Party Like an Athenian

When foodies consider the banquets of ancient Greece, they automatically ask what wines the Greeks drank with what dishes. The answer is simple: none. Or rather, they “paired” their main dishes with water and they “paired” their wines with dessert.

The ancient Greeks didn’t start drinking wine until after the meal proper was over--what they ate with wine was fruits, nuts and cakes. The nuts would horrify your average oenophile, since they’re notorious for calling attention to any faults in a wine being drunk at the same time.

But the Greeks didn’t drink wine at all the way modern foodies do. Everybody took a sip of straight wine at the moment of the libation, a ceremony of spilling a little wine on the ground for the gods. (Even today, many people in the Mediterranean think spilling wine brings luck, a belief that must go back to this custom of giving the gods a taste.) After that, the host always mixed the wine with water to achieve a calibrated level of intoxication among his guests. Since the Greeks were connoisseurs of spring waters, they may have “paired” particular wines with particular waters.

There was some debate about how many people there should be at a party. At one time Athens had a law against having more than 30, but Alexander the Great traveled with a tent that held 100 of the couches on which the Greeks reclined at dinner. The author of a book titled “The Life of Luxury” held that the proper number was four people--five at most.

The majority view was that the best number was between that of the Graces (of which there were three) and that of the Muses (nine). Maybe this three-to-nine idea was handed down to the Arabs, minus the pagan deities, or maybe there’s just something to it, because in 9th century Baghdad, a poet declared that a party should have at least three people for conversation’s sake but no more than nine, because “above nine, it becomes an unruly mob.”