Spicing Wine at the Symposion: Fact or Fiction? Some Critical Thoughts on Material Aspects of Commensality in the Early Iron Age and Archaic Mediterranean World

Interpretations of metal graters and pottery tripod bowls as Leitfossils of a trans-Mediterranean ‘orientalizing’ culture of spiced-wine consumption have of late become a staple of scholarship on sympotic banqueting, shaping our perception of ancient wine-drinking and its role in cross-cultural interaction in the first half of the first millennium BC. Yet a closer look at the evidence for spiced wine and the use of graters casts serious doubt on assumptions of a widespread practice of adding ‘spices’ to wine during the Greek symposion and of the use of graters or tripod grinding bowls for such a purpose in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. A more plausible scenario, it is argued, arises from the well-attested association of graters with cheese and other primarily culinary commodities. It sees the grater’s prime function and symbolic significance shift from a use in Early Iron Age ‘Homeric’ hospitality to becoming a tool in the increasingly complex cuisines associated with the Archaic and Classical banquet – an indicator of evolving Mediterranean commensality with no less of an international horizon, but a commensality that involved interaction and shared consumption beyond the narrowly sympotic.