Drink (7 page)

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 of 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.

4 WINE, BLOOD, SALVATION

At about the same time that the
Satyricon
was composed, and the wild Britons were developing a taste for wine, a rebellion commenced in one of Rome’s more civilized provinces—Judea. The future emperor Titus, fresh from a stint as military tribune in Britain, was sent with four legions to subdue the revolt and, in AD 70, sacked Jerusalem, killed or enslaved much of its population, and burned down its temple. His victory was commemorated with the construction of a triumphal arch in Rome, which still stands, and which depicts various sacred objects taken from the Jews as booty. Religion had been the cause of the differences between Rome and its Jewish subjects. The latter were monotheistic and iconoclastic, and had refused to erect a sculpture of the emperor Caligula in their temple, as required by imperial edict. Their obstinacy in such matters was thought to be a shame, for in most other aspects, they behaved like a civilized race. They were a wine-drinking culture, indeed, had been enamored of the grape for millennia prior to the foundation of Rome. Archaeological evidence suggests that their Semitic predecessors had carried out an extensive wine trade with Egypt and probably were responsible for the vintages found in the tomb of King Scorpion in Hierakonpolis.

The ancient connections of the Jews to viticulture were reflected in their sacred texts: Wine makes its debut in the Tanakh alongside Noah. After the flood, the original patriarch disembarked from his ark, planted a vineyard, and “he drank of the wine, and was drunken, and was uncovered in his tent.” Thereafter, references to wine flow thick and fast. The promised land—the homeland selected by God for his chosen race—is identified by the presence of vines bearing giant bunches of grapes; the prophets of the Tanakh discuss its consumption, and its patriarchs and kings gave conspicuous examples of how and how not to drink. The Tanakh even provides practical advice in the Book of Isaiah (5:1-5) as to the best way to lay out a vineyard, in the guise of a metaphor that illuminates the love of God for his chosen people. This sacred text is generally very positively disposed toward drinking, albeit with the odd warning: “A laboring man that is given to drunkenness shall not be rich,” cautions Ecclesiasticus 19:1, for instance. Such sentiments aside, alcohol, in the form of wine, is usually represented as the gift of god—a source of wealth and happiness, a substance with the power to “soothe the heavy-hearted.” Furthermore, the cultivation of the grape is portrayed as a dignified occupation— appropriate work for a prophet or a patriarch.

Wine played an important part in the personal rituals of the Jews. The weekly Sabbath commenced with a prayer delivered over a cup of wine; circumcisions, weddings, and funerals were celebrated with prescribed measures, the consumption of which was obligatory for every man present. In addition to such moderate imbibing, on the annual festival of Purim the faithful were instructed by their rabbis to drink so much wine that they could “no longer distinguish between the phrases ‘Cursed be Haman’ and ‘Blessed be Mordechai,’” respectively their most deadly enemy and most devoted friend at a critical point in their history.

Wine, and the Jewish Tanakh, likewise played vital roles in the lives of the adherents of a new religion, Christianity, which had arisen in the first century AD in Roman Judea. Christians were thought at first to be a breakaway sect of Jews, whose clandestine rituals were a cloak for witchcraft, and which also concealed a conspiracy to overthrow Rome and her empire. The emperor Nero blamed them for the fire that ruined much of his capital in AD 64, and crucified or burned as many of them as he could find. Any stragglers were sewn into the skins of wild beasts and fed to the lions at the circus. Notwithstanding such an inauspicious debut in the history books, the new religion made converts at so rapid a rate that despite imperial hostility, within a century of the death of its founder, Christians could be found in almost every corner of the empire.

The rapid dissemination of Christianity was in part a consequence of the duty Christ had laid upon his followers to propagate his message. This was something of a theological innovation. Judaism, which Christianity acknowledged as its source, and as sharing the same single God, did not seek converts. Moreover, it laid obstacles in the path of those wishing to become Jews, including circumcision for men and strict dietary taboos. Christianity had no such barriers to entry. The matter had been debated and settled by the apostles: Anyone could become a Christian, and every convert was expected to spread the good news.

The early rituals of the new faith were also far simpler than those of Judaism. The single most important rite of the Christians was the ceremony of the Eucharist, at which they gathered to share bread and wine, in accordance with the instructions of their founder. This ceremony placed the consumption of wine at the heart of the new religion and made it a duty to drink. Christianity added a new dimension to the relationship between humanity and alcohol. Not only could it relieve thirst, inspire joy, and ruin livers, but it might also, in the form of wine, represent the transubstantiated blood of the son of God. This potential was made apparent by Christ to his disciples at the last supper he spent with them, to celebrate the Jewish feast of Passover. After filling his cup with wine, he shared it with them and explained the significance of this act: “And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many.” (Mark 14:23-25)

The Eucharist was not the only link between Christianity and wine. Jesus had used the care of a vineyard as the theme for one of his most famous parables, and the grapevine as a metaphor for the relationship between himself and his converts. Moreover, the first miracle he had performed had been the transformation of six jars of water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana. Indeed, so pervasive was wine in the teachings of the new religion that the apostle Paul had felt it necessary to make clear that its role was principally symbolic and that the Eucharist should not be taken as an invitation to gluttony or drunkenness, “For he that eateth or drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself [for] not discerning the Lord’s body.”