Οἶνος ἐπίκλοπος: wine and deceit in ancient Greek mythology

• Κύριος συγγραφέας: Papadimitriou, Fay
• Μορφή: Online
• Γλώσσα: English
• Έκδοση: Centre for the Study of Myth and Religion in Greek and Roman Antiquity 2018
• Θέματα: Medicine, Plants, Vegetables, Fruits, Disease, Magic, Religion; Greek mythology; Oresteia, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra; disbelief, iamata, epigraphic evidence, literary evidence, divine punishment, incubation; Iphigénie, Iphigénie en Tauride, sacrifice, protéleia, prémices; Asclepius, Justin martyr, Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Contra Celsum, euhemerism; Hercules; Steve Moore; comics; myth;counterfeit;origami; repetition; Agamemnon, hero, Kassandra, Amyklai, Zeus; Asclepius, testimonials, medical treatment, Aristides; Heracles’ private life; Love; Family; Man /woman; Mythic parallels; greek mythology; Agamemnon, history, rhetoric, politics; Ηρακλής; Γέλα; Ακράγας; Ρόδος; Κρήτη; Snake, ambiguity, health in antiquity, healing cult, symbolism, ancient medicine, snake imagery, manipulation

Wine is first and foremost associated with pleasure; and not only in ancient Greece, where this survey is focused on. As it is commonly known, it accompanied the famous symposia of men, where it played the primary role and it’s not by chance that symposia received their name exactly from the drinking session of them, which actually contained only one kind of drink, i.e. wine (of course, mixed with water, the so-called οἶνος κεκραμένος, since it was offered to mortals and not to gods). Wine had (and still has) the property of bringing the person who drinks it in a state of joy and delight, relaxation and relief. But it was not only the comrade of men during their “convivia”. It’s also detected in Greeks’ offerings to their gods – mainly to the heavenward, not the chthonic ones; these offerings (i.e. to the Olympian gods) were called spondae (σπονδαί) and contained a variety of liquids, such as honey, olive oil and milk, but wine was in a way the protagonist among them, since it was its absence from (most of) the choae (χοαί) (the offerings to the chthonic gods), which differentiated the one kind of offerings from the other.