What the Odyssey Can Teach Us About Wine—and Drinking
Wine flows through the Odyssey. Homer mentions it well over a hundred times, and even supplies the first recorded tasting note in history. He loves wine so much he sees it on the face of the sea: the famous ‘wine-dark sea’.
But wine in the Odyssey is far more than a drink, or even a poetic image. It is a measure of civilisation. How people drink, and whether they drink at all, tells us what kind of people they are.
What Odysseus Most Loves
Many people imagine that the Odyssey unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians.
But before beginning his story, Odysseus tells King Alcinous and the Phaeacian court what, to him, constitutes the happiest scene imaginable:
For I say that there is no fulfilment more delightful than when joy possesses a whole people, and the banqueters in the halls sit in rows listening to a singer, while beside them the tables are laden with bread and meat, and the wine-bearer draws wine from the mixing bowl and carries it round and pours it into their cups. This seems to my mind the fairest thing there is.
This is the very scene before him. It is a revealing picture of the good life, three thousand years ago. Wine is not drunk alone, or merely for intoxication. It is shared, with food, music, conversation, and storytelling. And the adventures that Odysseus is about to relate will show what happens when those customs break down.
The Wine That Bested a Giant
Odysseus begins with the Cicones at Ismarus. After sacking their city, he orders his men to leave immediately. But they refuse. Instead, they remain on the shore slaughtering livestock and drinking wine. ‘There,’ Homer tells us, ‘much wine was drunk.’ While they are feasting, the surviving Cicones summon reinforcements. They counterattack, and Odysseus loses six men from every ship. Already, wine-drinking has become a test of self-command.
One assumes they were drinking the local wine—from what is now PGI Ismaros, in Thrace. At the heart of this wine region is the ancient town of Maroneia, named for Maron, the legendary priest of Apollo—and in later tradition, grandson of Dionysus. During the raid, Odysseus had spared Maron, together with his wife and child. In gratitude, Maron gave him gold, a silver mixing bowl, and twelve jars of an extraordinary wine.
It is here that Homer gives us the first tasting note:
He gave me twelve jars of wine, sweet and unmixed, a divine drink. No servant or maid in the house knew of it, but only [Maron] himself, his dear wife, and one housekeeper. And whenever they drank this honey-sweet red wine, he would fill one cup and pour it into twenty measures of water, and from the mixing bowl there rose a marvellous sweet fragrance: then indeed it would have been no pleasure to hold back.
Admittedly, Homer is not using the WSET tasting template. But I think the examiners would be satisfied that this is no rustic plonk.
Odysseus takes a skin of the wine when he goes to investigate the Cyclopes. The Cyclops Polyphemus, though a shepherd, is not a social or civilised creature. He has generous grapes—later tradition would place him on the volcanic slopes of Mount Etna—and milk and cheese, but no wine. So when Odysseus pours him some of Maron’s wine, he drinks it neat and is overwhelmed by it. When he asks for more, Odysseus obliges him three times, until he slumbers. That’s when the red-hot olive stake is driven into his single eye. It was not merely by his cunning that Odysseus defeated the vastly stronger Cyclops, but by wine, and by turning the monster’s own savagery against him.
The Sorceress’s Wine
Several adventures later, Odysseus and his remaining men reach the island of Circe. The sorceress welcomes a group of them into her house and feeds them a mixture of cheese, barley meal, honey, and Pramnian wine, a strong, celebrated wine of uncertain origin—interlaced with amnesic drugs. As they gulp it down, she strikes them with her wand, and they are transformed into pigs. (Circe is the original sorceress, and why Western witches and sorcerers use a wand.)
Men surrender to their appetites, forget their homes, and become animals. Yet Homer is not preaching abstinence, but self-control. After Odysseus overcomes Circe and she restores the men, wine and feasting help lift their spirits.
Two Kinds of Feast
Much later, when back in Ithaca, Odysseus offers one of the shrewdest descriptions of drunkenness in ancient literature. In Alexander Pope’s verse translation:
And wine can of their wits the wise beguile,
Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile,
The grave in merry measures frisk about,
And many a long-repented word bring out.
For Homer, then, the question is not whether to drink, but how. For a positive model, we need only return to the Phaeacians. They mix their wine with water, pour libations to the gods, exchange gifts, eat together, listen to music, and tell stories. They welcome the shipwrecked Odysseus and create the conditions in which a stranger might tell his story. Here, wine does not obliterate memory, but facilitates its recovery. And the scene is, of course, ‘the fairest thing there is.’ Grapes have been turned into wine, ingredients into cuisine, sounds into music, strangers into guests, and experiences into stories. Only once he has recovered his story is Odysseus fit to return to Ithaca.
Ithaca, where the suitors have been occupying Odysseus’ palace, slaughtering his livestock, draining his wine stores, and feasting at his expense while competing for Penelope. Outwardly, theirs is a civilised feast. There is meat and wine, music and conversation, servants and guests. But the suitors abuse that hospitality and gorge themselves day after day. Like Polyphemus, they know how to consume but not how to live.
Homer lived almost three thousand years ago, in a world in which wine was not treated simply as another form of ‘alcohol’. It was agriculture and craftsmanship transformed into hospitality, fellowship, ritual, pleasure, and even enlightenment. But Homer was not uncritical. Wine could indeed loosen the tongue, overwhelm judgement, invite forgetfulness, lose men, and return them to animals. The same drink could accompany Odysseus’ fairest vision, while also bringing down a giant, turning his men into swine, and foreboding the demise of the suitors. Civilisation requires not the abstinence of Cyclopes, but the moderation of men.
For Homer, the opposite of drunkenness was not sobriety, but civilisation.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this article, you might look into The Meaning of Myth, on the psychology and philosophy of mythology, and The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, on the appreciation, psychology, and philosophy of wine.
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