The following passage from "A Short History of Drunkenness:How, Why, Where and When Humankind has Gotten Merry from the Stone age to the Present," by Mark Forsyth, is about the pivotal place of Ancient Greeks in party culture.
The Greeks didn’t drink beer, they drank wine; but they watered it down by a ratio of about two or three parts water to one part wine, which made it almost exactly the same strength. That’s the funny thing about the Greeks: they had to complicate everything. Still, this allowed them to indulge in their very favorite pastime, because more than anything else, more than philosophy or pederasty or drinking or sculpture, the Greeks loved being sniffy about foreigners.
Given the Greek penchant for cocking a snook at those who dared to be not- Greek, it’s a little surprising that their god of wine, Dionysus, was usually said to be a foreigner. He was born on Mount Nysa, which was in either Ethiopia or Arabia, or sometimes India, and he had traveled to Greece from the East with a horde of exotic animals and dancing humans and centaurs and other mythical creatures.
(In fact, it’s rather intriguing that the Greek god of wine and the Egyptian goddess of beer were both said to arrive from the exotic south with a dancing menagerie of humans, animals and spirits, but it’s probably just a coincidence.)
Dionysus was, though, a Greek god. He’s mentioned as far back as 1200 bc, and he pops up in the Iliad, so he’d been around for 700 years by the time you get to the fifth century bc, which is when Athens became classical, and when most of the stuff we think of as Ancient Greek actually happened.
The myths about Dionysus mostly fall into two categories.
(1) There are the stories of people who don’t recognize him, and don’t even realize that he is a god. Who these people are varies from pirates to princes, but their fate is usually the same. Dionysus punishes them by turning them into animals. The moral of the stories is reasonably clear. When you’re dealing with wine you need to remember that you are dealing with something powerful, something divine. This is no ordinary drink. It is holy. Moreover, alcohol, if you’re not careful, can bring out the beast in you.
Dionysus was always connected with animals. He had a chariot pulled by lions and tigers. He hung around with centaurs, who are half human and half horse, and satyrs, who are half human and half goat. He had a human friend called Silenus, who nonetheless was sometimes depicted as having horse’s ears and a tail. In fact, the only fully human friends he had were the maenads.
Maenads were women who worshipped Dionysus. They did this by going out into the mountains wearing next to nothing and getting very, very drunk. Then they would dance and let their hair down and rip animals to pieces in a sort of terrifying Arcadian hen party.
Nobody is quite sure whether maenads ever actually existed, or whether they were just a sexual fantasy of Greek men, like the Amazons. Greek women had a fine time mythologically, but in reality they tended to have to stay at home and were distinctly put upon. Of course, there may have been the occasional priestess here or there. There is one epitaph from the second century bc that goes:
Bacchae [maenads] of the city, say “Farewell, holy priestess.” An excellent woman deserves this. She led you to the mountain and carried all the sacred objects and implements, processing at the head of the whole city.
But that’s only one, and it may well have been just a disappointing ritual. Maenads seem unlikely: on a purely practical level, how would you transport all that booze up a mountain?
The maenads, though, were terribly important in the second type of Dionysus myth.
(2) Dionysus didn’t like teetotalers. This is unsurprising for a god of wine, but Dionysus being Dionysus he tends to kill them cruelly. The most famous example is a play by Euripides where the King tries to outlaw maenadism so Dionysus makes his maenads believe that the King is a lion and they rip him limb from limb (the group is led by the King’s mother). There’s another story about Orpheus wandering the countryside. His wife has died and he wants to have a good cry. Unfortunately, he comes across a group of maenads who are all getting plastered and want him to join in. Orpheus politely declines and they rip him limb from limb as well.
There are a lot of stories like this and they all end the same way. The moral is pretty clear: you should recognize that drinking is dangerous and that it might turn you into a wild beast, but you should still drink. Never turn down an invitation to a party. Do not, whatever you do, try to ban drunkenness.
So, Greek mythology has a funny, rather wary relationship with drunkenness. The Sumerians saw it as a pure and jolly communal good, the Egyptians saw it as an extreme sport, but the Greeks stood back and stroked their beards and pondered. They developed theories and employed strategies. The Spartans, who were a nasty bunch, would force their slaves to get drunk in front of the children, in order to put them off the idea. The Athenians, who were a trifle less sadistic, decided to philosophize over exactly how drunk you should get and how you should behave when drunk.
Plato, quite specifically, says that getting drunk is like going to the gym: the first time you do it you’ll be really bad and end up in pain. But practice makes perfect. If you can drink a lot and still behave yourself, then you are an ideal man. If you can do this in company, then you can show the world that you are an ideal man, because you are displaying the great virtue of self- control even under the influence.
Self- control, said Plato, was like bravery. A man can only display bravery when he’s in danger. A man can only display self- control when he’s drunk a lot of wine. Bravery can be learned. A chap who spends his days fighting battles can train himself to be brave. A man who spends his evenings getting drunk can train himself to ever higher levels of self- control.
What is better adapted than the festive use of wine, in the first place to test, and in the second place to train, the character of a man, if care be taken in the use of it? What is there cheaper, or more innocent?
Basically, Plato thought that if you can trust a fellow when he’s drunk, you can trust him anywhere. Moreover, the drinking test has no real downside. If you get into a business deal with a man and then find out that he’s dishonest, you lose money. But if you get drunk with him first you get to see his true character, without putting anything at risk.
All of which leads to the logical conclusion that you can’t trust a teetotaler.
So drunkenness in Greece was a strange and subtle business. You were meant to drink. You were meant to get drunk. But you were meant to know what you were doing. You were meant to display virtue in drunkenness, and sail a steady ship on a stormy sea of wine.
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