Greek Women and Wine

At a Greek symposium, the only women in the room were paid to be there. The drinking party that shaped so much of classical culture was for men alone; the women present were courtesans and hired flute-players, never respectable wives¹. And yet, once a year, ordinary Greek women slipped out of their guarded households and into the mountains, to worship the god of wine in ecstatic frenzy. The Greek story of women and wine is a study in sharp exclusion — and one spectacular exception.

The men’s drinking party

The symposion — literally “drinking together” — was the beating heart of male social life in classical Greece. Men reclined on couches around a large mixing-bowl, the krater, in which wine was blended with water; to drink wine unmixed was considered the habit of barbarians and a fast road to madness². Here men talked philosophy, recited poetry, played games and drank late into the night. What they did not do was invite their wives.

The women who did attend were there to serve and entertain: hetairai, the educated courtesans who could hold their own in conversation, and the auletrides, the flute-girls hired for music and often more⁵. Their presence only sharpened the rule — a respectable woman’s absence from the party was precisely what marked her as respectable.

The respectable wife stayed home

For a citizen wife, the ideal was near-invisibility: managing the household, rarely seen in public, and certainly not reclining with wine among men⁶. Greek comedy loved to invert this ideal, with its stock joke of the wife secretly tippling the household wine — a gag that only worked because everyone knew women were supposed to abstain. A woman and unmixed wine, in the Greek imagination, spelled disorder.

The god’s wild women

And then there was Dionysus. The god of wine offered women the one licensed escape from all this restraint. In his rites, women became maenads — “raving ones” — who left the city for the mountainside, let down their hair, dressed in fawnskins and danced themselves into ecstasy³. Euripides made this the terrifying core of his last great tragedy, The Bacchae.

“To the mountain! To the mountain!” — and the whole hillside danced with them.— after Euripides, The Bacchae⁴

The rite was both a genuine release and a carefully bounded one: for a set time, in a set place, under the protection of a god, women could do what daily life forbade — and then return. It was ecstasy with a fence around it.

Festivals and the everyday

The rigid ideal was never the whole reality. Women had their own festivals, such as the Thesmophoria, from which men were excluded, and wine surely reached ordinary women at religious feasts and at home⁷. Most Greek women, like most people everywhere, probably drank in moderation without anyone recording it. What the sources preserve is the ideology — and that ideology drew a hard line between the disciplined citizen wife and the god’s wild follower.

Two faces of women and wine

Classical Greece thus imagined women and wine in two extreme forms: the wife who must not touch it, and the maenad who lost herself entirely in it. Both were male fantasies, and the truth lay somewhere quieter in between. But the split says something lasting about how societies have used wine to mark who is in control and who is set loose¹.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Ancient (Roman) women and wine
• Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy
• The symposium: wine and philosophy

References

1. World History Encyclopedia — The Greek Symposium. www.worldhistory.org ↩
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Symposium (Greek social gathering). www.britannica.com ↩
3. World History Encyclopedia — Maenad. www.worldhistory.org ↩
4. Euripides, The Bacchae — Perseus Digital Library (Greek and English text). www.perseus.tufts.edu ↩
5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline — The Symposium in Ancient Greece. www.metmuseum.org ↩
6. World History Encyclopedia — Women in Ancient Greece. www.worldhistory.org ↩
7. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Thesmophoria (women’s festival). www.britannica.com ↩

Recommended reading

A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Tom Standage
Traces wine through the Greek symposium and shows how a drink shaped classical social life.

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
A sweeping social history of wine, rich on Greece, Dionysus and the culture of the ancient Mediterranean.

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