CULTURAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOL - 'IN VINO VERITAS'

Rome was the next great drinking civilization to emerge in the classical world. Founded in legend by the twins Romulus and Remus on the banks of the river Tiber, the city-state subdued first its neighbors—the Latins, the Samnites, and the Etruscans—so that by 275 BC it controlled most of the Italian peninsula. Over the next 150 years, following victories over the Carthaginians and the Macedonians, Rome established itself as the preeminent nation in the Mediterranean. The new superpower gained ascendancy through a genius for organization and republicanism. On the way up, it won the respect of its foes for its asceticism and single-mindedness; once it was on top, it distinguished itself, at home, through decadence.
Like the Greeks, the Romans have left us a comprehensive picture of their drinking habits. These changed drastically over time, for in its formative years, by Hellenic standards, Rome was almost dry. Romulus, its mythical first ruler, is said to have used only milk when making offerings to his gods. The situation was little better in 290 BC, when the dictator Papirius could only tender a single small cup of wine to the god Jupiter in order to win his favor in a battle against the Samnites. The scarcity of wine in early Rome is corroborated by the relative insignificance of Liber, their native deity of the grape, who was an altogether more modest immortal than Bacchus. His duties seem to have been limited to protecting vines and their fruit.
The power to inspire divine madness in a drinker was far beyond his reach, and when the cult of Bacchus reached Roman territory in the second century BC it was received with suspicion, and its adherents were persecuted. It did not seem possible, to such a sober culture, that people should congregate in large bands merely for the purpose of becoming drunk together. The Romans decided that it was all a sinister plot to destabilize their rule, and in 186 BC their Senate issued a decree commanding the destruction of Bacchic shrines and the prohibition of Bacchic rites throughout Italy. With proscription came persecution: Spurius Postumius Albinus and Quintus Marcius Philipus were diverted from the “care of armies, and wars, and provinces, to the punishing of an intestine conspiracy.
” Nearly seven thousand devotees of Bacchus lost their lives in the ensuing purge. The slaughter was justified on the grounds that its victims were irredeemable villains, who left “no sort of crime, no kind of immorality” unattempted, and among whom “there were more obscenities practiced between men than between men and women.”
Not only did the Romans of the time have a cultural blind spot for inebriation as a form of worship, they were also utterly opposed to any creed that encouraged drinking among women. Their traditional views on this matter were strong. According to one of their own historians, “at Rome women were not allowed to drink wine. . . . The wife of Egnatius Maetennus was clubbed to death by her husband for drinking from a large jar, and he . . . was acquitted of murder by Romulus.” 
The same source quoted, with approval, the example of a matron “who was starved to death by her family for having broken open the box containing the keys to the wine store.” In addition to prohibiting women from drinking, the early Romans also restricted the access of slaves and young men under thirty to alcohol.
However, within a few decades of the anti-Bacchic purge, Roman attitudes toward drink had shifted. The change was driven by pragmatic, rather than cultural, reasons. Wine formed part of the rations of Roman legionaries, and a secure and increasing supply was necessary to support the efforts of ever larger and more active armies. Once it had been decided that they would get into viticulture, the Romans went about the business with their customary thoroughness.

Their genius was standardization. Weapons, legions, sewers, and roads were assembled according to formula. This practical bent was now applied to the cultivation of the grape. Their first steps were to establish a uniform procedure for winemaking, and to achieve this they were forced to borrow from their enemies.
In 160 BC, in the midst of the throes of the final Punic War, the Roman senate ordered the translation of a Carthaginian treatise on viticulture, resulting in 'De Agri Cultura', by Marcus Porcius Cato, which is the earliest surviving prose work in Latin. 'De Agri Cultura' covered every aspect of vineyard management, right down to the rations of slaves, and their clothing allowances. It was circulated among landowners, and Rome very quickly became a significant producer of wine. By the standards of the time, the new model vineyards were large (Cato recommended sixty acres) commercial ventures, which required a substantial investment in slaves, plant, and buildings.
They focused on producing bulk wines. De Agri Cultura speaks of only six different kinds of wine, against the fifty or so recognized by the Greeks. In addition to encouraging domestic production, Rome also set about stifling competition. In 154 BC the cultivation of vines beyond the Alps was banned. This protectionist measure stimulated domestic output further, and within a decade Roman-made wine was being exported in substantial volume to newly conquered territories.
A plentiful supply altered Roman attitudes toward drinking. They no longer need to count each cup when making offerings to their gods, and their largesse increased accordingly. They disposed of most of the surplus they produced by adopting the drinking culture of the Greeks, which both compensated for the poverty of their own and provided them with a wide range of reasons and rituals for consuming wine. By the middle of the first century BC, the transformation of Rome from a sober society, suspicious of both alcohol and drunkenness, to a major producer, populated with practiced and discriminating drinkers, was complete. The extent of change is apparent in the behavior of Mark Antony, a contender for the rule of Rome during the period of one of its civil wars (44-31 BC).
Antony established his power base in the eastern part of Rome’s possessions, conducted a long and fruitful love affair with Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, and went into his final battle disguised as Bacchus, right down to the fawn skin and tambourine. Such conduct would have been simply inconceivable to his disciplined and ascetic ancestors, who had been one of the most proper plebeian families of ancient Rome.
The ultimate victor of this conflict was Octavian, acknowledged as Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, whose absolute rule commenced in 27 BC.
Thereafter, a fashion for rare and costly foreign vintages appeared among the senior orders of citizens, and “the study of wines become a passion, and the most scrupulous care was bestowedupon every process connected with their production and preservation.” Roman writers, moreover, dedicated an increasing quantity of their output toward praising wine. Some even went so far as to denigrate water drinking, which would have been treasonous in the republican age, when Rome’s magnificent aqueducts were a matter of national pride. These new advocates of the grape borrowed heavily from Hellenic culture and, in doing so, incorporated Bacchus within their own. Poets began to call upon him in Latin as well as Greek to fill them with the creative spirit: “Whither, O Bacchus, dost thou hurry me, o’erflowing with thy power? Into what groves or grottoes am I swiftly driven in fresh inspiration?”
Not only did the Romans adopt Bacchus, they also embellished him with new myths and provided him with a sidekick—Silenus—a bloated middle-aged inebriate who carried around a bulging wine skin, and who served the drinks at mythical revels. However, while the powers of the god of wine were extended in fiction, belief in their truth diminished.

The Roman Bacchus was less of a mystery than the Greek variety. He was another statue on a crowded shelf, invoked as a figure of speech rather than venerated as an object of faith. Wine became a secular substance, and the Romans no longer thought it necessary to blame drunkenness on possession by a god. In the absence of such magical associations, the effects of drinking were scrutinized with more critical eyes.
The poet Horace, in his 'Epistles', ridiculed the notion that since wine inspired writers writers should be drunk. Noting that “from the moment Liber enlisted brain-sick poets among his satyrs and fauns, the sweet muses, as a rule, have had a scent of wine about them in the morning,” and that would-be poets “have never ceased to vie in wine drinking by night and to reek of it by day,” he pointed out that this was to mistake the symptoms for the cause and was as futile as dressing up like Cato without possessing Cato’s virtues. Horace was, however, a fervent advocate of alcohol per se, so long as it was consumed in accordance with his motto, “Let Moderation Reign!” 
In the right quantities, in his opinion, wine could be a miracle worker: “It unlocks secrets, bids hopes be fulfilled, thrusts the coward onto the battlefield, takes the load from anxious hearts. The flowing bowl—whom has it not made eloquent? Whom has it not made free even amid pinching poverty ?” In addition to ridiculing drunken poets and praising temperate drinking, Horace also satirized the prevailing fashions for fine wines and for consuming too much of them. He singled out for especial ridicule the trend toward ever more elaborate drinking rituals in the style of the Grecian symposium and poured scorn upon the vogue for ceremony. He was, however, swimming against the tide. The Romans of the imperial era had fallen in love with ostentation—magnificence was in as much as Hellenism—and they developed a domestic version of the symposium at which they might display their wealth and taste.

The Roman dinner party, or convivium, differed from its model in many aspects. Wine was served before, with, and after food, whereas in Greece the drinking had begun only after eating had ended. Most significantly, women were admitted to the dinner table, where they drank with the same gusto as their male counterparts. Rome, once noted for the sobriety of its women, became known for its drunkardesses. Their excesses attracted the attention of its satirists. The poet Martial pictured one such Latin maenad trying to hide the alcohol on her breath by not speaking; to no avail for her uncontrolled belching released its odor.
A measure of the difference between entertaining in imperial Rome and classical Athens is provided by the 'Satyricon 'of Petronius Arbiter, written during the reign of the emperor Nero. The story of two young men of good families who philander their way around the empire accompanied by a handsome catamite, and pursued by a nymphomaniac, the high priestess of Priapus, god of erections, and a gay but vengeful sea captain, the 'Satyricon' features a convivium at the house of a rich ex-slave named Trimalchio, which is the polar opposite of the ideal symposium depicted by Plato. Whereas the Greek example focuses on the inventive wine-inspired after-dinner speeches of its participants, the Roman version is distinguished by coarse and venal conversation and the uglier forms of drunkenness.
The tone for this latter feast is set when the heroes of the Satyricon meet their host at the baths, where he is playing ball. Exercise over, Trimalchio urinates in a silver chamber pot carried around by a dedicated eunuch, wipes his fingers in the eunuch’s hair, and leads his guests home in a little dogcart pulled by a matching pair of slaves. The former have their toenails cut on arrival and are offered a glass of sweet wine as an aperitif. The dinner that follows is comprised of a series of culinary prodigies accompanied by spectacular vintages.
Trimalchio opens a glass jar of Opimian Falernian (“Guaranteed one hundred years old!”), while his guests talk about money and death. He leaves the table midmeal to ease his bowels and advises his guests to follow his example (“There’s not a man been born yet with solid insides”). His wife, meanwhile, an equal paragon of bad taste, drinks herself into a frenzy in his absence. Upon his return to the table, she accuses him of preferring the bodies of young boys to her own, then attacks him with her fingernails. Peace is only restored when Trimalchio commands for his will to be brought in and read out. It frees some of the slaves present, who burst into tears of gratitude. The dinner ends in drunken chaos: Trimalchio commands his band to play a funeral march; the neighbors mistake it for a fire alarm and break down the door with axes, enabling the better-mannered guests to escape.
Trimalchio, the epitome of the new Roman model of inebriate, made his money in the wine trade, which had gone from strength to strength under the early emperors. Its vintners, like their Greek and Egyptian predecessors, had begun to focus on quality as well as volume. Around AD 60, a Roman Spaniard, Columella, wrote a new treatise on winemaking, which superseded Cato’s De Agri Cultura. While much of his advice regarding the situation of vineyards and the management of slaves was little different, Columella recognized at least twenty types of wine grape, including the Bumast (“full breasted”), and the “wooly” Aminean, against Cato’s mere half dozen. Moreover, their juices could be combined to make more than a hundred kinds of wine, a figure confirmed by the historian Pliny.
Columella was also an early prophet of genetics and advised his readers to consider each vine as an individual and to breed only from the best of them, for just as “those who contend in the sacred games protect with watchful care the progeny of their swiftest race horses, and upon the multiplying of offspring of noble stock they base their hope of future victories, we, too, for a reason like theirs in selecting the progeny of victorious Olympic mares, should base our hope of a bountiful vintage upon the selection of progeny of the most fruitful.”
His treatise was political as well as practical. Columella saw viticulture as the potential salvation of Rome, now up to its neck in decadence. Its emperors had gone from bad to worse: Whereas Augustus, the first Caesar, had been abstemious and had forced himself to vomit if occasion demanded he drink more than a pint of wine, his successors had gloried in excess.
Caligula, the third emperor (d. AD 41), “assumed the entire garb of Bacchus and made royal progresses and sat in judgment thus arrayed”; Nero (d. AD 68), the next Caesar but one, had married himself, as a woman, to one of his knights, consecrated the marriage, also as a woman, and, when Rome had been devastated by a fire, had embarked on a drinking binge while he serenaded the flames with his harp. Rome’s citizens, meanwhile, as the Satyricon implied, were hell-bent on following the examples set on high.
In the opinion of Columella, the empire could only save itself from decadence by making wine instead of drinking it. He pictured the vigorous good health enjoyed by vintners and contrasted it with the weakness of his fellow Romans who wasted their hours in the circuses and theaters rather than in the grainfields and vineyards. “We spend our nights in licentiousness and drunkenness, our days in gaming or sleeping, and account ourselves blessed by fortune in that ‘we behold neither the rising of the sun nor its setting,’” he regretted, and concluded that in consequence “the bodies of our young men are so flabby and enervated that death seems likely to make no change in them.”

The decadent style of drinking lamented by Rome’s poets, satirists, and gentlemen farmers was nowhere more in evidence than in Pompeii, center of the Roman wine trade. The vine had first been cultivated in the region by Greek colonists, and by the age of the Caesars the town had become one of the principal sources of Italian wine. Although some of its vintages were respected by connoisseurs, its main business was in bulk wine for export. According to Pliny,
“Wines from Pompeii are at their best within ten years and gain nothing from greater maturity. They are also observed to be injurious because of the hangover they cause, which persists until noon on the following day.” Hangovers notwithstanding, Pompeiians were furious drinkers, who seem to have measured the appeal of wine by the quantity they drank. In order to realize their ideal, they cooked themselves in the municipal baths to sweat out previous binges, then, “without putting on a stitch of clothing, still naked and gasping, [would] seize hold of a huge jar . . . and, as if to demonstrate their strength, pour down the entire contents . . . vomit it up again immediately, and then drink another jar. This they repeat two or three times over, as if they were born to waste wine and as if wine could be disposed of only through the agency of the human body.”
Pompeii and the neighboring town of Herculaneum were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, AD 79. Pliny was killed by poison fumes, and the degenerate Pompeiians were buried alive under a layer of mud, lava, and ashes. The resulting time capsule has preserved the scenes of their excess. The grander villas of the town have frescoes depicting the production of wine, or the adventures of Bacchus, including one important series from the so-called 'House of the Mysteries', which shows, in sequence, a young woman being stripped, whipped, and initiated into the arcania of a Bacchic sect.
Also preserved are the town’s 118 tabernae, or taverns, where the poorer citizens drank. A typical example consisted of a single, open room, with a counter to one side, behind which amphorae were stored on their sides on racks, rather like the barrels of beer in an English country pub. Wine was dispensed from these into pottery cucumas, or carafes, and was available in a range of qualities—as evinced by the bill of fare chalked onto the blackboard of one such establishment:
For one [coin] you can drink wine
For two you can drink the best
For four you can drink Falernian.
The Romans continued the Greek habit of mixing their wine with water, and despite the abundance in Pompeii of the former, tabernae keepers were not above overdiluting their vintages with the contents of the town aqueducts, as a piece of graffiti from another tavern indicates: “Curses on you, Landlord, you sell water and drink unmixed wine yourself.” Some tabernae, known as popinae, also doubled as brothels and were graced with splendidly candid frescoes of fornicating couples on the walls of their back rooms.
While most of the public drinking in Pompeii took place in its tabernae, wine was also served, sometimes for free, in its amphitheater. The Roman culture of spectacle entertainments, in particular the spectacle of death, has few parallels in history. Tribal society everywhere was brutal, public executions were a common feature of most ancient civilizations, but the organization, the scale, and the frequency of bestiaria (shows in which wild animals were killed), gladiatorial contests, chariot races, and other such extravaganzas placed Rome in a category of its own. These spectacles were staged to purchase the affection of the masses. The republic was dead, but its façade was preserved and Romans fought for election to various public offices through largesse. Whoever put on the best show gained the greatest number of supporters.
The most extreme entertainments were staged in the capital and were accounted by the epigrammatist Martial to be the greatest wonder of the world, which drew an audience from throughout the empire. Farmers from the provinces, Egyptians, Jews, Scythians, Greeks, and Gauls all flocked to Rome’s amphitheaters to satisfy their curiosity and bloodlust. Since most of the spectacles were competitive, in that their sponsors vied with each other for attention, novelty was the watchword. According to Martial, “Whatever Fame sings of . . . the arena makes real.” Participants in the shows were dressed as historic or mythical figures, ancient battles on land and sea were reenacted, people who had killed, or been killed by, lions in legend were impersonated in appropriate costumes, by criminals or slaves, who were compelled to slay or to die.
The old myths were not only staged by the book, but also in sensational variations and ridiculous combinations. Martial records one combat between Daedalus, the legendary Greek who built himself a pair of wings to fly away from captivity, and a wild boar. The boar won: “Daedalus, now thou art being so mangled by a Lucanian boar, how would’st thou wish thou hads’t now thy wings!”
Writers such as Martial and Columella were the sternest critics of Roman degeneracy. While they delighted in drawing attention to domestic vices, the reputation of the empire’s legions suffered little among its enemies abroad. Roman armies seldom lost battles, and if they did, they were always avenged. The legions maintained the austere principles of the republic, and the depravity that characterized the capital and towns like Pompeii was absent from their camps. The wine rations that they carried served functional rather than hedonistic purposes: Wherever they campaigned they added wine to their drinking water, and its bactericidal properties protected many against the waterborne illnesses that were one of the greatest hazards of warfare in the ancient world. By the end of the first century AD, Roman rule had been extended over much of western Europe, and France, Belgium, parts of Germany, and the British Isles all paid tribute to or professed allegiance with the eternal city.
This western expansion had commenced with the step-by-step subjugation of the French Gauls. The process had been assisted by wine in several ways. In the first instance, its superior alcoholic strength had saved Rome at a crucial moment. The Gauls, like most other kinds of western barbarian, were a beer-loving culture with a binge-drinking mentality, and when they had invaded Italy in 105 BC, they had paused in the Alban district to drink it dry of wine.
Although practiced inebriates, they were unready for the extra kick that wine possessed, and like the degenerates of imperial Rome, they went into speedy physical decline: “They gained so rapidly in corpulence and flabbiness and became so womanish in physical strength that whenever they undertook to exercise their bodies and to drill in arms their respiration was broken by continual panting, their limbs were drenched by much sweat, and they desisted from their toils before they were bidden to do so by their commanders.” Thus compromised, they were slaughtered by the legions.
In addition to reducing the fighting ability of Gallic armies, wine also acted as a civilizing influence in times of peace. The Greek colony of Marseilles on the Mediterranean coast of Gaul had cultivated the grape since its inception, and when the Romans took it over they traded its vintages and their own imports with their former enemies.
From the Gallic point of view the stronger the beverage the better, and their drinking habits became stratified through the availability of wine. According to the historian Poseidonius, “The liquor drunk in the houses of the rich is wine brought from Italy and the country round Marseilles, and is unmixed; though sometimes a little water is added. But among the needier inhabitants a beer is drunk made from wheat, with honey added; the masses drink it plain.” This stratification, which associated wine with power and beer with servitude, was a godsend to Roman wine merchants, who took “wine to them by ship up the navigable rivers, or by chariot traveling overland” and received “incredible prices” for their wares. The going rate was one slave for one amphora  Pompeiian wine. A slave was worth three hundred times as much in Rome.
Notwithstanding their value as trading partners, the Gauls were difficult neighbors who persisted in launching raids into Roman territory. In order to put an end to such incursions, Julius Caesar took the war to Gaul in 58 BC. He found a few of his adversaries had learned the lesson of the Alban massacre and had banned wine. The Nervii, a “savage people of great bravery” who lived in what is now the Champagne district of France, “suffered no wine and other things tending to luxury to be imported; because they thought that by their use the mind is enervated and the courage impaired.”
Clearly, the Nervii considered beer and wine to be fluids without anything in common, for they still drank beer. The additional alcoholic strength of wine seems to have persuaded them that it was not only dangerous but alien. They were exterminated by Caesar’s legions, as were every other tribe who put up any resistance, and thereafter Gaul Romanized rapidly.
Emblematic of this progress was the dispersal of the vine. Bordeaux, once a distant client of Pompeii, became a producer in its own right. The northern limit of the Pax Romana in France was the river Rhine, beyond which lurked numerous Germanic tribes. They, like the ancient Gauls, were beer and binge drinkers. Both characteristics were recorded by the historian Tacitus, who noted that their usual beverage was “a liquor prepared from barley or wheat,” and that their thirst for it was not quenched with moderation: “It is no disgrace to pass days and nights, without intermission, in drinking.”
Moreover, once they were drunk, they started fighting, and “the frequent quarrels that arise amongst them, when inebriated, seldom terminate in abusive language, but more frequently in blood.” The Germans practiced ritual as well as recreational tippling. Like the Persians in the days of Alexander, they considered intoxication to be an essential prelude to decision making. After downing a sufficient quantity of their barley brews, they would “deliberate on the reconcilement of enemies, on family alliances, on the appointment of chiefs, and finally on peace and war; conceiving that at no time is the soul more opened to sincerity, or warmed to heroism.” 
In the opinion of Tacitus, the Teutonic passion for intoxication was a weakness that could be exploited: “If you will but humor their excess in drinking, and supply them with as much as they covet, it will be no less easy to vanquish them by vices than by arms.” Interestingly, the tactic of inebriating opponents before slaughtering them seems to have been a standard Roman military stratagem and was employed with great success over the centuries against various barbarian hordes.
The vast forests of Germania, teeming with beer-drinking savages, held little interest to the Romans. Civilization had to end somewhere, and they chose to draw a line to the north along the river Rhine. To the west, however, lay an Atlantic archipelago, within easy reach of Gaul, and which, although its sky was “obscured by continual rain and cloud, ” was wonderfully fertile, looked promising enough to invade and subdue. The classical world knew very little about Britain or its peoples before Caesar had visited it with his legions in 55 BC.
Tacitus admitted this ignorance in his Agricola, which contained a potted history of the place: “Who the first inhabitants of Britain were is open to question: We must remember we are dealing with barbarians.” Archaeological evidence suggests that the equivocal barbarians were Celtic, and that their drinking habits were little different from those of the Neolithic inhabitants of the Orkney Islands, who had brewed up psychoactive ales by the gallon.
The Romanization of Britain commenced in AD 43 when the emperor Claudius picked up where Caesar had left off and sent four legions over to conquer it. By AD 96, most of England and Wales were part of the empire. Scotland, like Germany, was left to its brutish inhabitants. The subject territory was civilized according to the standard Roman formula. Taxes were imposed that obliged Britons to grow cash crops to sell to the legions in their garrisons; and cooperative local rulers were given Roman names, were encouraged to build country villas in the Italian style, and to plant vineyards.
In the event, “competition for honor proved as effective as compulsion,” and Britons vied in Romanizing themselves. They imported both wine and Bacchus as symbols of sophistication. His image appeared in villas up and down the land—in mosaic in Somerset, in a fresco in Dover, and in marble in Spoonley Wood, Gloucestershire, where he was carved naked, leaning against a vine-entwined tree trunk, dangling an empty cup over the head of a kittenish panther. The British were eager for Roman literature as well as its visual culture. Martial claimed that “Britain is said to hum my verses,” with the intention of implying he was read wherever civilization existed, and proving at the same time the existence in England of a thirst for Latin eloquence.
However, many Britons resented Roman occupation, and while they paid lip service to the customs of their new rulers, their rebellious hearts inspired them to pervert their submission. In Northamptonshire, for instance, the natives superimposed classical shrines on the barrow graves of their ancestors but buried new bodies underneath in the traditional fashion. Moreover, beyond the Roman camps and towns, where Britons still plied their barbarism with impunity, they drank ale not wine, and their ale was so good that it became the staple of the Roman legions stationed in the country.

The Augustan legion, which garrisoned a fortress at Vindolanda on the wall that divided England from Scotland, drank far more English ale than the wine supplied to them in their rations. They employed a certain Arrectus, the first named brewer in British history, to prepare them their liquid bread. Such examples of counter-Romanization, however, were rare throughout the empire. Rome had a dominant and lasting influence on the drinking habits of most of Europe. The culture once famed for its love of milk introduced wine to the parts of the continent where it had been absent, together with a bibulous ethos derived from the Greek model. Rome spread the name of Bacchus from the Libyan deserts to Ultima Thule.

By Iain Gately in the book 'Drink- A Cultural History of Alcohol'-Gotham Books published by Penguin Group, New York, U.S.A, 2008, p.39-52. Edited to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.