it. He pictured the vigorous good health enjoyed by vintners and contrasted it with the weakness of his fellow Romans who wasted their hours in the circuses and theaters rather than in the grainfields and vineyards. “We spend our nights in licentiousness and drunkenness, our days in gaming or sleeping, and account ourselves blessed by fortune in that ‘we behold neither the rising of the sun nor its setting,’” he regretted, and concluded that in consequence “the bodies of our young men are so flabby and enervated that death seems likely to make no change in them.”
The decadent style of drinking lamented by Rome’s poets, satirists, and gentlemen farmers was nowhere more in evidence than in Pompeii, center of the Roman wine trade. The vine had first been cultivated in the region by Greek colonists, and by the age of the Caesars the town had become one of the principal sources of Italian wine. Although some of its vintages were respected by connoisseurs, its main business was in bulk wine for export. According to Pliny, “Wines from Pompeii are at their best within ten years and gain nothing from greater maturity. They are also observed to be injurious because of the hangover they cause, which persists until noon on the following day.” Hangovers notwithstanding, Pompeiians were furious drinkers, who seem to have measured the appeal of wine by the quantity they drank. In order to realize their ideal, they cooked themselves in the municipal baths to sweat out previous binges, then, “without putting on a stitch of clothing, still naked and gasping, [would] seize hold of a huge jar . . . and, as if to demonstrate their strength, pour down the entire contents . . . vomit it up again immediately, and then drink another jar. This they repeat two or three times over, as if they were born to waste wine and as if wine could be disposed of only through the agency of the human body.”
Pompeii and the neighboring town of Herculaneum were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, AD 79. Pliny was killed by poison fumes, and the degenerate Pompeiians were buried alive under a layer of mud, lava, and ashes. The resulting time capsule has preserved the scenes of their excess. The grander villas of the town have frescoes depicting the production of wine, or the adventures of Bacchus, including one important series from the so-called House of the Mysteries, which shows, in sequence, a young woman being stripped, whipped, and initiated into the arcania of a Bacchic sect. Also preserved are the town’s 118 tabernae, or taverns, where the poorer citizens drank. A typical example consisted of a single, open room, with a counter to one side, behind which amphorae were stored on their sides on racks, rather like the barrels of beer in an English country pub. Wine was dispensed from these into pottery cucumas, or carafes, and was available in a range of qualities—as evinced by the bill of fare chalked onto the blackboard of one such establishment:
For one [coin] you can drink wine
For two you can drink the best
For four you can drink Falernian.
The Romans continued the Greek habit of mixing their wine with water, and despite the abundance in Pompeii of the former, tabernae keepers were not above overdiluting their vintages with the contents of the town aqueducts, as a piece of graffiti from another tavern indicates: “Curses on you, Landlord, you sell water and drink unmixed wine yourself.” Some tabernae, known as popinae, also doubled as brothels and were graced with splendidly candid frescoes of fornicating couples on the walls of their back rooms.
While most of the public drinking in Pompeii took place in its tabernae, wine was also served, sometimes for free, in its amphitheater. The Roman culture of spectacle entertainments, in particular the spectacle of death, has few parallels in history. Tribal society everywhere was brutal, public executions were a common feature of most ancient civilizations, but
The decadent style of drinking lamented by Rome’s poets, satirists, and gentlemen farmers was nowhere more in evidence than in Pompeii, center of the Roman wine trade. The vine had first been cultivated in the region by Greek colonists, and by the age of the Caesars the town had become one of the principal sources of Italian wine. Although some of its vintages were respected by connoisseurs, its main business was in bulk wine for export. According to Pliny, “Wines from Pompeii are at their best within ten years and gain nothing from greater maturity. They are also observed to be injurious because of the hangover they cause, which persists until noon on the following day.” Hangovers notwithstanding, Pompeiians were furious drinkers, who seem to have measured the appeal of wine by the quantity they drank. In order to realize their ideal, they cooked themselves in the municipal baths to sweat out previous binges, then, “without putting on a stitch of clothing, still naked and gasping, [would] seize hold of a huge jar . . . and, as if to demonstrate their strength, pour down the entire contents . . . vomit it up again immediately, and then drink another jar. This they repeat two or three times over, as if they were born to waste wine and as if wine could be disposed of only through the agency of the human body.”
Pompeii and the neighboring town of Herculaneum were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, AD 79. Pliny was killed by poison fumes, and the degenerate Pompeiians were buried alive under a layer of mud, lava, and ashes. The resulting time capsule has preserved the scenes of their excess. The grander villas of the town have frescoes depicting the production of wine, or the adventures of Bacchus, including one important series from the so-called House of the Mysteries, which shows, in sequence, a young woman being stripped, whipped, and initiated into the arcania of a Bacchic sect. Also preserved are the town’s 118 tabernae, or taverns, where the poorer citizens drank. A typical example consisted of a single, open room, with a counter to one side, behind which amphorae were stored on their sides on racks, rather like the barrels of beer in an English country pub. Wine was dispensed from these into pottery cucumas, or carafes, and was available in a range of qualities—as evinced by the bill of fare chalked onto the blackboard of one such establishment:
For one [coin] you can drink wine
For two you can drink the best
For four you can drink Falernian.
The Romans continued the Greek habit of mixing their wine with water, and despite the abundance in Pompeii of the former, tabernae keepers were not above overdiluting their vintages with the contents of the town aqueducts, as a piece of graffiti from another tavern indicates: “Curses on you, Landlord, you sell water and drink unmixed wine yourself.” Some tabernae, known as popinae, also doubled as brothels and were graced with splendidly candid frescoes of fornicating couples on the walls of their back rooms.
While most of the public drinking in Pompeii took place in its tabernae, wine was also served, sometimes for free, in its amphitheater. The Roman culture of spectacle entertainments, in particular the spectacle of death, has few parallels in history. Tribal society everywhere was brutal, public executions were a common feature of most ancient civilizations, but
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