Tim Stanley

Hangover? Try chewing on a deep-fried canary

For hardened drinkers, looking for the perfect hangover cure is like the search for the fountain of youth. To drink and drink without any consequences is the stuff of fantasy – and it’s one that’s been indulged by countless civilisations. A return to one’s GCSE classics days proves it. It’s nice to know what Grumio really got up to in that culina when he wasn’t coquebatting.

For the ancients, getting drunk was a sign of civilisation, proof of masculine virtue and bloody good fun. Athenaeus, a writer who flourished at the turn of the 2nd century AD and the beginning of the 3rd, wrote masterfully about dining and drinking and included in Book Two of The Deipnosophists a recognisable tale of a group of young men who became so intoxicated that they were convinced they were aboard a ship: ‘they threw all the furniture, and all the sofas and chairs and beds, out of the window, as if they were throwing them into the sea, fancying that the captain had ordered them to lighten the ship because of the storm. And though a crowd collected round the house and began to plunder what was thrown out, even that did not cure the young men of their frenzy.’ When the equivalent of the police arrived the next day, the boys explained that they weren’t hungover so much as seasick.

The Romans and Greeks thought that one way to determine the condition of a hangover was to wear the right thing on your head. Vine wreaths, which were associated with Bacchus, would increase tipsiness. But hanging ivy, dedicated to Jupiter, would keep you relatively sober. Hazel, crocus and henna could retrain someone from drinking too much. And anyone with a headache would do well to don roses or violets.

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Written by
Tim Stanley
Tim Stanley is a leader writer at the Daily Telegraph and a contributing editor at the Catholic Herald. Tim Stanley’s Whatever Happened to Tradition? History, Belonging and the Future of the West is out now.

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