Roderick Conway-Morris

Fruit of the vine

According to Athenaeus of Naucratis, the 2nd-century AD author of The Sophists’ Banquet, the ancient Sybarites kept the capital of their city-state in southern Italy supplied with wine through a network of ‘vinoducts’ that reached far out into the surrounding countryside.

According to Athenaeus of Naucratis, the 2nd-century AD author of The Sophists’ Banquet, the ancient Sybarites kept the capital of their city-state in southern Italy supplied with wine through a network of ‘vinoducts’ that reached far out into the surrounding countryside.

According to Athenaeus of Naucratis, the 2nd-century AD author of The Sophists’ Banquet, the ancient Sybarites kept the capital of their city-state in southern Italy supplied with wine through a network of ‘vinoducts’ that reached far out into the surrounding countryside.

Amusing though this high-table story was, it reflects the extent to which ancient Mediterranean civilisations were fuelled by the fermented grape, a sacred fluid central to the imagery and practice of Judaism and Christianity. The origins of wine and its role in inspiring antique religion, philosophy, science, commerce, culture and social life are the subject of Vinum Nostrum, curated by Giovanni di Pasquale, a sequel to the diverting exhibition The Ancient Garden from Babylon to Rome, staged in the Orangery of the Pitti Palace in the Boboli Gardens three years ago.

The vine, a wild climbing-plant, seems to have been one of the first crops to be cultivated by mankind. And Georgia provides the first evidence of this going back over 8,000 years. Clay wine cups from the National Museum in Tbilisi at the opening of the show date from the 6th and mid-3rd millennia BC.

The standard tipple of both Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilisation was beer but wine became the drink of the ruling classes. Egyptian gods drank wine, while the Greek Olympian deities stuck to nectar. Possibly the first recorded juvenile binge drinker features in some Egyptian tomb murals at El-Kab — a young girl demanding 18 jugs of wine with the expressed intention of getting wasted.

An alabaster frieze of Assurbanipal (668–631 BC) from Nineveh shows him with his queen drinking wine beneath a pergola of hanging grapes supported on trees, the festivities occasioned by the defeat of an enemy whose decapitated head can be seen decoratively suspended nearby.

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