Plato

One of the great stories in the world of wine over the last half century is the rebirth of Greek wine. I say “rebirth” because wine has been an inextricable part of the story of Greece from time immemorial. What would Plato’s Symposium — literally “drinking party” — be without wine? And the story of Greek wine goes back much further than that. According to experts, wine grapes have been cultivated in Greece from about 6000 BC. Anyone who has read Homer recalls his frequent deployment of the epithet “οἶνοψ πόντος.” That is usually translated as “wine-dark sea,” though it literally means “wine-faced” or “wine-eyed” (οἶνος + ὄψις) sea. What color do you suppose “wine-dark” is?

Some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Athenaeus of Naucratis, a shadowy Egyptian-born Greek who floruit somewhere in the Roman Empire during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Septimius Severus, i.e., around 200 AD. Athenaeus was a rhetorician, grammarian and epicure. But he is known to posterity primarily as the author of The Learned Banqueters (Δειπνοσοφισταὶ), a sprawling, miscellaneous work that touches on, well, just about everything: food, philosophy, fermentation, fabulation and many other subjects, not all of which begin with the phoneme “f.” Henry James called the three-volume Victorian novel a “loose baggy monster.” None was so loose or so baggy as Athenaeus’ compendium. There is a bit of Petronius’s Satyricon (c.