Drinking Wine Neat Marked You as a Barbarian — and Drove a Spartan King Insane

The ancient Greeks did not drink their wine as it came from the jar. They mixed it with water, in careful proportion, before a drop reached the cup, and they judged a man by whether he did the same. To drink wine neat, unmixed and at full strength, was the habit of barbarians and drunkards, a sign of no self-command. The Greeks even told a cautionary tale about where that habit led: a Spartan king who learned to drink his wine unmixed and went so violently mad that he cut himself to pieces with a knife.¹

The king was Cleomenes I of Sparta, and the tale comes from Herodotus, who did not himself believe it. It survives because of what the Greeks thought it showed about wine, water, and the line between a civilised man and a savage.

The rule: never drink it neat

The Greeks watered their wine, and they did it as a matter of course. Before a symposium, the drinking party that followed a Greek meal, wine and water were combined in a large bowl called a krater, and it was from the krater, not the jar, that servants filled the cups.² The proportions were a matter of judgement and taste, but they leaned heavily towards water: mixtures of one part wine to two or three parts water were entirely normal, and a strong mix was still more water than wine. A gathering appointed a symposiarch, a master of the drinking, whose job included setting how strong the bowl would be and how it changed as the evening went on.

Drinking wine unmixed had a name, akratos, and a reputation: it was what barbarians and the intemperate did, and it was thought to lead straight to drunkenness and the loss of reason. The idea sat so deep in the culture that it shaped the language. The modern Greek word for wine, krasi, descends from krasis, meaning “mixture,” because to a Greek, wine simply was wine-and-water.²

The modern Greek word for wine, krasi, comes from the word for “mixture” — because to the Greeks, wine meant wine mixed with water.

The Scythians, who drank like no one should

If the watered krater stood for civilisation, the Greeks had a ready image for its opposite: the Scythians, the nomadic horse peoples of the steppe north of the Black Sea. In the Greek imagination the Scythian was the archetypal drinker of neat wine, who took it at full strength and behaved accordingly.³ The association was strong enough to become a figure of speech. Herodotus records that when the Spartans wanted their wine poured stronger than usual, they would call for it to be poured “in the Scythian fashion.”¹

To drink like a Scythian was to drink dangerously, abandoning the measured mixture for raw strength. That joke, with its edge, is the background to what the Spartans later said about their king.

The king who drank like a Scythian

Cleomenes I was one of the two kings of Sparta, of the Agiad house, and he reigned from around 520 to about 490 BC. He was no minor figure. A cunning and often ruthless king, he intervened across the Greek world, manipulated oracles, and dealt hard with rivals and enemies. He was also, by the end, a man his own city believed had lost his mind.¹

According to Herodotus, envoys from Scythia once came to Sparta to propose a joint campaign against the Persian king Darius, and Cleomenes spent a good deal of time in their company. It was from them, the Spartans said, that he learned to drink his wine unmixed. And it was that habit, in the Spartan telling, that unhinged him: the neat wine working on him until his reason gave way.¹

A spectacular madness

Whatever its cause, the madness that overtook Cleomenes was appalling, and Herodotus does not spare the detail. The king’s behaviour grew so alarming — he had taken to striking any Spartan he met in the face with his staff — that his relatives put him in the stocks, under guard. Finding himself alone with a single helot guard, Cleomenes demanded a knife; when the frightened man at last handed one over, the king set about mutilating himself, slicing the flesh from his own legs and working upward, cutting his thighs and belly into strips until he died.¹

It was a death horrifying enough to demand an explanation, and the unmixed wine offered one: here was a man who had broken the great rule of civilised drinking, and here was where breaking it had led. For a Greek audience, it was a familiar kind of cautionary story.

Herodotus’s doubts

And yet Herodotus, who reports the wine explanation, did not himself believe it. He sets it down as what “the Spartans say,” and then gives his own, different view: that Cleomenes was destroyed as a punishment for his impieties.¹ The king had done a great many things the gods might resent. He had bribed the oracle at Delphi to help him depose his fellow king Demaratus; he had committed sacrilege in his brutal campaign against Argos; he had a long record of the kind of behaviour that, to Herodotus, invited divine retribution. To the historian, the madness was the reckoning for all of that, and the wine had nothing to do with it.

There is also a plain chronological problem, which later readers have not failed to notice. The Scythian embassy belongs to the years around 514 BC, and Cleomenes’ madness and death came roughly two decades later. A drinking habit that took twenty years to act is a weak sort of poison. The wine explanation looks less like a diagnosis than like a story, a way of making sense of a shocking end with the most obvious moral tool to hand.¹

The taboo outlived Sparta

Cleomenes was not the only ruler the Greeks measured against the mixing bowl. The same suspicion of neat wine attached, for centuries afterward, to the Macedonians to the north. To the sophisticated cities of the south, the Macedonian court was a place of hard, deep drinking, where wine was taken strong and often unmixed, in quantities a proper symposium would never have allowed. It was one of the things that marked the Macedonians, in Greek eyes, as only half-civilised.³

The most famous of them did nothing to dispel the reputation. Alexander the Great was remembered by ancient writers as a prodigious drinker, and several of them tie his final illness to a night of heavy drinking in Babylon in 323 BC, when he is said to have drained an enormous cup of unmixed wine before falling ill and, days later, dying.³ Whether wine truly killed him is impossible to say, and the ancient accounts disagree about almost everything surrounding his death. But the same kind of story that the Spartans told about Cleomenes could be told about Alexander: when a powerful man came to a bad end, unmixed wine was there to explain it.

What the story was really about

For the Greeks, the difference between a civilised man and a savage could be measured in a mixing bowl. Watered wine meant self-control and the ordered pleasures of the symposium; neat wine meant the loss of both, the condition they attributed to Scythians and, in his last years, to a mad king of Sparta.

Cleomenes may well have drunk too much; Spartan kings often did. But the charge that specifically unmixed wine unmade him says more about Greek values than about Cleomenes. In a culture that read character in how a man mixed his wine, a king rumoured to have taken to barbarian drinking was an obvious candidate for the neat-wine warning, whatever it was that actually destroyed him.

Related dates

The ancient world argued about wine as fiercely as any modern critic. Explore what else happened on this article’s date below.

Read more

The Greek drinking world had rules for everyone: read about Greek women and wine, and the vessels the whole ritual depended on in the history of wine cups and goblets. For another ancient take on watering down the grape, see the story of posca, the sour wine-and-water drink of Rome.

References

1. On Cleomenes I of Sparta, the Spartan claim that he learned to drink unmixed wine from Scythian envoys and was driven mad by it, the phrase to pour wine “in the Scythian fashion,” Herodotus’ own preference for divine punishment as the cause, and the king’s self-mutilation and death: Herodotus, Histories, Book 6 (esp. 6.75 and 6.84), and modern accounts of Cleomenes’ reign. ↩
2. On the Greek custom of mixing wine with water in the krater before drinking, typical proportions of one part wine to two or three parts water, the role of the symposiarch, and the derivation of Greek krasi (wine) from krasis (“mixture”): histories of the Greek symposium and of the krater. ↩
3. On the Scythians as the Greeks’ archetype of unmixed-wine drinkers and the wider Greek association of neat wine with barbarism and excess: Greek ethnographic writing, including Herodotus, and later commentary on “drinking Scythian-style.” ↩

Books worth reading

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The Histories
Herodotus
The original source for Cleomenes, the Scythians, and a thousand other tales from the edge of the Greek world.

Ancient Wine
Patrick E. McGovern
The archaeological search for wine’s origins, and how the drink shaped the ancient cultures that prized it.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
A readable global history that puts the Greek habits of the symposium in their long context.