Οἶνος ἐπίκλοπος: wine and deceit in ancient Greek mythology

Abstract

Wine is first and foremost associated with pleasure; and not only in ancient Greece, where this survey is focused on. As it is commonly known, it accompanied the famous symposia of men, where it played the primary role and it’s not by chance that symposia received their name exactly from the drinking session of them, which actually contained only one kind of drink, i.e. wine (of course, mixed with water, the so-called οἶνος κεκραμένος, since it was offered to mortals and not to gods). Wine had (and still has) the property of bringing the person who drinks it in a state of joy and delight, relaxation and relief. But it was not only the comrade of men during their “convivia”. It’s also detected in Greeks’ offerings to their gods – mainly to the heavenward, not the chthonic ones; these offerings (i.e. to the Olympian gods) were called spondae (σπονδαί) and contained a variety of liquids, such as honey, olive oil and milk, but wine was in a way the protagonist among them, since it was its absence from (most of) the choae (χοαί) (the offerings to the chthonic gods), which differentiated the one kind of offerings from the other.