The View From Mount Olympus: What The Greek Gods Ate And Drank While Partying

Forbes

2 days ago

|Medium: Fresco|Creation date: 1518-1519|Located in: Palazzo Farnese, Farnesina, Italy, circa 1518. ... More (Photo by David Lees/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)Rare is the Greek god or goddess who is not a cosmic annoyance to human beings. They are immeasurably flawed, vindictive, irrational, self-serving, mean-spirited and use their powers to outwit each other and mankind. They were also gluttons: According to Homer, the gods lounging atop Mount Olympus 'feasted all day until sunset and ate to their hearts content,' then they would put up their feet and listen to music and poetry.
Bacchanalia, before 1659. Found in the Collection of Art History Museum, Vienne. (Photo by Fine Art ... More Images/)
Dionysus was a god the Greeks most happily imitated. Called Bacchus by the Romans, he was the privileged son of Zeus himself and god of agriculture, who showed men how to grow wine grapes and make wine; he was also a comic sower of decadence, though he was never depicted as obese by Greek sculptors.
He would conduct his conquests surrounded by a retinue of Bacchii that included drunken satyrs and mad women known as maenads who wore crowns of snakes and would tear animals and enemies to pieces.
The feasts celebrating Dionysus date to Attica, where a yearly wine festival was held during the winter solstice and grew into raucous, sexually charged, raunchy scenes in which masked men dressed in goat skins, giant phalluses were carried about and flaunted and dances tended towards the obscene.
ITALY - CIRCA 2002: Symposium scene, ca 480-490 BC, decorative fresco from the north wall of the ... More Tomb of the Diver at Paestum, Campania, Italy. Detail of the so-called lovers. Ancient Greek civilization, Magna Graecia, 5th Century BC. Paestum, Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Archaeological Museum) (Photo)
Drinking parties held in Dionysus's honor, called sympósions, became very deliberate gluttonous events, despite Dionysus's own dictum that a man should drink only three cups of wine at dinner: toasting the first to health, the second to love and pleasure and the third to sleep, after which a guest should go home to bed. Few paid much attention once the party got going.Attic Red-Figure Psykter, about 510 BC. Wine Cooler with Athletes. Additional Info: The psykter is a ... More vessel used for cooling wine at a symposium. Placed in a large bowl of ice-cold water, the bulbous upper section - decorated here with youths in the gymnasium - would be visible to drinkers. Creator: Smikros. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
Such banquets were all male, with the exception of naked dancing girls, and the manners and rituals of inviting guests, making the menus and deciding on the entertainment were very involved. During a sympósion guests arrived, their feet would be washed by slaves, then they reclined on couches; a communal cup called a psycter of aromatics was passed around, and the eating part of the banquet began. But the serious drinking came after dinner.
The meal would consist of an enormous number of dishes. A poem written around 400 BC called The Banquet describes a feast well appreciated by its enthusiastic author.
In came a pair of slaves with a shiny table, and another, and
another until they filled the room.
They fetched in show-white barley-rolls baskets,
A casserole— no bigger than that—call it a marmite, full of a
noble eel with a look of the conger about him.
Honey-glazed shrimps besides, my love,
Squid sprinkled with sea-salt,
Baby birds in flaky pastry,
And a baked tuna, gods! What a huge one fresh from the fire
and the pan and the carving knife.
Enough steaks from its tender belly to delight us both as long
as we might care to stay and munch.
. . . . Then the same polished tables, loaded with more good
things, sailed back to us, 'second table,' as men say
Sweet pastry shells, crispy flapjacks, toasted sesame cakes
drenched in honey sauce,
Cheesecake, made with milk and honey, baked like a pie;
Cheese-and-sesame sweetmeats fried in the hottest oil in
sesame seeds were passed around.
At that point, with only small bites called tragemata to nibble on, the guests began to drink as much as they liked of wine cut two-thirds by water. If a man protested that he'd had enough wine and refused another cup, he had to perform some silly entertainment, like dancing naked or carrying the girl flute-player around the room. Parasites was the name given to those who arrived late to the party and mooched off the remains. Only around 500 BC were women invited to join the fun, but they were largely courtesans, prostitutes and female artists.
Epicurus (ca.341-270 BC). Ancient Greek philosopher. Bust. Marble. From Villa Casali, Rome (1-160 ... More AD). British Museum. London, England, Great Britain. (Photo by: Prisma/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
How such a gentle philosopher named Epicurus became equated with the term 'epicureanism' as a license to excessive indulgence, particularly in food and drink, is a unfortunate because he actually
advocated 'katastematic pleasure' that is experienced through a harmonious state of mind free of mental distress and pain achieved through a simple life rather than by activating unnatural pleasures like gluttony that take hold of the mind's free will.
Ulysses and Circe, ca 1580-1585. Found in the collection of Art History Museum, Vienne. Artist : ... More Spranger, Bartholomeus (1546-1611). (Photo by Fine Art Images/)
In Homer's Odyssey, the poet insists that while heroes need proper nourishment, mostly meat and bread, it would be foolhardy for them to indulge in gluttonous behavior. Nevertheless, in The Iliad the hero Odysseus is called by an opponent 'wild for fame, glutton for cunning, glutton for war,' while Odysseus uses the word 'glutton' to describe King Agamemnon as a 'dog-faced' glutton' and 'people-devouring king.'
When Odysseus sails into the clutches of the breathtakingly beautiful goddess Circe, she turns his men into swine with a drugged drink (she turns them back, too) and persuades him to feast with her and her maidens on 'enough food and drink to last forever.' And then to bed. Odysseus and his men gave in to her seductions and stuck around the island 'day after day, eating food in plenty, and drinking sweet wine' for an entire year.Herakles Marotti, from Rome, 2nd century. Statuette of naked Herakles in Boston-Oxford type, with ... More club, and lionskin. Copy of work of c460 BC. Dimensions: height: 57 cm. (Photo by Ashmolean Museum/)
But the candidate for Super Glutton is the god Herakles (Hercules to the Romans), a bastard son of Zeus whose wife Hera tried to abort him and afterwards tried to make his life miserable. Herakles is, of course, a person of inhuman strength, but he emerges as a comic figure among Greeks who regarded his gluttonous antics as human foibles. From the earliest days of Greek drama Herakles is ridiculed for his brutish way of eating his food, his preference for a good meal versus a good woman and, in Aristophanes's The Bird, even his reluctance to leave a barbecue in order to help save his own father. In an earlier play, The Frogs, Aristophanes had also portrayed Herakles as a god led around by his nose at the thought of food, describing how in a trip to the underworld he had gobbled up sixteen loaves of bread, 20 portions of beef stew, a mess of fish and a newly made goat's cheese—baskets included—then, bellowing and drawing his sword, skipped out on the bill.
Though sometimes depicted in terracotta figurines from the 5th and 4th centuries BC as pot-bellied, overwhelmingly Herakles was sculpted in marble and bronze by both Greek and Romans as a male figure of daunting musculature with what today are called 'killer abs.'
Alexander the Great on his Sickbed, 1806. Creator: CW Eckersberg. (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage ... More Images via Getty Images)
Alexander the Great was a mere mortal and a big drinker who on 'on such a day, and sometimes two days together, slept after a debauch.' ALexander's soldiers, named Promachus. won the prize after knocking down four gallons of wine (unmixed with water). But not everyone, especially the local people, was used to drinking so much wine, resulting in 41 deaths from alcohol poisoning.
Never defeated in battle, Alexander's demise came at the age of thirty in 323 BC, in Babylon. The earliest reports say that after nights of excessive drinking, the young king fell ill with fever and died two weeks later. Others contend he was poisoned by his viceroy Antipater, while more modern conjectures propose the weary conqueror had picked up typhoid fever or meningitis or was done in by his over-use of the medicine hellebore, then prescribed as a purgative as well as for gout and signs of insanity.