power, went outside of Italy, interfered in the great affairs of the
Mediterranean, and came into more immediate contact with Greece and
the Orient. By a strange law of correlation, as the Roman Empire
spread about the Mediterranean, the vineyard spread in Italy;
gradually, as the world politics of Rome triumphed in Asia and Africa,
the grape harvest grew more abundant in Italy, the consumption of
wine increased, the quality was refined. The bond between the
two phenomena--the progress of conquest and the progress of
vine-growing--is not accidental, but organic, essential, intimate.
As, little by little, the policy of expansion grew, wealth and culture
increased in Rome; the spirit of tradition and of simplicity weakened;
luxury spread, and with it the appetite for sensations, including that
of the taste for intoxicating beverages.
We have but to notice what happens about us in the modern world--when
industry gains and wealth increases and cities grow, men drink more
eagerly and riotously inebriating beverages--to understand
what happened in Italy and in Rome, as gradually wars, tribute,
blackmailing politics, pitiless usury, carried into the peninsula the
spoils of the Mediterranean world, riches of the most numerous and
varied forms. The old-time aversion to wine diminished; men and
women, city-dwellers and countrymen, learned to drink it. The cities,
particularly Rome, no longer confined themselves to slaking their
thirst at the fountains; as the demand and the price for wine
increased, the land-owners in Italy grew interested in offering the
cup of Bacchus, and as they had invested capital in vineyards,
they were drawn on by the same interest to excite ever the more the
eagerness for wine among the multitude, and to perfect grape-culture
and increase the crop, in imitation of the Greeks. The wars and
military expeditions to the Orient not only carried many Italians,
peasants and proprietors, into the midst of the most celebrated
vineyards of the world, but also transported into Italy slaves and
numerous Greek and Asiatic peasants who knew the best methods of
cultivating the vine, and of making wines like the Greek, just as the
peasants of Piedmont, of the _Veneto_, and of Sicily, have in the last
twenty years developed grape-culture in Tunis and California.
Pliny, who is so rich in valuable information on the agricultural and
social advances of Italy, tells us that it opened its hills and plains
to the triumphal entrance of Dionysus between 130 and 120 B.C., about
the time that Rome entered into possession of the kingdom of Pergamus,
the largest and richest part of Asia Minor, left to it by bequest
of Attalus. Thenceforward, for a century and a half, the progress of
grape-growing continued without interruption; every generation poured
forth new capital to enlarge the inheritance of vineyards already
grown and to plant new ones. As the crop increased, the effort was
redoubled to widen the sale, to entice a greater number of people to
drink, to put the Italian wines by the side of the Greek.
At the distance of centuries, these vine-growing interests do not
appear even in history; but they actually were a most important factor
in the Roman policy, a force that helps us explain several main
facts in the history of Rome. For example, vineyards were one of the
foundations of the imperial authority in Italy. That political form
which was called with Augustus the principality, and from which was
evolved the monarchy, would not have been founded if in the last
century of the Republic all Italy had not been covered with vineyards
and olive orchards. The affirmation, put just so, may seem strange and
paradoxical, but the truth of it will be easy to prove.
The imperial authority was gradually consolidated, because, beginning
with Augustus, it succeeded in pacifying Italy after a century of
commotion and civil wars and of foreign invasions, to which the
secular institutions of the Republic had not known how to oppose
sufficient defence; so that, little by little, right or wrong, the
authority of the _Princeps_, as supreme magistrate, and the power of
the Julian-Claudian house, which the supreme magistrate had organised,
seemed to the Italian multitude the stable foundation of peace
and order. But why was Italy, beginning with the time of Cæsar, so
desperately anxious for peace and order? It would be a mistake to see
in this anxiety only the natural desire of a nation, worn by anarchy,
for the conditions necessary to a common social existence. The
contrast of two episodes will show you that during the age of Cæsar
annoyance at disorder and intolerance of it had for a special reason
increased in Italy. Toward the end of the third century B.C., Italy
had borne on its soil for about seventeen years the presence of
an army that went sacking and burning everywhere--the army of
Hannibal--without losing composure, awaiting with patience the hour
for torment to cease. A century and a half later, a Thracian slave,
escaping from the chain-gang with some companions, overran the
country,--and Italy was frightened, implored help, stretched out its
arms to Rome more despairingly than it had ever done in all the years
of Hannibal.
What made Italy so fearful? Because in the time of Hannibal it had
chiefly cultivated cereals and pastured cattle, while in the days of
Spartacus a considerable part of its fortune was invested in vineyards
and olive groves. In pastoral and grain regions the invasion of an
army does relatively little damage; for the cattle can be driven in
advance of the invader, and if grain fields are burned, the harvest of
a year is lost but the capital is not destroyed. If, instead, an army
cuts and burns olive orchards and vineyards, which are many years in
growing, it destroys an immense accumulated capital. Spartacus was
not a new Hannibal, he was something much more dangerous; he was a new
species of _Phylloxera_ or of _Mosca olearia_ in the form of brigand
bands that destroyed vines and olives, the accumulated capital of
centuries. Whence, the emperor became gradually a tutelary deity of
the vine and the olive, the fortune of Italy. It was he who stopped
the barbarians still restless and turbulent on the frontiers of Italy,
hardly over the borders; it was he who kept peace within the country
between social orders and political parties; it was he who looked
after the maintenance and guarding of the great highways of the
peninsula, periodically clearing them of robbers and the evil-disposed
that infested them; and the land-owners, who held their vineyards
and olive groves more at heart than they did the great republican
traditions, placed the image of the Emperor among those of their
Lares, and venerated him as they had earlier revered the Senate.
Still more curious is the influence that this development of Italian
viticulture exercised on the political life of Rome; for example,
in the barbarous provinces of Europe, wine was an instrument
of Romanisation, the effectiveness of which has been too much
disregarded. In Gaul, in Spain, in Helvetia, in the Danube provinces,
Rome taught many things: law, war, construction of roads and cities,
the Latin language and literature, the literature and art of
Greece; more, it also taught to drink wine. Whoever has read the
_Commentaries_ of Cæsar will recall that, on several occasions, he
describes certain more barbarous peoples of Gaul as prohibiting the
importation of wine because they feared they would unnerve and
corrupt themselves by habitual drunkenness. Strabo tells us of a great
Gæto-Thracian empire that a Gætic warrior, Borebiste by name, founded
in the time of Augustus beyond the Danube, opposite Roman possessions;
while this chieftain sought to take from Greek and Latin civilisation
many useful things, he severely prohibited the importation of wine.
This fact and others similar, which might be cited, show that these
primitive folk, exactly like the Romans of more ancient times, feared
the beverage which so easily intoxicates, exactly as in China all wise
people have always feared opium as a national scourge, and so many in
France would to-day prohibit the manufacture of absinthe.
This hesitation and fear disappeared among the Gauls, after their
country was annexed to the Empire; disappeared or was weakened among
all the other peoples of the Danube and Rhine regions, and even in
Germany, when they fell under Roman dominion; even also while they
preserved independence, as little by little the Roman influence
intensified in strength. By example, with the merchants, in
literature, Rome poured out everywhere the ruddy and perfumed drink
of Dionysos, and drove to the wilds and the villages, remote and poor,
the national mead--the beverage of fermented barley akin to modern
beer.
The Italian proprietors who were enlarging their vineyards--especially
those of the valley of the Po, where already at the time of Strabo the
grape-crop was very abundant--soon learned that beyond the Alps lived
numerous customers. Under Augustus, Arles was already a large market
for wines, both Greek and Italian; during the same period, there
passed through Aquileia and Leibach considerable trade in Italian wine
with the Danube regions. In the Roman castles along the Rhine, among
the multitudes of Italians who followed the armies, there was not
wanting the wine-dealer who sought with his liquor to infuse into the
torpid blood of the barbarian a ray of southern warmth. Everywhere
the Roman influence conquered national traditions; wine reigned on the
tables of the rich as the lordly beverage, and the more the Gauls, the
Pannonians, the Dalmatians, drank, the more money Italian proprietors
made from their vineyards.
I have said that Rome diffused at once its wine and its literature:
it also diffused its wine through its literature, a fact upon which
I should like to dwell a moment, since it is odd and interesting
for diverse reasons. We always make a mistake in judging the great
literary works of the past. Two or three centuries after they were
written, they serve only to bring a certain delight to the mind;
consequently, we take for granted they were written only to bring us
this delight. On the contrary, almost all literary works, even the
greatest, had at first quite another office; they served to spread
or to counteract among the author's contemporaries certain ideas and
sentiments that the interests of certain directing forces favoured or
opposed; indeed very often the authors were admired and remunerated
far more for these services rendered to their contemporaries than for
the lofty beauty of the literary works themselves.
This is the case with the odes of Horace. To understand all that they
meant to say to contemporaries, one must imagine Roman society as it
was then, hardly out of a century of conquests and revolutions, in
disorder, unbalanced, and still crude, notwithstanding the luxuries
and refinements superficially imitated from the Orient; a society
eager to enjoy, yet still ill educated to exercise upon itself that
discipline of good taste, without which civilisation and its pleasures
aggravate more than restrain the innate brutality of men. During the
first period of peace, arrived after so great disturbance, that
poetry so perfect in form, which analysed and described all the
most exquisite delights of sense and soul, infused a new spirit of
refinement into habits, and co-operated with laborious education
in teaching even the stern conquerors of the world to enjoy all the
pleasures of civilisation, alike literature and love, the luxury of
the city and the restfulness of the villa, fraternal friendship and
good cookery. It taught, too--this master poetry of the senses--to
enjoy wine, to use the drink of Dionysos not to slake the thirst, but
to colour, with an intoxication now soft, now strong, the most diverse
emotions: the sadness of memories, the tendernesses of friendship, the
transports of love, the warmth of the quiet house, when without the
furious storm and the bitter cold stiffen the universe of nature.
In the poetry of Horace, therefore, wine appears as a proteiform god,
which penetrates not only the tissues of the body but also the inmost
recesses of the mind and aids it in its every contingency, sad or
gay. Wine consoles in ill fortune (i., 7), suffuses the senses with
universal oblivion, frees from anxiety and the weariness of care,
fills the empty hours, and warms away the chill of winter (i., 9). But
the wine that has the power to infuse gentle forgetfulness into the
veins, has also the contrasting power of rousing lyric fervour in the
spirit, the fervour heroic, divining, mystic (iii., 2). Finally, wine
is also a source of power and heroism, as well as of joy and sensuous
delight; a principle of civilisation and of progress (ii., 14).
I wish I could repeat to you all the Dionysic verse of this old poet
from Venosa, whose subjects and motives, even though expressed in the
choicest forms, may seem common and conventional in our time and to
us, among whom for centuries the custom of drinking wine daily with
meals has been a general habit. But these poems had a very different
significance when they were written, in that society in which many did
not dare drink wine commonly, considering it as a medicine, or as a
beverage injurious to the health, or as a luxury dangerous to morals
and the purse; in that time when entire nations, like Gaul, hesitated
between the invitations of the ruddy vine-crowned Bacchus, come with
his legions victorious, and the desperate supplications of Cervisia,
the national mead, pale and fleeing to the forests. In those times and
among those men, Horace with his dithyrambics affected not only the
spirit but the will, uniting the subtle suggestion of his verses to
all the other incentives and solicitations that on every side were
persuading men to drink. He corroded the ancient Italian traditions,
which opposed with such repugnance and so many fears the efforts of
the vintners and the vineyard labourers to sell wine at a high price;
in this way he rendered service to Italian viticulture.
The books of Horace, while he was still living, became what we might
call school text-books; that is, they were read by young students,
which must have increased their influence on the mind. Imagine that
to-day a great European poet should describe and extol in magnificent
verses the sensuous delight of smoking opium; should deify, in a
mythology rich in imagery, the inebriating virtues of this product.
Imagine that the verses of this poet were read in the schools: you
may then by comparison picture to yourself the action of the poems of
Horace.
The political and military triumph of Rome in the Mediterranean world
signified therefore the world triumph of wine. So true is this, that
in Europe and America to-day the sons of Rome drink wine as their
national daily beverage. The Anglo-Saxons and Germans drink it in
the same way as the Romans of the second century B.C., on formal
occasions, or as a medicine. When you see at an European or American
table the gold or the ruby of the fair liquor gleaming in the glasses,
remember that this is another inheritance from the Roman Empire and
an ultimate effect of the victories of Rome; that probably we should
drink different beverages if Cæsar had been overcome at Alesia or
if Mithridates had been able decisively to reconquer Asia Minor from
Rome. It astonishes you to see between politics and enology, between
the great historical events and the lot of a humble plant, so close a
bond.
I can show you another aspect of this phenomenon, even stranger and
more philosophical. I have already said that at the beginning of the
first century before Christ, although Italy had already planted many
vineyards and gathered generous crops, Italian wines were still little
sought after, while the contrary was true of the Greek. Pliny writes:
The wines of Italy were for long despised.... Foreign wines
had great vogue for some time even after the consulate of
Opimius [121 B.C.], and up to the times of our grandfathers,
although then Falernian was already discovered.
In the second half of the last century of the Republic and the first
half of the first century B.C., this condition of things changed;
Italian wines rose to great fame and demand, and took from the Greek
the pre-eminence they so long had held. Finally, this pre-eminence
formed one of the spoils of world conquest, and that not one of the
meagrest. Pliny, writing in the second half of the first century, says
(bk. 14, ch. 11):
Among the eighty most celebrated qualities of wine made in all
the world, Italy makes about two thirds; therefore in this it
outdoes other peoples.
The first wines that came into note seem to have been those of
southern Italy, especially Falernian, and Julius Cæsar seems to have
done much to make it known. Pliny tells us (bk. 14, ch. 15) that, in
the great popular banquet offered to celebrate his triumph after his
return from Egypt, he gave to every group of banqueters a cask of
Chian and an _amphora_ of Falernian, and that in his third consulate
he distributed four kinds of wine to the populace, Lesbian, Chian,
Falernian, and Mamertine; two Greek qualities and two Italian. It is
evident that he wished officially to recognise national wines as equal
to the foreign, in favour of Italian vintners; so that Julius Cæsar,
that universal man, has a place not only in the history of the great
Italian conquests, but also in that of Italian viticulture.
The wines of the valley of the Po were not long in making place for
themselves after those of southern Italy. We know that Augustus drank
only Rhetian wine; that is, of the Valtellina, one of the valleys
famous also to-day for several delicious wines; we know that Livia
drank Istrian wine.
I have said that Italy exported much wine to Gaul, to the Danube
regions, and to Germany; to this may be added another remark,
both curious and interesting. _The Periplus of the Erytrian Sea_,
attributed to Arrianus, a kind of practical manual of geography,
compiled in the second century A.D., tells us that in that century
Italian wine was exported as far as India; so far had its fame spread!
There is no doubt that the wealth in the first and second century
A.D., which flowed for every section of Italy, came in part from the
nourishing vineyards planted upon its hills and plains; and that
the Italians, who had gone to the Orient for reasons political and
financial, had fallen upon yet greater fortune in contrabanding
Bacchus from the superb vineyards of the Ægean islands, and
transporting him to the hills of Italy; a new seat whereon the
capricious god of the vine rested for two centuries, until he took
again to wandering, and crossed the Alps.
We may at this juncture ask ourselves if this enologic pre-eminence of
Italy was the result only of a greater skill in cultivating the vine
and pressing the grapes. I think not. It does not seem that Italy
invented new methods of wine-making; it appears, instead, that it
restricted itself to imitating what the Greeks had originated. On the
other hand, it is certain, at least in northern and central Italy,
that, although the vine grows, it does so less spontaneously and
prosperously than in the Ægean islands, Greece, and Asia Minor,
because the former regions are relatively too cold.
The great fame of the Italian wines had another cause, a political:
the world power and prestige of Rome. This psychological phenomenon
is found in every age, among all peoples, and is one of the most
important and essential in all history. What is beautiful and what is
ugly? What is good and what is bad? What is true and what is false?
In every period men must so distinguish between things, must adopt
or repudiate certain ideas, practise or abandon certain habits, buy
certain objects and refuse others; but one should not believe that
all peoples make these discernments spontaneously, according to their
natural inclination. It always happens that some nations succeed, by
war, or money, or culture, in persuading the lesser peoples about them
that they are superior; and strong in this admiration, they impose
upon their susceptible neighbours, by a kind of continuous suggestion,
their own ideas as the truest, their own customs as the noblest, their
own arts as the most perfect.
For this reason chiefly, wars have often distant and complicated
repercussions on the habits, the ideas, the commerce of nations. War,
to which so many philosophers would attribute a divine spirit, so
many others a diabolic, appears to the historian as above all a
means--allow me the phrase, a bit frivolous, but graphic--of noisy
_réclame_, advertisement for a people; because, although a more
civilised people may be conquered by one more barbarous, less
cultured, less moral; although, also, the superiority in war may
be relative, and men are not on the earth merely to give each other
blows, but to work, to study, to know, to enjoy; yet the majority
of men are easily convinced that he who has won in a war is in
everything, or at least in many things, superior to him who has lost.
So it happened, for example, after the late Franco-Prussian War, that
not only the armies organised or reorganised after 1870 imitated even
the German uniform, as they had earlier copied the French, but in
politics, science, industry, even in art, everything German was more
generously admired. Even the consumption of beer heavily increased
in the wine countries, and under the protection of the Treaty of
Frankfurt, the god Gambrinus has made some audacious sallies into the
territories sacred to Dionysos.
The same thing occurred in regard to wine in the ancient world. Athens
and Alexander the Great had given to Greek wine the widest reputation,
all the peoples of the Mediterranean world being persuaded that that
was the best of all. Then the centre of power shifted to the west,
toward the city built on the banks of the Tiber, and little by little
as the power of Rome grew, the reputation of its wine increased, while
that of Greece declined; until, finally, with world empire, Italy
conquered pre-eminence in the wine market, and held it with the
Empire; for while Italy was lord, Italian wine seemed most excellent
and was paid for accordingly.
This propensity of minor or subject peoples to imitate those dominant
or more famous, is the greatest prize that rewards the pre-eminent
for the fatigue necessary to conquer that place of honour; it is the
reason why cultured and civilised nations ought naturally to seek
to preserve a certain political, economic, and military supremacy,
without which their intellectual superiority would weaken or at least
lose a part of its value. The human multitude in the vast world are
not yet so intelligent and refined as to prize that which is beautiful
and grand for its own sake; and they are readily induced to admire as
excellent what is but mediocre, if behind it there is a force to be
feared or to impose it. Indeed, we may observe in the modern world a
phenomenon analogous to that in historic Italy. What, in succeeding
centuries, have been the changes in the enologic superiority conquered
by Rome?
Naturally I cannot recount the whole story, although it would be
interesting; but will only observe that contemporary civilisation
confirms the law by which predominance in the Latin world and the
pre-eminence of wine are indissolubly bound together in history.