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The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet
Images of Wine and Ritual (Un Flot d'Images)
By François Lissarrague, Andrew Szegedy-Maszak PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03595-6
CHAPTER 1
The Greek Experience of Wine
When speaking about wine, the Greeks were inexhaustible. Drinkers' dialogues, experts' discussions, lyric poems, and mythological tales—the literature that deals with the divine beverage is extensive. Given such abundance it is difficult to account for every detail, but we can isolate certain basic concepts, within Greek culture, regarding the use, the origin, and the value of wine.
In the Bacchae Euripides dramatizes the vast power of Dionysus. At several points the god of wine is described as the one who has given mortals the cure for their sorrows, forgetfulness (in the sleep that follows drinking) of their cares, and relief for their suffering. The chorus sings his praise:
... the prince of the blessèd,
the god of garlands and banquets,
Bromius, Semele's son ...
These blessings he gave:
laughter to the flute
and the loosing of cares
when the shining wine is spilled
at the feast of the gods,
and the wine-bowl casts its sleep
on feasters crowned with ivy.
Moreover, his blessings belong to all, without distinction; Dionysus is a true democrat:
The deity, the son of Zeus,
in feast, in festival, delights.
He loves the goddess Peace,
generous of good,
preserver of the young.
To rich and poor he gives
the simple gift of wine,
the gladness of the grape.
Wine as an anodyne is one of the images most familiar to us; throughout our tradition "wine dissolves sorrow"—it is an artificial paradise, a drug that alleviates pain.
This depiction does appear in Greece—the Bacchae is only one instance among many—but it is not so pervasive as it is in our modern imagination. The idea of wine as a release is actually a secondary aspect in the Greek world view. There wine is thought of as a blessing, a divine gift of major importance, equivalent to Demeter's gift of grain. The prophet Teiresias offers the following explanation to Pentheus, the young king of Thebes, who refuses to welcome Dionysus into his city:
Mankind, young man, possesses two supreme blessings.
First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth—
whichever name you choose to call her by.
It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain.
But after her came the son of Semele,
who matched her present by inventing liquid wine
as his gift to man. For filled with that good gift,
suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it
comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles
of the day. There is no other medicine for misery.
Wine is seen as a positive force whose activity is not restricted to the temporary suppression of evil, of all the misery inherent to the human condition; rather, its use is put in a religious context, just like that of grain. All city-states took care to pass laws on its use, some very few—like Sparta—to proscribe its use by citizens, most to regulate it.
Such control was necessary because, in the Greek imagination, wine is an ambiguous drink, like liquid fire, at once dangerous and beneficial. The myths that tell of the origin of the vine and of wine highlight their ambivalent nature, halfway between the savage and the civilized, functioning as a mediation between these two polar opposites. The grapevine has its origin outside the world of man: according to the stories, it came from a root fallen from the sky, or was found by a goat (an animal that is half-wild and half-domesticated), or perhaps brought in by a bitch, according to a version that blurs the distinction between animals and plants. Conversely, wine—after the process of vinification, which is conceived of as cooking—is located on the side of culture, of a complex technical skill that differentiates it from fruit and produce. Dionysus shares in this doubleness; in his link to plant life and the spreading vine (see fig. 94), he is marked by exuberance; but he is nonetheless the master over wine and its effects. The Athenian religious calendar emphasizes the latter aspect; the festivals of Dionysus are not connected with the grape harvest, and he does not seem to be considered a god of agriculture. The new wine and the opening of the storage jars occasioned the most important ceremonies in January-February. The miracle of wine, annually repeated and celebrated under the auspices of Dionysus, is a dangerous moment in the etiological myths. The effects of the first wine are always devastating: the first men to taste it go mad, think themselves possessed, and kill the one who made them drink it.
In fact, wine is a poison, but Dionysus gives it to men along with the rules for its use. It teaches the Athenians about mixture, the proportions involved in blending. Wine, indeed, is fundamentally linked to mixing; in the ancient world it is drunk only when blended with water. This custom is certainly due to its high alcohol content, which in turn is due to a late harvest, after the leaves have fallen. At that point, says Cato, the grape is percoctus, "quite cooked." The liquor it yields, if drunk neat, is a drug that can madden or kill, a true pharmakon in the double meaning of the Greek term: both poison and medicine. The medicinal use of wine is widely attested. The pure essence is called akratos, unmixed. This linguistic fact is very significant because it illuminates the essential quality of wine that makes it fit to drink: mixture. Pure wine—for us the only drinkable kind—is defined in Greek by a negative term formed from the alpha-privative and the word kratos (whence the name of the vase, krater), which denotes a mingling. Modern Greek has preserved this word in calling wine krasi. Identification of wine with a process of mixing reappears in Artemidorus' Oneirokritikos (Key to Dreams), which specifies that it is good "for someone planning to marry or to contract an alliance" to dream of a grapevine or wine, "the vine because of its intertwinings, wine because it is mixed."
Among the regulations connected with wine, those established by Lycurgus at Sparta, as reported by Plutarch, are particularly interesting because they address the use of pure wine in its application as an analytic tool. Newborn infants are dipped into pure wine to detect cases of epilepsy; those that have the disease go into convulsions. Here wine serves as an instrument of selection. Another use of wine can be classified as educational: we know that at Sparta the helots, the serfs who were tied to the land and constituted the lower class of society, were made to drink pure wine and then led, drunk, into the city. There they sang obscene songs accompanied by indecent dances, in order to instill in the Spartan youths a horror of the wine that caused such reprehensible behavior. In both these cases pure wine is defined as a drug whose use indicates complete alienation: it excludes the unworthy newborn, rejected from the time of birth, and it signals the total otherness of the inferiors who are treated like animals.
In all of Greece, drinking unmixed wine is a barbarian custom, summed up in the proverbial expression "to drink like a Scythian." King Cleomenes of Sparta died a madman from having drunk too much pure wine in the company of Scythian envoys. Wine and its mixing are universal cultural indicators, and the whole imagery of wine in ancient Greece is constellated around such mixing. This image in turn gives rise to a vastly greater set of fundamental social, religious, and philosophical ideas.
This point deserves to be underscored: in the process of mixing the proportions might vary but are never left to chance. The crucial instrument is the krater, the great vessel that we see so often placed on the floor amidst the guests at a symposion (see fig. 11). The latter word, often translated as "banquet," actually means the moment when people drink together; people do not eat at the symposion because it generally takes place after the actual meal. It is a social gathering that brings together adult male citizens; among themselves they drink, sing lyric poetry, play music, and converse on various topics. A fragment of a drinking-song hints at the spirit, and almost the agenda, of such meetings, as it reiterates the prefix syn- ("with"), an essential term that marks the symposion's ideal of community and conviviality: "Drink with me, play music with me, love with me, wear a crown with me, be mad with me when I am mad and wise with me when I am wise."
At the symposion one can pass from wisdom to folly; the option remains open. On each occasion rules are passed under the aegis of the master of the banquet, the symposiarch, whom the guests must obey. He prescribes the musical themes, or the topic of conversation; in Plato's Symposium, for example, after Eryximachos has dismissed the flute girl, he suggests that each guest in turn offer a speech in praise of Love. The symposiarch also decides the number of kraters that will be drunk, as well as the ratio of water to wine, which can vary from 3:1 to 5:3 or 3:2, depending on the desired strength of the mixture. These proportions are thought of as harmonic balances, almost like music; thus Plutarch tells of a drinker who describes a good mixture as being like a chord and is then jokingly invited to take his cup as he would pick up his lyre, in order to drink like a good musician.
Within the framework of the symposion, the use of wine is the basis for a set of practices that define the symposion as a process, an experience both positive and necessary for social life. We can distinguish several levels in this process. To begin with, wine is an agent for sociability, a means for bringing things to light. The lyric poets, whose verses were recited or sung during the banquets and who were often poets of wine, alluded to this phenomenon in many passages that present wine as something that reveals the truth. Alcaeus links the two in a kind of proverb, "Wine and truth [in vino veritas]." Theognis is more explicit:
It is in fire that experts test gold and silver;
It is wine that discloses the soul of a man.
In a vivid image, Aeschylus explains: "Bronze reflects the appearance; wine is the mirror of the soul."
In the Laws Plato emphasizes the revelatory aspect of wine. In the course of this long dialogue in which he sets himself up as legislator for a Utopian city, the philosopher often seems drawn to the Spartan model that prohibited symposia and instead adopted syssitia, compulsory meals taken in common that were exemplary in their austerity and temperance. But in this case Plato abandons his model. Far from banning wine from his city, he defends and justifies the symposion. He claims that wine can disclose another's character without the slightest danger. To discover if one is dealing with someone violent, unjust, brutal, or addicted to the pleasures of love, it is much better to associate with him during communal drinking than to risk endangering one's wife or son or daughter.
Everything takes place as if the symposion were the site of a simulated experience and wine were the agent of this simulation. The experience remains free of danger because it is controlled by the symposiarch, the master of ceremonies, who is compared to a general without whom it is dangerous to go to war. Disobeying his orders results in exclusion from the banquets, hence social isolation. For Plato this testing by means of wine has an educational goal; it means that one comes to know individual characters in their true nature, in order to be able to make them better. As regards moderation, a primary virtue, such improvement is accomplished through the medium of wine. One can learn temperance only through drunkenness; related to the golden mean, temperance is equated with the right mixture.
This ideal of a wise balance in the use of wine is already clear in Theognis:
Wine drunk in excess is an evil; if we drink it wisely (episthemos) it is not an evil but a blessing. Drinking brings down on frail men two great dangers: parching thirst, and disabling drunkenness. I place myself between these two extremes, and you will not persuade me either to stop drinking, or to become riotously drunk.
Greek morality, which idealizes balance (but neither frustration nor self-denial), is conceived on the model of the correct mixture of wine and water and linked to the image of the krater.
This is more than a matter of prudence and unreflective moderation. For the Greeks wine allows experience at another level: not only of another person, a neighbor, a drinking companion, but also of an otherness that each person feels in his own liberation and self-emancipation. Wine, says Plato, confers a sense of happiness, power, and freedom. For the latter he offers a specific example, which might seem commonplace but is a good illustration of how wine's action is viewed. In the Laws he makes rules for the use of wine according to the age divisions. Prior to the age of eighteen, children are not to drink it because "they must not add fuel to the fire in their souls." Up to the age of thirty, the citizens may drink in moderation, with absolutely no excess or drunkenness. Thereafter, in their forties, they may "invite Dionysus" to "relieve the dessication of old age." Thus wine becomes a necessity for the mature adult; his rigid spirit has to "soften, like iron thrust into the fire." Wine warms the soul and removes its stiffness, just as it removes its worries. The action of wine, however, is not just negative; it has a positive effect in making the old man happy in his life and newly sociable. His soul, once again as pliable as that of a child, can be reshaped, and this malleability has a direct effect during religious observances: it allows the old man to sing and to dance, which are important social activities. At festivals each age class has to perform appropriate songs and dances, which have a pronounced moral efficacy. Without the assistance of wine, the adult males would not be able to give up their caution, the reserve that befits their age. Their experience is most valuable for the city, and—once the wine warms them up—they can sing and dance, and thereby fulfill their role and convey their message to others.
Plato's ideas might make us smile, but they give a very clear indication of how wine's power is understood: it frees us from restrictions, prohibitions, habits; it allows for a brief excursion outside normal boundaries. Old men recover the liveliness and sociability of youth. In contexts other than the Platonic, the excursion outside oneself takes the form of approaching the Other, not only the neighbor and fellow citizen but even the foreigner, the Other whose exclusion forms the basis for the structure of the state. In Athens as in Sparta, the citizen is defined by equality and identity. Full Spartan citizens are Homoioi, social and civic peers. The fundamental principle in Athens is isonomia, in which all citizens are equal before the law; such equality does not apply to women, slaves, or foreigners.
In the experience of the symposion, imagery plays an important role. The vases used for drinking are not merely containers, or vessels for the consumption of wine; they are vehicles for images. Therefore the pictorial representations allow us to develop an iconography of wine, in which all the values we have discerned are embodied and organized in visual form.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet by François Lissarrague, Andrew Szegedy-Maszak. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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