For all that lofty talk of culture, sophistication, and temperance, the Ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t hold back on the drink front. Wine wasn’t just something to be piously poured in ritual libations by religious devotees. In fact, although these people did regard wine as the guaranteed marker of civilised society – what separated cultivated humans, they thought, from barbarous brutes and the animal world – this self-same drink could swiftly transform these high-brow intellectuals into the most low-life bibbers, topers and poters of all. With such a welter of material on offer, then, why shouldn’t we wade a while amid the wine-soaked annals of Greco-Roman oenophilia?
