Hellenic Immortal Read Free Page B

had to be weak enough so everyone could partake all night without dying, but strong enough so everyone got good and drunk.
    So that’s what the water and the wine—and the bowl—were for. The piece of paper was something else.
    Athenian drinking sometimes involved religious ceremonies, and in that case the wine and water had to be combined in a very specific way with some very specific chanting at very specific times. The note described one such ceremony, for the god Dionysos. The reason I almost fell over is that nobody had performed this ceremony in two and a half thousand years, and I was nearly positive I was the only one who could possibly still know about it.
    In hindsight, I don’t think there’s any way to logically justify what I did next, but as I mixed the water and the wine in the bowl, held it up to my lips and began to drink, it made all the sense in the world.

SIL. IS IT NOT TRUE THAT A MAN WHO DRINKS STEADILY IS A MAN WHO ONLY THINKS HE IS HAPPY?
    DION. IT IS SO. BUT IF A MAN THINKS HE IS HAPPY THERE NEED BE NO OTHER EXPERT. FOR WHOSE OPINION WOULD HE ACCEPT ABOVE HIS OWN?

    From the dialogues of Silenus the Younger. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

    It may be my fault that anyone even knows about wine. Not that I invented it—I’m not nearly that clever—but I did tell an awful lot of people about it. (As an aside, I am probably not the best source when it comes to who invented what. For a long time, I thought I invented the wheel.) Wine was a good idea, and I like to share good ideas when I find them, because it means the product of those ideas are easier to find the next time I pass through town. Like cooked meat.
        The Minoans may have invented wine, as I was on the island of Minos when I had my first taste. It wasn’t particularly good by later standards. Grapes grew on Minos just fine and the concept of fermentation was fairly well understood, but Minoans were by nature an impatient bunch, and nobody had realized that the longer you aged wine, the better it tended to taste. And even with that gradual realization came the difficulty of putting it into a properly sealed container. So it tasted like sour grape juice. Still, it packed a decent kick and showed real promise.
    This was not, incidentally, my first introduction to alcohol. Beer showed up earlier. The Sumerians managed to pull that off which, if you have any idea what the Sumerians were like, you’d find it as amazing as I do. And their beer was awful, but beer it was. Later, the Egyptians picked up on it and did a fine job of perfecting the process. But Minos was a long way from Egypt, and I never quite got the hang of making beer, so I was grateful that somebody had come up with a new drink.
    The man who handed me the wine—and who showed me how to make my own—was a slave named Argun. He belonged to the family of a person who today might be called a navy admiral, and whose name I’ve actually forgotten. Argun was a good guy. I never learned how he ended up a slave, but it probably came about as a result of one military conquest or another. (Back then the terms slave and prisoner of war were almost always interchangeable.) Had I been a landowner, I probably would have tried to make some wine myself right away, but I was a fisherman and the only thing I owned was my boat.
    I was on Minos because it was one of the few places in the civilized world that supported a merchant class. (Another such place was—again—Egypt, but I’d been run out of there. Long story.) A culture with a merchant class was important because merchants got to come and go without any concern as to their larger status in society, since that was something determined based on familial connections. I had no connections that anybody would be prepared to recognize, so I was always on the lookout for cultures that were advanced enough to support trade and commerce.
    Unfortunately, I never amounted to much more than a fisherman on Minos. Not because of