In my recent return to the Odyssey — prompted by Professor Quarto, who has been on a Hellenic tear and will not rest until everyone within earshot has read their Homer — I was struck again by how central wine is to the machinery of that great poem. Not as background detail, but as a tool of civilization itself. When Odysseus defeats the Cyclops, he does so with wine — a gift so potent it renders the monster insensible. The lesson is plain: the man who understands wine conquers the brute who does not. One might call it the founding myth of the sommelier's profession.
But it is at the court of King Alcinous that wine achieves its highest Homeric purpose. There, wine and food and storytelling are inseparable — Odysseus earns his passage home not by feats of arms but by being magnificent company at dinner. He eats well, drinks deeply, and tells his story. The Phaeacians, moved by his eloquence and his appetite, give him a ship. I can think of no more persuasive argument for the dinner table as the seat of all important human business.
It is worth considering what Homer's wine actually was. The modern reader, encountering frequent references to "wine-dark sea" and "the wine-dark blood" — oinops, as the Greek has it — might imagine something very dark indeed, perhaps closer to what we would call a port. In fact, the wines of the ancient Aegean were light in colour and relatively weak by modern standards. They were invariably cut with water, often in ratios of one part wine to three parts water, and such undiluted wine was considered the mark of a barbarian. Thus we arrive at one of Homer's great themes: civilization is the discipline of dilution. The man who drinks wine pure is a savage. The man who mixes it properly, who paces himself, who uses wine to facilitate conversation rather than to obliterate it — this man is civilized.
Consider the scene in Book Seven, when Odysseus is received as a guest in Alcinous's hall. He is offered xenia — sacred hospitality — and wine figures centrally in this offering. The wine is not a casual detail; it is the outward sign of respect. When a guest is given wine, he is being told: you are welcome, you are important, you belong here. The gift of wine is the gift of community. And Odysseus, understanding this perfectly, accepts the wine with grace and drinks with moderation. He knows that to refuse would be an insult. He also knows that to overindulge would be to diminish himself.
This understanding is what modern culture has largely lost. We have grown accustomed to thinking of wine — indeed, of all drink — as a means to escape. We drink to forget, to obliterate, to remove ourselves from the present moment. The Greeks understood something quite different. Wine was meant to intensify the present moment, to loosen the tongue and sharpen the wit, to create the conditions under which men might understand each other better. It was, in short, a social technology.
And therein lies what Odysseus understood, and what I believe we would do well to remember. Drinking is not about the drink itself. It is about what the drink facilitates — the conversation, the company, the sense of belonging to a community gathered around food and wine. When Odysseus drinks, he does so as a man of culture and wisdom. When the Cyclops drinks, he does so as a brute. The difference is not in the quality of the wine, but in the understanding of what wine is for.
I have returned to the Odyssey many times in my life, and I find that each return teaches me something new. But perhaps the most enduring lesson is this: we gather around wine not because the wine compels us, but because we compel the wine to serve our purposes — companionship, conversation, the transmission of stories and wisdom from one generation to the next. That is what Odysseus knew. That is what the best of human civilization has always known. And it remains, even now, in our modern age of swift isolation, a lesson worth remembering.