The Alcohol Culture. Ancient Greece.
Part 2 of 3 ( Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Ancient China).
The Greeks never drank pure wine. This was the hallmark of barbarians and was believed to result in madness. A ratio of one part wine to three parts water was considered safe. Even one to one was thought to be risky.
The best wine came from the islands of Chios, Lesbos and Thasos. Those with a modest budget would be content with plonk from Kos, Rhodes or Knidos. Neither beer nor spirits were popular.
Dionysus, the god of wine, was a Greek god. He’s mentioned as far back as 1200BC, 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.
Wine was widespread in Hellenic society: it was used as an offering to their deities; as a currency to buy rare and precious things from distant countries; and it was drunk formally, ritually, as a medicine, and to quenche thirst (утолять жажду).
In some Greek states such as Athens its consumption could be a civic duty. At the great public feasts officials made its distribution. They ensured that all present got their fair share of alcohol. Such equality of proportions was the seed from which grew the concept of demokratia, or «people power».
So drunkenness in Greece was a strange and subtle business. You were meant to drink. You were meant to get drunk. And the venue for this was the symposium.
The symposium was a wine drinking party, which took place in a private room in the house called ‘men’s room’. Bars, pubs did not exist back then.