According to Greek mythology, Dionysus could have given wine to man and could have taught them the methods about how to produce and correctly consume it. In his honor the Dionysian festivals were conducted as well as the Orphic cults, in which wine was the main protagonist even with sometimes not so nice consequences.
The best poet Homer, in fact said: Insane wine that tends drive even the wisest man to start singing a song, and to laugh whole-heartedly, and sends him to dance, and let escape some word that was better kept quiet.
And from the blind poet the need to place as much trust and knew that men that acted under the impulse of passion. However the wine in itself was so important, so important in fact that in Greece it was the symposiarch’s, the master of ceremonies, task to regulate the pace of the banquet, stabilizing each time how much wine to drink and when to drink it and the level of delusion with the water.
For the ancients wine wasn’t consumed pure, as it provoked undesired and negative effects, and then it was considered barbarous, to be seen as such like the famous episode of Odysseus and the Cyclops Polyphemus, at which point was made to drink a wine that should have been mixed with a good 10 parts of water to be able to tolerate it.
Also in Rome wine was as important as in Greece and the god Dionysus became the god Bacchus and the Dionysian festivals became the Bacchanal. However for the Romans attention to drinking wine wasn’t a right for everyone, in fact Roman women, that normally were relatively free, were prohibited from drinking the fruit of Bacchus as this was reserved only for the men that had aged 30 years and was to be found fragrant!
The importance of the wine then between our ancestors was that important that Pliny the elder declared the famous saying: in vino veritas and also, man owes wine to be the only animal that drinks without being thirsty.
In closing also the good old forefathers understood how necessary wine was in the production of art like the stern Horace declared: No poetry written by water drinkers can be liked or live a long time.
And so who are we to blame him? Before it’s too late, better to do like Aristophanes and close: Soon, bring me a drink of wine, in the way that I can bathe my mind and say something intelligent!
