Ancient wines were also exposed in smoky garrets until reduced to a thick syrup, when they had to be strained before they were drunk. Habit only it seems could have endeared these pickled and pitched and smoked wines to the Greek and Roman palates, as it has endeared to some of our own caviare and putrescent game.
To drink wine unmixed was, it has been said before, held by the Greeks to be disreputable. Those who did so were said to be like Scythians. The Maronean wine of Homer was mixed with twenty measures of water. The common proportion in the more polished days of Greece was three or four parts of water to one of wine. But probably Greece, like Rome, had many a Menenius who loved a cup of hot wine with not a drop of allaying Tiber in it. If the condition of Alcibiades in the Platonic symposium was the result of wine so diluted, the wine must have been strong indeed.
The Grecian and Roman banquet began with the mulsum, of mingled wine and honey. The dessert wines among the Greeks were the Thasian and Lesbian; among the Romans the Alban, Cæcuban, and Falernian, and afterwards the Chian and Lesbian.
In the triumphal supper of Cæsar in his dictatorship Pliny says Falernian flowed in hogsheads and Chian in gallons. At the well-known Horatian supper of Nasidienus, the Cæcuban and indifferent Chian were handed round before the host advised Mæcenas that Alban and Falernian were procurable if he preferred them.
Juvenal and Martial tell us of the complaint of clients, that while the master and his friends drank the best wine out of costly cups, they themselves had to put up with ropy liquors in coarse, half-broken vessels. Human nature has changed little in this respect since those satirists wrote.
The old fashion of dedicating cups to divinities led perhaps to our modern system of drinking healths. Sometimes as many cups were drunk to a person as there were letters in the name of the person so honoured.
It was better then for the bibulous to toast the ancient Sempronia or Messalina than the modern Meg or Kate.
Hydromeli, made of honey and five-year-old rain-water; oxymeli, made of honey, sea-salt, and vinegar; hydromelon, made of honey and quinces; hydrorosatum, a similar compound with the addition of roses; apomeli, water in which honeycomb had been boiled; omphacomeli, a mixture of honey and verjuice; myrtites, a compound of honey and myrtle seed; rhoites, a drink in which the pomegranate took the place of the myrtle; œnanthinum, made from the fruit of the wild vine; silatum, taken, according to Festus, in the forenoon, and made of Saxifragia major (Forcellini) or Tordylium officinale (Liddell and Scott); sycites, wine of figs; phœnicites, wine of palms; abrotonites, wine of wormwood; and adynamon, a weak wine for the sick—are most of them mentioned as drinks in Pliny.[7] This author also mentions drinks made of sorbs, medlars, mulberries, and other fruits, of asparagus, origanum, thyme, and other herbs. Hippocrates praises wine as a medical agent. In his third book the father of medicine gives a description of the general qualities and virtues of wines, and shows for what diseases they are in his opinion advantageous. For more information on wines the reader may consult Sir Edward Barry, Dr. Alexander Henderson, and Cyrus Redding. Henderson, who was, like Barry, a physician, did not always agree with him. Barry’s observations, according to Henderson, are chiefly borrowed from Bacci. Those not so borrowed are for the most part “flimsy and tedious.”
The vessels and other drinking cups were commonly ranged on an abacus of marble, something like our sideboard. It was large, if Philo Judeus is to be believed. Pliny, speaking of Pompey’s spoils in the matter of the pirates, says the number of jewel-adorned drinking cups was enough to furnish nine abaci. Cicero charges Verres with having plundered the abaci.