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.