Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes: A useful scale of inebriation
So the other day I was reading an excerpt of a biography of Alexander the Great, and it included a delightful quotation about drunkenness, spoken by Dionysus as a character in an Athenian play:
For sensible men I prepare only three craters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third mixing bowl is drained, sensible men go home. The fourth crater is nothing to do with me -- it belongs to bad behavior; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.
It didn't source it but I wanted to know what it was, and Lysimache says this is apparently a fragment from a play Dionysus by Eubulus.
(Note to people unfamiliar with Ancient Greek drinking conventions: a krater isn't an individual cup, it's a communal bowl from which you fill your cup, and also the wine is mixed with varying amounts of water so there's not really a standard unit involved here to be able to make a scale. Nonetheless, the Greeks seem to have tried to invent one.)
Things I like about this quote:
1. At some point some idiots drank ten kraters of wine.
2. There's a separate level for "breaking furniture" that's different from "fights."
3. Dionysus himself says that if you have more than three, that's on you, buddy. That wasn't his idea.
Lysimache actually found this sourced in an article entitled Classically intoxicated: correlations between quantity of alcohol consumed and alcohol related problems in a classical Greek text, which gives you the original text and, weirdly, a different translation -- eight is basically "a legal summons" rather than "breaking furniture," and ten just says "mania," which the translator in that article thinks means "throwing things," with no reference to unconsciousness. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway. In case you ever go drinking in Ancient Greece and need to know when to stop, the Greeks have that all worked out for you.
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For sensible men I prepare only three craters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third mixing bowl is drained, sensible men go home. The fourth crater is nothing to do with me -- it belongs to bad behavior; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.
It didn't source it but I wanted to know what it was, and Lysimache says this is apparently a fragment from a play Dionysus by Eubulus.
(Note to people unfamiliar with Ancient Greek drinking conventions: a krater isn't an individual cup, it's a communal bowl from which you fill your cup, and also the wine is mixed with varying amounts of water so there's not really a standard unit involved here to be able to make a scale. Nonetheless, the Greeks seem to have tried to invent one.)
Things I like about this quote:
1. At some point some idiots drank ten kraters of wine.
2. There's a separate level for "breaking furniture" that's different from "fights."
3. Dionysus himself says that if you have more than three, that's on you, buddy. That wasn't his idea.
Lysimache actually found this sourced in an article entitled Classically intoxicated: correlations between quantity of alcohol consumed and alcohol related problems in a classical Greek text, which gives you the original text and, weirdly, a different translation -- eight is basically "a legal summons" rather than "breaking furniture," and ten just says "mania," which the translator in that article thinks means "throwing things," with no reference to unconsciousness. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway. In case you ever go drinking in Ancient Greece and need to know when to stop, the Greeks have that all worked out for you.
Read this entry on Dreamwidth ||
comments