Category Archives: Culture

A century ago today, James Joyce’s daring masterpiece Ulysses was first published. It has since been acclaimed as a landmark in literary history, and (by some) as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Yet its roots go much deeper. As its title suggests, the novel features a substantial link to the ancient world: Ulysses is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey.

Instead of showcasing the adventures of Odysseus’ journeys over the ten years after the fall of Troy, however, it instead follows the wanderings of Leopold Bloom, a polite, married man of Jewish background, across a single day in Dublin (June 16th, 1904). His various experiences across this one day each correspond to events from the Odyssey, and so do the various people he encounters. The novel is then, naturally, saturated with references to antiquity. Even the sea-blue colour of the first edition’s cover was chosen to evoke both the seas Odysseus travels upon, as well as the contemporary Greek flag.

The three main characters of Ulysses (Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom) are each ‘versions’ of major figures from the Odyssey. Joyce wished to create an ‘everyman’ character in Leopold Bloom, and he believed that Odysseus was the perfect model of a ‘complete man’. As he related to his friend, the artist Frank Budgen, during the novel’s gestation:

‘Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband of Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with his wisdom and courage he came through them all.’

Joyce’s desire with Ulysses was to celebrate ordinary, everyday life. He achieved this by choosing a decent but unremarkable man as his protagonist, and linking his life with one of the most famous heroes of world literature. He has frustrations and disappointments, but also joys and small triumphs. In many ways he is unlike Odysseus: he is a pacifist, and he is much more honest than Odysseus. Yet, like Odysseus, he has a great curiosity, and learns a great deal from those he encounters across his travels.

A substantial alteration from the Odyssey, however, is Bloom’s relationship with his wife Molly, Joyce’s analogue for Penelope. Whereas Penelope is Odysseus’ faithful wife, awaiting his homecoming (or nostos), Molly Bloom is having an adulterous affair with a brazen local loudmouth, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan. Yet Joyce is unjudgmental in his portrayal of Molly’s infidelity. Indeed, her husband is aware of, and even tacitly approves of the affair. The couple’s marriage was permanently altered by the death of their young son just a few days after his birth eleven years prior to the events of the novel. Unable to be intimate with one another since then, the couple sleep head to toe of each other. Despite the infidelity, there is a great deal of love and warmth between the couple. During the famous soliloquy of Molly Bloom, she recalls vividly and with great warmth moments in their relationship. Part of the reason Bloom is wandering around for so much of the day is to give his wife privacy for her affair. Yet as Leopold wanders the city, he is haunted by the memory of his lost son.

Thirdly, we have the character of Stephen Dedalus. He is essentially Joyce’s fictional self-portrait and shares an abundance of the writer’s biography. He is the protagonist of Joyce’s earlier novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (essential reading for anyone wanting to read Ulysses). Stephen is still in his early twenties, and much younger than the thirty-something Blooms. Of course, Stephen Dedalus’ own name is a classical reference itself. Daedalus was the master craftsman of Greek myth, who created wings so that he could escape the Cretan labyrinth of the minotaur. He is also, of course, the father of the perhaps more famous figure of Icarus. Portrait of the Artist focuses heavily (yet subtly) on the myth of Daedalus, and features many instances of imagery regarding flight and wings. It opens with an epigram from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and closes with a metaphorical ‘flight’ from Ireland to mainland Europe.

Yet when we find Stephen at the start of Ulysses, he is not in full flight. He has returned to Dublin after his expedition abroad at the end of A Portrait of the Artist has ended unsuccessfully. Furthermore, during the time between the two novels, the character has experienced a painful bereavement, for which he feels culpable. His artistic ambitions have stalled, and he is a young man very much at a loose end. Stephen’s biological father, Simon, is still alive, but he is a very different man to his son. He is unable to offer the guidance and direction that the young artist needs.

Beyond the main characters, the structure of Ulysses is also based upon that of the Odyssey. Much like how the Odyssey doesn’t feature Odysseus until Book V (with the earlier books focusing on Telemachus), Bloom doesn’t show up until the fourth chapter. The early chapters of Ulysses instead focus on Stephen. Within the framework of the Odyssey, Stephen is therefore cast as Telemachus, Odysseus’ son.

One of the stranger editorial choices across the writing of Ulysses was the decision to remove the chapter titles. These are present in Joyce’s notes for the novel, and have long been used in Joycean and academic circles, although they are absent from the novel itself.  From the perspective of a Classics enthusiast, they are particularly illuminating: each chapter is named after a significant incident in the Odyssey. The classical allusions often work on a metaphorical level and the titles helps clarify these metaphors.

For instance, the central chapter of the novel features Bloom in a bar getting into an increasingly heated and antagonistic conversation with a bigoted antisemite, known simply as ‘the Citizen’. The notes reveal the title of the chapter is ‘Cyclops’, which recasts the entire situation. While the character has both his eyes and can see, his small mindedness has left him ‘one-eyed’. The chapter climaxes with Bloom fleeing from the bar as a biscuit tin is thrown at him, a humorous echo of the rocks Polyphemus hurled at the escaping Odysseus.

Beyond the events that take place, each chapter is written in a unique style that reflects the novel’s ancient predecessor in some way. The Aeolus chapter features multiple, continuous references to the wind, like that of the wind god Odysseus encountered. Similarly, the Sirens chapter has a significant emphasis on music, like that of the sirens’ song, with the novel even featuring sheet music.

The novel’s most experimental chapter is titled Circe and is set in Dublin’s Nighttown district (turn of the century Dublin’s red light district), where men metaphorically turn to pigs. Here, Stephen gets into an altercation with a British soldier and is left badly needing aid. Bloom is passing by and is able to come to his help. Bloom helps Stephen recover from the incident, and takes him to a bar wherein they encounter a drunk (Joyce’s stand in for Eumaeus, the swineherd). Bloom is able to leave Stephen in considerably better physical shape than he found him. More than that, however, Bloom’s act of kindness has inspired Stephen, and looks to elevate him from the rut in which he has found himself.

For all its experimentation and fearsome reputation, for all its allusions and footnotes, Ulysses is at core, about something very simple and very human. It is about a father looking for a son, and a son looking for a father.

Dante’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy (completed in 1320) is full of allusions. As readers travel the road through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, they are everywhere confronted with names and stories stretching back to classical mythology. The classicist will find a great many familiar characters. But one of these, Ulysses (also known by his Greek name, Odysseus), is central to Dante’s journey through the afterlife.

Dante’s presentation of Ulysses was not drawn directly from Homer, but from Virgil, Statius, Ovid, and especially Cicero. Cicero linked Ulysses for a drive for knowledge and wisdom. In De Finibus (V.18), Cicero described Homer’s account of the call of the Sirens, which exerted a powerful draw on Ulysses, as an offer of knowledge. Thus, Ulysses becomes an archetype for all who possess a passionate love of learning, disdaining hardship in pursuit of knowledge.

Dante incorporates the classical tradition into his Ulysses, adopting the Roman view of the man as a treacherous schemer, placing him among the false counselors in the eighth circle of Hell for his deceptions and tricks. (Inferno XXVI. 58-63). But these offenses are not the emphasis of the Canto. The highlight is Dante’s presentation of the story of the last journey of Ulysses, which seems to be the poet’s own invention.

Dante makes the search for knowledge the impetus for Ulysses’ fateful journey. It is his “burning wish/ to know the world and have experience/ of all men’s vices, of all human worth” (Inferno XXVI. 97-98) that drives him to take to the open sea and sail into the unknown. Ulysses’ rhetorical skill is present in the story as he convinces his crew to undertake the journey. When they have reached the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which men are not permitted to go, Ulysses exhorts them in terms of love of knowledge:

            …do not deny

            yourself experience of what there is beyond,

            behind the sun, in the world they call unpeopled.

            Consider where you came from: you are Greeks!

            You were not born to live like mindless brutes

            But to follow paths of excellence and knowledge. (Inferno XXVI. 118-120)

Ulysses’ appeal makes them eager to pass the boundary, an act which is clearly illicit. The end of that “mad flight” (Inferno XXVI .125) is that, after Ulysses has a faint glimpse of that which was never meant to be seen by living man, he and his crew are struck down by the will of God (Inferno XXVI. 127-142).

By incorporating Ulysses into the Commedia, Dante has brought him into a Christian framework. By placing him in Inferno, Dante passes a moral judgment. Dante is writing for a Christian audience with a developed concept, not only of vice, but of sin: offense against the laws of God. In this light, the moral violations of Ulysses are important for understanding his role in the poem. First, the main point of the Canto is that Ulysses crossed the boundaries set for man by the divine order. Doing so was a sin, for which he was destroyed. The sinful nature of the act becomes fully clear in Paradiso, when Adam describes the first human sin:

            Know now, my son, the tasting of the tree

            Was not in itself the cause of such a long exile,

            but only the transgression of God’s bounds. (Paradiso XXVI. 115-117)    

All human sin shares the character of this first parent; all sin involves violating boundaries for thought or action set by God. That Ulysses passed those boundaries with deliberateness only adds to the fault. He presumed to go by his own power where God had ordained that no man may go.

Second, Ulysses used his natural gift of eloquence to persuade others to illicit action: he is a false counselor. He persuades his crew to overstep the limits set for man and defy the divine order. They are punished for their presumption with a watery death. But does not a greater burden of guilt lie on Ulysses, who persuaded them to sin? Dante must have in mind the words of Christ (Matthew 18:6):

            If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

There are important parallels between the journey of Ulysses and that of Dante the pilgrim (Dante within the poem). The pilgrim gains the knowledge Ulysses sought, seeing clearly what Ulysses only glimpsed before he was destroyed. In fact, the Commedia seeks to describe the whole divine ordering of the universe. The question arises: is Dante not also guilty of presumption, of sailing seas never intended for man?

There are a great many allusions to Ulysses throughout the Commedia, employing the imagery of water, boats, and unknown seas. Many of these reminders implicitly compare the pilgrim’s success to Ulysses’ failure. As he leaves Inferno, Dante reminds us that he is able to go on, having passes through regions no one else has navigated:

            For better waters, now, the little bark

            of my poetic powers hoists its sails,

            and leaves behind that cruelest of the seas (Purgatorio I.1-3)

When Dante reaches the edge of purgatory, the reader is given a pointed reminder that the pilgrim is the only living man to set foot here:

            At last we touched upon the lonely shore

            that never yet has seen its waters sailed

            by one who then returned to tell the tale. (Purgatorio I. 130-132) 

When he reaches paradise, Dante looks down from the spheres. Now far above earth he can trace with his eye the insignificant route Ulysses managed to sail in his presumption:

            I saw beyond Cadiz to the mad route

            Ulysses took, and nearly to the shore

            Europa left as a sweet godly burden. (Paradiso XXVII. 82-84)

The point of Dante’s references to Ulysses is not merely that the pilgrim succeeded where Ulysses failed. The pilgrim has managed to make his journey for a reason: he has received divine sanction and guidance. That Dante the pilgrim is on a divinely-ordained journey is made abundantly clear in the poem. The forces of heaven move with personal intent toward Dante, initiating his journey for the sake of his soul.

These lines alone are sufficient to clear the pilgrim of the charge of presumption. He does not go trusting in his own ability or in violation of divine authority. The contrast with Ulysses is pointed.

The pilgrim also displays a great deal of humility when he learns of the journey he is to take, recognizing that he cannot claim equality with those who, while still living have previously been admitted to the regions beyond mortal habitation:

            But why am I to go? Who allows me to?

            I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul,

            neither I nor any man would think me worthy. (Inferno II. 31-33) 

Dante’s humility is, of course, in dramatic contrast with the self-assertiveness of Ulysses as he appears in the tradition and in the Commedia. It is true that throughout the poem the pilgrim exhibits a thirst to know at least as great as that which characterized Ulysses, but he is often afraid to ask his questions out of fear of violating some law of propriety. Moreover, his divinely-appointed guides do not discourage his questioning, legitimating his desire for knowledge. Dante the pilgrim, then, is intentionally contrasted with Ulysses and is innocent of presumption in both thought and deed.

Dante, the poet, however, might be another matter. Dante wrote that he was neither Aeneas nor Paul. Yet his poetry does what Aeneas did in going to the infernal regions and does what Paul did in seeing heaven itself (2 Corinthians 12:2). He has presented an image of the whole divine order without any sanction other than his own imagination. The pilgrim is the literary figure for Dante himself, who has created the conditions of the poem which clear the pilgrim of presumption. By doing so is the poet trying to clear himself, outside the poem, of the same charge?

It was a widespread cult of enormous importance in the ancient world. Socrates’ last words referenced its central figure. Their symbol is still recognizable today, worldwide – even if you don’t know what it is, you’ve likely seen it. But what exactly was the cult of Asklepios?

Established towards the end of the sixth century B.C. in the ancient Greek city of Epidauros, the cult worshipped the ancient Greek god of healing and medicine, Asklepios. The Temple of Asklepios at Epidauros flourished as a healing centre thanks to the careful management of its priests, and the cult’s temples and sanctuaries spread and went on to provide health services for the people of the Graeco-Roman world.

According to myth, Asklepios was the son of the god Apollo, and a mortal woman, Koronis. Apollo loved Koronis, yet her father, King Phlegyas, arranged her marriage to a mortal man. Jealous, Apollo killed the groom with an arrow. In turn, the goddess Artemis killed the pregnant Koronis in the same manner. Apollo saved Asklepios from his mother’s womb, and he was then fostered and tutored by the centaur Kheiron, who taught him the healing arts of medicine.

Asklepios became such a skilled healer that he could raise the dead. At the request of Artemis, he restored her favourite, Hippolytus, to life. For his interference in matters of life and death, Zeus, the king of the gods, killed him with a thunderbolt crafted by the Cyclopes. Angered by this, Apollo killed the Cyclopes in revenge. After his death, Asklepios was worshipped as a god.  

This mythical history was first set in Thessaly. The priests of Epidauros, however, localised it and established Asklepios’ connection with their city. From there, other cult centres dedicated to Asklepios spread. One was established in Athens in 420/19, with the support of the playwright Sophocles.

His sanctuary at Epidauros came to be the site of quadrennial games, the Asklepieia, similar to other Panhellenic festivals, such as the Olympics. To accommodate these games, the sanctuary at Epidauros grew to include an amphitheater, a stadium, a gymnasium, and dormitories. However, the primary reason the sanctuary gained acclaim was for the healing rituals carried out by the priests of Asklepios. 

One such ritual carried out at Epidauros involved the sacred snakes of Asklepios. The snakes were a symbol of rejuvenescence (for the snake shedding its skin was believed to renew its youth) and blessed serpents were housed in the temples of the god; the snakes were thought to heal the sick by licking them. The symbol of the staff of Asklepios entwined with a snake is still today associated with medical organisations. 

Those who wished to be healed would be purified in the holy waters that flowed from the sanctuary’s sacred fountains; they partook in cleansing rituals involving sacrifices and ablutions. Only those free from blemish, both moral and physical, could enter the holy shrine. To prevent pollution, pilgrims abstained from sexual intercourse, and it was forbidden to die or give birth within the sanctuary. Once in the temple proper, they were taken to the ‘incubation place’, which was forbidden to the impure. Divination also took place there. This involved the god’s visiting sleepers in dreams, whereupon he revealed the right remedies.  

Alternatively, cure took the form of a consultation with the priests who would interpret advice given by the god.  This melding of cures with smart propaganda saw the sanctuary at Epidauros remain popular right up to A.D. fourth century.The renown of the sanctuary helped it morph from an oracular shrine dedicated to the practise of incubation, to a sizable complex of baths.  

Some scholars attribute the rise in popularity of the cult in democratic Athens as a response to the plague that devastated Athens (430-426 B.C.). It could be that these cult sanctuaries in Athens provided some with healing and respite from the ravages of the plague. We do know that Asklepion sites were chosen for their natural beauty, spacious with clean air and pure, flowing, waters.

Written sources suggest the regime of cleansing, bathing and other ritual purifications were legitimately beneficial. The taking of the open air was said to be restorative. That’s not to mention the powerful spiritual and religious benefits they believed they gained through ritual sacrifice and worship of a powerful health-giving deity.
The Hellenistic era saw shrines dedicated to Asklepios increase.  The Askelpion of Kos gained a status comparable to the centre at Epidauros. The popularity of the cult spread to Rome and throughout the Roman empire, providing important health services.

Even today, milennia after the fall of the Roman empire, the symbol of Asklepios can be seen emblazoned across ambulances and hospitals. It’s good to know the legacy of the god is in good health.

The Roman world was a pagan society with a very strong moral code – but what can be hard for people to understand is that, while moral, that code was very different from our own. Religion was everywhere and part of everything Romans did. Religion’s role was to protect the state, the social order, and to maintain the reciprocal power-play between mortals and the gods. It was not necessarily a dualistic good/evil moral framework of absolutes. Or at least, the absolute rules for good and evil they had were not the same as ours today.

It takes imagination to achieve a distanced and appreciative understanding of life in ancient Rome. Religion in their age, in many ways, had very little to do with morality, in the sense that its purpose was not to ensure you were good or bad. Rather, it was more of a functional backdrop of the casual relations of daily life.

This is evident in the gods the Romans worshipped. In Rome, the gods were everywhere and present in all actions. The Roman gods, in particular, often had a very direct, practical ‘function’. For example: Terminus was the god of landmarks and boundaries, Cloacina was the goddess of the sewer system, and Forculus was the god of the integrity of doors, along with Cardea (goddess of hinges).

Their religion expanded through conquest, and so did its pantheon. In time, the majority of the most prominent gods in the Roman pantheon were equivalents to Greek counterpart deities. Jupiter was an equivalent of Zeus, Minerva was an equivalent of Athena, and Neptune was a counterpart of Poseidon, amongst many others. Despite this, certain gods were distinct and unique to the Romans, such as Janus (although these gods often had antecedent figures).

If you wanted success in whatever you were doing, the proper god had to be respected, as a practical matter of action. Magic and divining, respectful rituals, veneration for ancestral blood-lines, sacrifice, were all essential components of what was a richly structured and deeply strict sense of civic duty. Candles lit the faces of ancestors, continually, as they also burned for individual household gods. A Roman god wanted recognition and respect: a small part of each meal was shared with the gods, with a direct fear that negligence would lead to negative consequences in the real world.

Because Roman religion was not dualistic, there was not exactly a strict categorizing of ‘good and evil’, with one leading towards heaven and the other to hell. Despite this, they did, however, hold broadly similar conceptions of the afterlife, in the form of Tartarus, a primordial prison which held the defeated Titans, and Elysium, a blessed island that allowed a happy afterlife for heroes. Tartarus and Elysium are, however, outliers; there was little emphasis on moral duality. The flip-side to this was a more unabashedly adroit attitude towards violence, revenge, and conquest.

In fact, in many ways Roman cult activities were designed to keep blood and death at the forefront of public awareness, as was the circus maximus and the violence of gladiator battles. They felt there was great wisdom in being reminded of death, constantly. There probably is.

The Romans believed in fate (fatum) – not in a world of random occurrence, but of the unfolding of the intelligible will and order of the gods. Their world was full of sacred mystery. They believed in family and blood-lines (patrician lineage) and personal sacrifice for honour, above concepts of personal good as manifest in individual personal mercies and pities. Though they had less strictness of ‘metaphysical law’, they knew religion as a force of action in reality. Oracles and soothsayers played an important part in private and public life, even affairs of state and vital military decisions. The divine law did not hinder their human freedom of choice, but it was important for them to feel connected with the hidden (religious world) in the sense that they were fulfilling the divine plan and honouring their ancestors in their choices and actions. In that sense they did not seek religious solace (or conviction) in prayer and forgiveness, but in ‘fateful action’.

As we can see, there are many fundamental and stark differences in their attitude to religion and morality. It can be hard for us to understand, to frame our thoughts from their moral point of view when trying to make sense of their world, yet their aims and desires are often familiar and relatable.

Regardless, many people do not realize the relative nature of moral concepts they take for granted as universal, that were very different in the past.

The myth of Elektra, daughter of Agamemnon, seems to have held a particular power on the minds of tragedians – all three of the great Greek playwrights wrote a version which survives to this day. While they are all working with the same core myth, the versions each have some significant differences from one another, which are revealing of the different worldviews of the playwrights, as well as changes in Greek society. By taking a deeper look at these plays we can come to a greater understanding of the respective playwrights, and also the multi-faceted figure of Elektra herself…

The earliest extant Greek tragedy on this subject matter is the version by Aeschylus. Entitled Libation Bearers (or Choephori in ancient Greek), it is the middle play of the Oresteia trilogy, which was first performed in 458 BC. This play takes place many years after the trilogy’s opener Agamemnon, in which the title character is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra upon his homecoming (or nostos) from the Siege of Troy. Now, his son Orestes and daughter Elektra have grown. Orestes was raised separate from the royal household, but his sister Elektra was brought up by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, cousin of Agamemnon.

Unlike the other versions of the play we will look at, the character of Elektra in Libation Bearers is more of a supporting role; the protagonist is undoubtedly Orestes. Nevertheless, she is central to the play’s action, particularly the graveside scene. At the beginning of the play, Orestes is returning to his birthplace. He is bound by his moral code to avenge the death of his father, yet he is also forbidden by that same moral code to kill his mother. Trapped by the contradiction, the play follows his journey to a deadly confrontation with his mother. Yet, an important stop on that journey is the graveside of his murdered father.

Here Orestes unexpectedly encounters his sister. Reunited, the two then take part in ritual to call upon the ghost of their slain father. Agamemnon’s ghost doesn’t actually appear in the action of the play. Nevertheless, the ritual is impactful on both siblings: they commit to a plan to murder their mother. Although they conspire together, Orestes faces and kills both his mother and Aegisthus alone. The subject of his guilt and legal culpability is then the cornerstone for the trilogy’s third entry, the Eumenides.

Even though Elektra doesn’t appear again the Eumenides, it was far from the last time the character would appear on stage…

We can’t be certain when Sophocles’ version of Elektra was first performed. It almost certainly followed the Aeschylus version, but we cannot be sure whether the Sophocles or Euripides version came next. The play deals with the same subject matter as Libation Bearers, but while the broad stokes of the story are the same, there are some crucial differences.

Perhaps the most notable departure from Aeschylus is the presence of a third sibling, a sister, Chryosthemis. Whereas Sophocles’ Elektra lives away from the palace, due to her disdain for her mother’s actions, Chrysothemis is much more complacent. She is content to live in the palace, and is much less preturbed by her family’s violent history than their sister. Their dynamic is highly reminiscent of the relationship between Antigone and Ismene in Sophocles’ Antigone play, wherein one sister is driven to action, whereas the other is more passive. The addition of Chrysothemis, and the emphasis on the relationship between the two sisters, places greater focus on the role of Elektra in the violence that follows. Indeed, the play as a whole focuses much more on Elektra’s inner feelings and emotions. She mourns the devastation her family has been put through, but she is also a figure of strong resolve.

The Euripides version of the play, also simply titled Elektra, likewise naturally places much more focus on Elektra herself than Libation Bearers. Here, however, her characterization is notably different, and significantly darker than other versions.

There is a suggestion that Elektra may be something of an ‘unreliable narrator’. We don’t actually see any of the cruelty this Elektra insists she experiences at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Wheneever they do appear on stage, it is surprising how unlike Elektra’s descriptions they are. Clytemnestra is concerned for her daughter’s well being, and the similarly considerate Aegisthus is far removed from the figure Elektra describes dancing on the grave of her father.

There is a suggestion that this Elektra is somewhat unbalanced. Furthermore, this version is a something of a zealot for the violence and brutalty of the Homeric code.

Like in Libation Bearers, Orestes arrives to avenge his father. This time, however, Elektra directly takes part in the violence herself, alongside her brother. Whereas previous versions showed a great deal of ambiguity over the potential justification of the murders, Euripides, however, places much greater emphasis on how horrific the violence of the act is. Much like Euripides’ Herakles or Medea, the play functions as a criticism of the Homeric code, by placing the brutality of its violence within a family.

Across the three versions we can see a trajectory, from the somewhat sidelined figure of Libation Bearers, to the more central figure of Sophocles, to the more frenzied interpretation of Euripides. So many Elektras, so little time. The only way to really understand the character is to read them all!

When we think of wine in the ancient world, the first thing that comes to mind is the Romans and their luxurious banquets. We know that wine was an important part of the Roman culture; there were even precise rules for the way and quantity in which it was to be consumed. However, while we do know that wine played an enormous part in the life of the ancient Romans, we have to bear in mind that most of the information we have about wine and drunkenness in Roman society come from literary sources. As such, the information we get from these sources is entirely susceptible to the requirements of the genre.

If you wanted to find the most ardent fan of wine, look no further – you have found a man who not only resorts to wine for pleasure, but claims that his work itself entirely depends on it:

The most important role that Horace attributes to wine is that of a source of inspiration, and he claims that he cannot write until directed to by Bacchus, the god of wine. He does not know where Bacchus will take him, but this direction also depends on Horace’s mood, as well as the type of wine that he is drinking.

We all know the famous line “seize the day”. What some of us may not know, however, is that Horace uses wine more than anything else to demonstrate the importance of this attitude. He says that there is no way to know what gods have in store for us, so the solution is: “Be wise, strain the wine, and trim your long hope into a brief space … seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.” It is not useful to spend time thinking about bad things, and to get rid of these earthly cares, we should resort to wine.

Another important feature of wine, according to Horace, is its inability of being connected to the war in any way. He thinks that Bacchus brings only harmony, and that there is no place for war in the wine-drinking world. What is important to note, however, is the fact that Horace emphasizes the importance of moderation in drinking, and warns of the dangers if this moderation is not achieved.

As mentioned above, the exaggerated appraisal of wine that can be found in the works of these poets should not be taken literally. That is to say that, most probably, they were not such passionate wine-drinkers in their private lives. This is especially true when it comes to Propertius. We know almost for sure that Propertius the man would not allow himself to fall under the temptations caused by excessive intake of wine. Propertius the poet, on the other hand, continues the elegiac tradition in the best way possible.

He uses wine to emphasize the passion in his poems, and it is an almost inevitable feature of the lovers’ encounters. Similar to Horace, for Propertius, wine is the source of inspiration, his muse. However, Propertius is a bit more realistic, taking into account that wine does not only solve lovers’ problems, but it also creates them. In his prayer to Bacchus, Propertius says: Through you lovers are joined, through you they are broken up.

The poet’s ambivalent approach to wine can also be seen in the following verses:

The two greatest passions of Tibullus are his lover and the countryside. For him, wine is an instrument that he uses to emphasize the importance of both, as it is not only related to love affairs, but also to the celebration of nature. When it comes to love though, he is a bit more moderate than his two colleagues. He takes Horace’s stance that wine can dissolve earthly cares, but he also agrees with Propertius that it is not always the case.

Tibullus was in love with a married woman named Delia. You can imagine how much suffering this situation can cause, especially for an elegy poet. Therefore, only wine and sleep can provide him with a temporary relief:

On the other hand, wine can also help him seduce Delia, or bring sleep to her husband, leaving some lovers’ time to them. This poet’s stance on wine was very ambivalent, which usually depended on the nature of the relationship in question. When he was suffering, not even the countryside could soothe his sadness. When things were going well, however, there was nothing better than enjoying wine outside:

Even though we know for sure that these poets were merely conforming to the requirements of the genre, we can still learn a lot of actual wine facts from them, and take great pleasure in reading about their struggles and passions.

After all, we have all been there, haven’t we?