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OP
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Sometime this coming fall, I'll take four groups of ninth graders through the Odyssey. This summer I've been reading Robert Fagles' wonderful translation of the work and have come away from each study session with renewed appreciation of the work, particularly the number of lines devoted to the subject of abundant hospitality.
The mixing bowl for wine has been mentioned numerous times--and I'm wondering about that process. It seems there's the wine itself, but it was at every banquet mentioned mixed in a mixing bowl. A particularly delicious wine was just mentioned in Book 9--and Homer writes that this wine would be mixed with twenty cups of water.
Does anyone know how the wine of ancient times compared with our modern day wine? Was it, after having been mixed in the mixing bowls, much weaker in terms of alcoholic content? If not, how did the ancients achieve such a very strong wine to be later watered down to something resembling our present-day wine? Does any culture still use these mixing bowls for wine of which Homer writes?
I'll probably Google this topic, but I thought perhaps someone had heard a lecture on the topic or had read about it. There is such a great deal of wine mentioned in the Odyssey that I thought the mixing bowl would be worth bringing up as a topic here, if not with my ninth graders.
Edit note of very little consequence. I just corrected the spelling of Fagles' name above. I hope no one tried to search him and came up empty-handed.
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interesting question, WW. I've no doubt someone will get Bacchus to you with something... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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I have it in my JDM® that the alcohol content of wine is close to the limit for the survival of the yeast. Modern fortified wines are just that, wines to which alcohol has been added. Thus my assumption has always been that the watered-down wines common in Classical Greece and through the Roman Empire had a lower percentage of alcohol than our standard wines of today.
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So we get drunker more easily and more quickly, Faldage? Here's a site that shows two mixing bowls--and there's a scholarly article worth skimming that gets into the disputed dates of creation of the 'Warrior Bowl.' It's always so much fun for me to see how deeply one can go into a topic. http://www.varchive.org/schorr/warvase.htmEdit: PS: Sorry, et', to ignore your pun! The Bacchus pun 'died on ice sus-'piciously close to the death this one will die.
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Here's a site that shows very simple line drawings of shapes of seventeen pottery vessels that would have been commonly seen in ancient Greece: http://www.artfromgreece.com/vshapes.htmlAnd 'krater' (or 'mixing bowl' as Flagles and others like to call it) is defined here: Ancient Greeks had usually drunk wine mixed with water. "Krater" is a mixing bowl and the name is from the word "Kerannmi" means to mix.http://www.officenet.co.jp/~yoji/vase/s_mix.html#skyphos_kraterAnother Edit or Addition:
Just as Faldage wrote above, there's this mentioning of the yeast and alcohol content of wine: "Unmixed wine tended to be strong, with an alcohol content as much as 15 or 16 percent (at which point the yeast is killed by the alcohol it produces) and was considered unhealthy by the ancient Greeks, who customarily diluted it with three or four parts of water. The wine always was added to the water, usually in a large mixing bowl or crater (krater), such as illustrated here" http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~snlrc/encyclopaedia_romana/greece/hetairai/tondo.html
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Mixing up information: Here's something from one site that has left me smiling. The writer on the website is trying to explain the difference between 'black figure' and 'red figure' design in ancient Greek pottery. I'm going to paste exactly what was written and see whether you are amused, as I was, by how the writer makes a complete contradiction: There were two different types of pottery, black-figure and red-figure styles. The black-figure style had a black background with the designs looking red. The red-figure style took over in about 510 B.C. The red-figure style is the vise versa of the black-figure style. The background is red while the drawings are black.
Greek pottery was made by hand, so therefore a well made and well painted piece of pottery was more expensive. The making of a piece of pottery usually involved two people, the painter and the potter. The Greeks used the Black figure and Red figure method of making pottery. In the Black figure method the Greeks painted on red backgrounds. In the Red figure method they painted on black backgrounds.
http://www.nisd.net/coonww/Carlos_CoonWebFolder/Rome_Greece_Web/greece_art.htm...and watch getting caught up in that 'vise versa.'
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Pooh-Bah
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Contradiction is right. The writer must be a consultant!
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Wine in Greece and Rome: http://makeashorterlink.com/?O1A332F65 Of particular interest to WW: By the Greeks, at least in the early period, wines were drunk mixed with various substances, as grated cheese and flour ( Il.xi. 638), barley-meal and honey ( Od.x. 234).
Il. = Iliad, Od. = Odyssey Bingley
Bingley
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re: By the Greeks, at least in the early period, wines were drunk mixed with various substances, as grated cheese and flour ( Il.xi. 638), barley-meal and honey ( Od.x. 234).
so you're saying that wine mixers and wine smoothies are really a greek invention? and not some marketing ploy of our age?
adding honey and and ground barley meal, would make the wine sweet and thick, like a smoothy, (though i doubt they added snow or ice, as the roman's did to special drinks, as well as serving snow with fruit and honey (snow cones!))
barley is rather sweet, soaked in water, its starch is sweet, and it starts to ferment and change that starch into a barley sugar in a flash! i am sure that harsh bitter wine was quickly turned into a snazzy drink with a bit of honey, and barley!
the grated cheese and flour mixture doesn't strike my fancy... but it could be good, (maybe a nice creamy ricotta type cheese) and zowee, you have a creamy wine cooler, something like the new yogurt smoothies, only with a kick!
we often don't look at the ingredients of our own food, or if we do, we don't pay them mind.. unless you have a premium brand of ice cream in the house, chances are it contains 'carregeen'-- or seaweed..
now think about a scholar telling you, in the late 20th and early 21st century, it was common to have a sweet dairy dessert, made of milk and seaweed.. sound gross? I used to love the column in Natural History about the anthropology of food- bare facts of food often sound gross, but i doubt that the greeks make horrible melanges of their wine. (unless of course, you think sangria, and wine cooler, and smoothies are horrid melanges!)
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On the other hand, almost anything can be believed of people who add turps to their wine to make retsina.
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