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unmixed wine to be not only uncivilized but also perilous. The risk it posed to manners was documented by the philosopher Plato: “The Scythians and Thracians, both men and women, drink unmixed wine, which they pour on their garments, and this they think a happy and glorious institution.” The danger it represented to unwary drinkers was proven by the example of the Spartan general Cleomenes, who had been sent to sack the city of Argos but had destroyed instead the shrine of the god of the same name, then led his forces home, claiming to have been distracted by an omen. Cleomenes went mad and died shortly afterward, and his “own countrymen declared that his madness proceeded not from any supernatural cause whatsoever, but only from the habit of drinking wine unmixed with water, which he learnt of the Scythians.”
    There were also risks associated with drinking mixed wine, and although the Greeks generally considered it to be liquid joy, they acknowledged it was capable of producing painful and sometimes dangerous side effects. The tendency of drinking to cause a hangover was noted, and Greek literature contains advice on how to avoid, and how to cure, the headaches and nausea that followed a binge. The key to avoidance was quality—good wine was less likely, according to the poet Philyllius, to make the drinker “feel seedy.” As for cures, boiled cabbage eaten the following day was considered to be the best way to clear a fuzzy head, although some drinkers felt the cure was more painful than the ailment, and the combination of rank-smelling cabbage, a sore brain, and a sense of queasiness to be an unnecessary compound of evils—“stern misfortune’s unexpected blow,” in the words of the poet Amphis.
    The usual way to recuperate after a bout of heavy drinking was to sleep it off. Indeed, sleeping late was considered to be a hallmark of the drunkard, as was a certain inattentiveness to serious matters. Habitual drunks were characterized by the description apeles, which means careless, and/or carefree. Being apeles was no disgrace. Many great men were honored with the title. It was, however, occasionally the subject of mild criticism. The historian Herodotus, for instance, pointed it out as a vice of foreigners and gave the example of Amasis, ruler of Egypt, who became apeles to the extent that he lost his kingdom.
    The Greek word for drinker, philopotes, which also meant “lover of drinking sessions,” bore no stigma. As drinking was an inherently pleasurable activity it was understandable that people would want to indulge in it as much as possible. Those who succumbed too often did so not out of dependency but rather from an inability to resist an entirely natural impulse. They were considered weak, not wrong. In contrast, inappropriate sobriety was thought highly suspect. Some skills, such as oratory, could only be exercised when drunk. Sober people were coldhearted—they meditated before they spoke and were careful about what they said, and therefore, according to logic, the new science of reason, did not really care about their subject. When the orator Demosthenes wanted to criticize the youth of Athens for their drinking habits he had to coin a new term— akratokothones —to distinguish their dangerous kind of drinking. “But even so it was the remark and not its target that became notorious, laying the orator open to the more serious charge of being a water drinker.”
    Water drinkers were believed not only to lack passion but also to exude a noxious odor. Hegesander the Delphian noted that when the two infamous water drinkers Anchimolus and Moschus went to the public baths everyone else got out. The different powers of the respective beverages were summed up in an epigram:
    If with water you fill up your glasses,
You’ll never write anything wise
But wine is the horse of Parnassus,
That carries a bard to the skies.
    This is not to suggest that the Greeks, whenever possible, avoided drinking