants, for in 1750 BC a merchant of Babylon named Belânu showed frustration at the absence of wine from a shipment of goods that had arrived on the Euphrates. He wrote to his agent, “The boats have arrived here at the end of their journey at Sippar [50 kilometers north of Babylon], but why have you not bought and sent me some good wine? Send me some and bring it to me in person within ten days!” 23 Given the price of wine, only people such as the ruler of Lagash could purchase it in big volumes. It was reported in 2340 BC that he had established a wine cellar, “into which wine is brought in great vases from the mountains.” These vases were the forerunners of amphoras, the clay jars later used by Greek and Roman merchants to ship millions of liters of wine throughout the Mediterranean and Europe. The mass of the population drank only beer, and the place of beer in the diet of Mesopotamians is denoted by the description of basic daily fare as “bread and beer.” The hymn to Ninkasi celebrated the brew that exhilarates the drinker, “makes the liver happy and fills the heart with joy.” 24 Beer and wine were similarly consumed in Egypt, where grapes were far more difficult to cultivate than cereals. At first, wine was imported from the east. Hundreds of wine jars found in the burial chamber of one of the Egyptian kings, Scorpion I (about 3150 BC), contain deposits and resin 39 identical to those found at Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains, and the jars themselves were made from clay that seems to have come from the area now occupied by Israel and Palestine. This suggests the existence of a complex wine industry where jars were imported, filled with wine, then re-exported farther afield. Wine was not only consumed as part of the elites’ diet in ancient Egypt; it was also employed in ceremonies, often being poured as a libation as prayers were said. Beer, oil, honey, and water were also used in libations, but wine tended to have more religious or spiritual associations throughout the ancient world. Planting vines might have been perceived as a religious obligation, as the pharaoh Ramses III suggested when he addressed the god Amon-Ra: “I made for thee wine-gardens on the Southern oasis, and Northern oasis likewise without number.” Ramses claimed to have presented 59,588 jars of wine to gods in his lifetime. 25 And if the lifetime was important, so was the afterlife, for supplies of wine were buried with eminent Egyptians, as vessels of alcohol were with the dead in China. When Tutankhamun died at the age of nineteen (at or below the legal drinking age in most countries today), three dozen jars of wine were buried with him, most from the fourth, fifth, and ninth years of his reign. Although the pharaohs drank beer while they were living, beer would not have been buried with them, not because it was unworthy, but because it was known not to last more than a week or two. It is worth noting that until the wine-rich heydays of the Greeks and Romans, there is no evidence of a negative attitude toward beer. The Greeks and Romans thought beer 40 was utterly inferior to wine. Wine, they said, was a manly and civilized beverage; beer, which made men effeminate and was fit only for barbarians, was to be avoided by peoples who aspired to greatness and civilization. These views (explored in more detail in the next chapter) contributed to a belief, which still has some currency, that wine possesses intrinsic civilizing qualities and is culturally superior to beer. A lot of nonsense has been written about wine’s being a sign of “civilization,” a statement predicated on the assumption that the life of the elites was civilized and the life of the masses was worth little in any cultural sense. It ignores the reality that in most ancient societies, until Greece and Rome came into their own, the elites themselves must have drunk far more beer than wine. If they produced longer-lasting artifacts and ideas than the masses, they did it with the aid of beer, at least as much as of wine. So far was beer from being considered an inferior beverage that Mesopotamia’s classic piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, identified beer-drinking as essential to being human, as the process of humanizing Enkidu, the wild man, shows: “Enkidu does not know of eating food; of beer to drink he has not been taught. The prostitute opened her mouth. She said to Enkidu, ‘eat the food Enkidu, it is the luster of life. Drink the beer as is done in this land.’ Enkidu ate the food until he was sated; of the beer he drank seven cups. His soul became free and cheerful, his heart rejoiced, his face glowed. He rubbed... his hairy body. He anointed himself with oil. He became human.” 26 Both beer and wine were served at the funeral banquet of a person thought to have been King Midas, in about 700 BC. 41 27 Evidence of the banquet was found in a five-by-six-meter burial room deep in a human-built earthen mound that looks, from the outside, like a natural hillock. It is located in Gordion, now in central Turkey but formerly the capital of the Phrygian empire over which Midas ruled. The burial chamber contained the skeleton of a sixty- to sixty-five-year-old male laid out on dyed textiles in a log coffin surrounded by 150 bronze vessels. More than 100 drinking bowls littered the chamber, and there were also three 150-liter vats, which probably held the beverage that was poured into bronze jugs and from there into individual bowls. (There were also some larger, two-handled bowls, perhaps for the thirstier guests.) The crowd of mourners implied by the number of pieces in this drinking set could not possibly have fitted into the burial chamber, so the wooden furniture and the bronze bowls, plates, and vats must have been placed around the body after the banquet (probably held outdoors) was over. As for what was consumed at King Midas’s funeral banquet, both the food and drink were combinations of ingredients. The meal was a stew of goat or sheep meat that was marinated in oil, honey, and wine before being grilled, mixed with lentils and cereals, and flavored with herbs and spices. It was accompanied by a beverage that was no less complex: a mixture—“blend” is probably a more positive term—of grape wine, barley beer, and mead. If the three 150-liter vats were only half full, there would have been more than 200 liters of this beverage available for the 100 guests, which would have made for a convivial gathering. Was the banquet of King Midas a kind of ancient wake, and did the eating and drinking have religious associations? There 42 were strong links between wine and religion (stronger links than between beer and religion) in the ancient world and later, and several explanations have been advanced. One is that mild or more advanced intoxication gave drinkers a sense of light-headedness that felt like slipping from the mundane world and approaching the gods. Yet this would not necessarily differentiate wine from any other alcoholic beverage. What was different was the higher alcohol level of wine than, say, beer, so that consuming the same volume of wine would get the drinker closer to the gods more rapidly. Another explanation is that wine gained spiritual value from the apparent miracle of fermentation, when grape juice rose in temperature and bubbled without any external stimulus, such as fire. But again, this is common to all fermented beverages, although the roiling fermentation of wine might have been more impressive than the foaming of fermenting beer. A third suggestion is that the life cycle of the grapevine—which flourishes in spring, bears fruit during summer and autumn, then appears to die during the winter, only to sprout leaves and flowers again in the spring—appeared to ancient peoples like a recurring miracle of death and resurrection. But many other plants and trees—though not the cereals used for brewing—go through the same annual cycle. Perhaps the spiritual associations of wine reflected all these properties. The strong association of alcohol with feasting indicates its high status at these times; banquets, whether celebrating life events or death, were often important political events, used for purposes such as forming and cementing social alliances, creating social debt, and demonstrating social distinctions. 28 All the alcoholic beverages in the ancient world had some religious connotations that might well have reflected the 43 perceived wonder of fermentation and the feelings of other-worldliness that even mild alcoholic intoxication produces. If wine had stronger religious associations, which it did in many ancient cultures, it might well have been more because of its scarcity than of any intrinsic quality. It is not surprising that the social elites in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere stressed the godly associations of the beverage to which they had virtually sole access; it gave them a proximity to and an intimacy with the divine that was greater than any the masses had access to. Some cultures treated mead as divine, too—perhaps a measure of its scarcity, perhaps reflecting a widespread belief that bees were divine, perhaps because honey was the sweetest commodity known in the ancient world. Intense sweetness was a treasured quality, and Christians would later adapt this notion to the idea of the “sweetness” of Jesus. 29 Alcohol occupied not only a religious position in ancient cultures; it was regularly employed as a medicine, either in its own right or as a medium for plants, herbs, and other produce that were believed to have therapeutic properties. Many of the Neolithic alcoholic beverages identified in China and the Middle East contained plant material that was not used for the production of the alcohol, and although it might well have been used to add flavor, it might also have been added because of its perceived medicinal value. Ancient Egypt provides comprehensive information, even though most of the plants named in hieroglyphics have not been identified. Coriander is an exception, and a common remedy for stomach problems was beer infused with coriander, bryony (a flowering plant), flax, and dates. Grated 44 and mixed with chaste-tree and an unidentified fruit, then infused into beer, strained and drunk, coriander was also prescribed as a cure for blood in the feces. 30 In general, wine was considered a particularly good aid to digestion, and it was prescribed to increase the appetite, purge the body of worms, regulate the flow of urine, and act as an enema. It was often mixed with kyphi, a concoction of gum, resin, herbs, spices, and even the hair of asses, animal dung, and bird droppings. Alcohol dissolves solids more effectively than water, and its higher concentration in wine made it a very good medium for many medicines. Wine was also applied externally as a salve to reduce swelling, and recognition that alcohol was a disinfectant led to wine being applied to bandages to treat wounds. 31 Wine was highly valued in Chinese medicine, too; the character for “medical treatment” contains the elements of the character for wine, indicating the close relationship between wine and medicine. 32 The earliest Chinese medical and pharmaceutical works cite wine as an important drug and antiseptic and as a means of circulating medicines in the body. Among its specific uses, wine was employed as an antiseptic, an anesthetic, and a diuretic, and in the Taoist period it was an ingredient in longevity elixirs. 33 For all these positive qualities attributed to alcoholic beverages, they were also recognized as having a darker side. There was, first of all, the matter of simple overconsumption. It is argued that heavy drinking became so widespread, at least in the royal court, that it brought about the collapse of 45 the Shang dynasty in China (1750–1100 BC). In reaction, subsequent rulers not only warned against excessive drinking but made it punishable by death. 34 The general tolerance and even encouragement of drinking during festivities is suggested by a scene from the Egyptian tomb of Nakhet, where a girl is shown offering her parents wine and saying, “To your health! Drink this good wine, celebrate a festive day with what your lord has given you.” 35 Although light intoxication at celebrations, like drinking to achieve a spiritual light-headedness, might be tolerated, heavy drinking at festivals and other occasions sometimes got out of hand. One Egyptian sage, Ani, said of the drunk person, “When you speak, nonsense comes out of your mouth; if you fall down and break your limb, no one will come to your assistance.” 36 Another sage advised, “Do not get drunk, lest you go mad.” Egyptian artists were not shy about showing the seedier side of alcohol-charged festivities, and wall drawings depict men and women vomiting and being carried unconscious from banquet rooms. There is no explicit suggestion of moral disapproval here, but some writings suggest that public intoxication was more frowned upon than excessive drinking in private. What began to emerge in the ancient world is a theme that runs through the history of alcohol to the present: that moderate consumption was not only acceptable, but a good thing for reasons of health and pleasure. But drinking too much alcohol, either on specific occasions (what is now called binge-drinking) or as a regular pattern, was bad. It was detrimental to the drinker’s health and morals, harmful to 46 those immediately affected by his or her behavior, and damaging to society more generally. It led to a debate, which continues today, about how to define the line between moderation and excess, and how to ensure that no one crossed the line. Historically, some commentators have identified the line by the unruly behavior of the drinker, but this meant that it was defined only after it had been crossed. Others have prescribed specific volumes of alcohol as moderate and safe, as modern public health policy-makers recommend a maximum of so many standard servings of alcohol a day. Attempts to prevent excessive drinking constitute an important strand in the history of regulation, as one society after another has variously tried to control the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol. Some later societies attempted to prohibit alcohol entirely, and in those cases the distinction between moderate and excessive consumption was moot. The distinction might have been less of an issue in ancient societies where alcohol was produced and consumed in relatively small volumes, but it became much more important as alcohol production increased and alcoholic beverages became central to the daily diet, as they did in Ancient Greece and Rome. 47 2: Greece and Rome 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 48 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 49 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 50 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 51 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 52 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 53 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. 54 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. 55 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. 8 In 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. 56 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 57 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, 58 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. 59 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. 17 The 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 60 (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. 61 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 62 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. 63 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 64 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 65 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 si

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