Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. James Davidson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ periods managed to place drunks on stage and enact the preparations for drinking-parties. This was nothing less than appropriate given that the plays were performed under the tutelage of Dionysus, the god of wine himself.

      This ancient discourse falls readily within the boundaries set by the two sides of the modern controversy, turning from drink to the community of drinkers and back again to drink, enabling us to escape in the first place some of Baudelaire’s most trenchant criticisms and present a brief survey ‘de tous les vins, de leurs différentes qualités…’

      WINE

      The vine was familiar all over mainland Greece and in those coastal enclaves from Catalonia to the Crimea that the Greeks colonized. In fact, wine-drinking was considered nothing less than a symbol of Greek cultural identity. It was a mark of their barbarism that the barbarians drank beer. If they did know of wine, and the Greeks acknowledged that other cultures were not totally ignorant of it, they misused it. The wine itself, in the raw and undiluted form rarely tasted by the Greeks, was often sweet and thanks to hot weather and low yields probably towards the upper end of the scale of potency at 15–16 per cent as opposed to the 12.5 per cent which is normal today. It usually had bits of grape and vine debris floating in it and needed to be sieved before being mixed or poured out. This will have made red wines correspondingly dark in colour and somewhat tannic. The scent of ancient wine was said to have a powerful effect on wine-lovers and was often compared to the scent of flowers. Some other aromas may have been unfamiliar to the modern nose. For a start, the wine absorbed the taste of the container in which it had been carried or stored; not the oak that lends to modern wines their characteristic vanilla flavours, but pitch or resin used to seal amphoras and, on occasion, the sheep and goats that provided the raw material for wine-skins. Other items were sometimes added at various points in the process of manufacturing and preparation including salt water, aromatic herbs, perfume and in one case honey and dough. Aristotle in a fragment of his treatise On Drunkenness mentions drinking wine from a ‘Rhodes jar’ which was prepared with an infusion of myrrh and rushes. Apparently when heated the vessel lessened the intoxicating power of the liquid inside.

      According to Mnesitheus, three colours of wine were differentiated, ‘black’, ‘white’ and kirrhos, or amber. The white and amber wines could be either sweet or dry, the ‘black’ could also be made ‘medium’. The Hippocratic treatise On Diet categorizes wines also as ‘fragrant’ or ‘odourless’, ‘slender’ or ‘fat’, and ‘strong’ or ‘weaker’. Theophrastus says wines were sometimes blended.⁴

      The Greeks, unlike the Romans after them, seem to have had no appreciation of particular vintages, but certainly recognized the value of ageing, something which amazed antiquarians as late as the early eighteenth century, when wines usually deteriorated quickly. This misunderstanding seems to be a simple consequence of the fact that in the early Middle Ages readily sealable clay amphoras fell out of favour to be replaced by less air-tight receptacles. The age of wine was a matter of some importance to connoisseurs, inspiring the gourmand Archestratus to heights of purple poetastery that make modern connoisseurs look prosaic:

      Then, when you have drawn a full measure for Zeus Saviour, you must drink an old wine, bearing on its shoulders a head hoary indeed, a wine whose wet curls are crowned with white flowers, a wine begat of wave-girdled Lesbos. And Bybline, the wine that hails from holy Phoenicia, I recommend, though I do not place it in the same rank as the other. For if you were not previously on intimate terms and it catches your taste-buds unaware, it will seem more fragrant than the Lesbian, and it does retain its bouquet for a prodigious length of time, but when you come to drink it you will find it inferior by far, while in your estimation the Lesbian will soar, worthy not merely of wine’s prerogatives but of ambrosia’s. Some swagger-chattering gas-bags may scoff that Phoenician was ever the sweetest of wines but to them I pay no heed … The wine of Thasos too makes noble drinking, provided it be old with the fair seasons of many years.

      Wine’s ability to age well drew some unfavourable comparisons with the human species. A character in a play of Eubulus, for instance, remarks on how the hetaeras esteem old wine, but not old men. A fragment of Cratinus conjures up a more sophisticated deployment of the human lifetime analogy. He talks of ‘Mendaean wine coming of age’ (hēbōnta, literally ‘in bloom’ or ‘pubescent’), thereby bringing to mind modern maturity charts of the ‘life’ of a wine divided into periods of maturation: ‘Ready’, ‘Peak’, ‘Tiring’, ‘Decline’.⁵

      The vast bulk of the wine consumed was undistinguished local produce from the harvest of small unspecialized holdings. This was what the Athenians called trikotylos, or ‘litre wine’ (literally, three half-pints) because, according to the lexicographer Hesychius, you could get three half-pint measures of it for only an obol. Some, however, was of a much higher quality imported from areas famous for their wines and grown on large estates. These wines are often found listed along with other fine foods in comedy, although the top rank contains rather fewer specimens than the number of fishes, for instance, at the poets’ command, rarely amounting to more than three or four at a time. Membership of this elite is not always consistent, but the wines of Thasos, Chios and Mende, a city in the Chalcidice, are the most prominent for most of the classical period. These are joined by the wines of Lesbos which are occasionally found in lists as early as the fifth century BCE, although Pliny has the impression that their reputation dated only from the end of the fourth. Characters in the plays discourse freely on the peculiar qualities of each wine, its characteristic colour and scent, its sweetness, as in this speech of Dionysus from a play of Hermippus: ‘With … Mendaean wine the gods themselves wet their soft beds. And then there is Magnesian, generous, sweet and smooth, and Thasian upon whose surface skates the perfume of apples; this I judge by far the best of all the wines, except for blameless, painless Chian.’⁶

      The fine wines of the classical period have left traces of their popularity not only in the remnants of ancient literature, but also in fragments of amphoras, dug up around the Athenian Agora and elsewhere. Each of the great wine-exporting cities packaged its wine in distinctive and more or less uniformly-shaped vases, which can be differentiated by archaeologists. The Chians even used their amphora as an identifying symbol on their coinage. This confirms what the comic fragments suggest, that these city wines were specific products, with recognizable characteristics. Some cities specialized in producing only one kind of wine, others produced more. Chian wine, for instance, came in three types, austēros (dry), glukazōn (sweet), and one called autokratos in between the two. The individuality of these wines can be explained as the result of the natural prevalence of particular varieties of vine and certain traditional methods specific to a region. It is not a coincidence that the sources of these distinctive wines are, without exception, isolated agricultural economies, literally in the case of islands like Thasos and Chios, or, like Mende, surrounded by barbarians. It is significant, in this respect, that Lesbian wine takes its name from the island itself, the geographical entity, rather than from the cities, the political entities, Mitylene, Eresus and Methymna, that divided the territory between them. Some very occasional references indicate ancient recognition of that rather less tangible quality of terroir, the magical influence of specific plots of land. The best Chian wine apparently came from an area in the north-west of the island, and was known as Ariusian. We also hear of a wine called Bibline which, contra Archestratus, probably came not from Phoenician Byblos, but from an area in Thrace opposite the north-western part of Thasos, and which probably belonged to the territory of one of the cities in the area, perhaps to Thasos itself.⁷

      Thasos also provides, in contrast, the best evidence for highly organized viticulture carried out on a large scale, the haphazard blessings of sound traditional methods and good soil supplemented with legislation. A series of inscriptions from the island reveal СКАЧАТЬ