The rain of fire

On the morning of October 24, 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of the deadliest volcanic events in recorded history.

The nearby towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis had warnings.  There was a series of earthquakes during the lead-up to the eruption, which got a few people to leave the area -- everyone remembered that there'd been a powerful earthquake in February of 62 that had destroyed a number of buildings, and the skittish thought that something similar might be about to happen again -- but by and large, the residents just shrugged their shoulders.  Pliny the Younger, who wrote the only extant eyewitness account of the eruption (he was safely in Misenum, thirty kilometers away across the Bay of Naples, when it happened), said that the earthquakes that preceded the eruption "were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania," and thus the majority of people in the area ignored them and stayed home.

This turned out to be a mistake.

The morning of October 24 dawned clear and bright, but there was already a plume of steam coming from the summit of the mountain that loomed over the four cities.  This, too, was nothing unusual; it's doubtful many people even noticed.  But at around midday, there was a sudden jolt, and the entire peak exploded, sending a column of ash, rock, and superheated steam an estimated thirty kilometers high, blasting out material at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second.  Rocks and ash rained down on the cities, but worse was to come; by evening, the pressure forcing the column upward dropped suddenly and the entire column collapsed, causing a pyroclastic surge with an estimated temperature of six hundred degrees Celsius pouring downhill at about a hundred kilometers an hour.  Anything or anyone left that hadn't been killed by asphyxiation or roofs collapsing died instantly, and the ash flow blanketed the region.  The greatest quantity of ash landed in Herculaneum, which was buried under a layer twenty meters thick.

But all four cities were completely obliterated, to the point that within a hundred years, most people forgot that they'd ever existed.  References to Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis, four prosperous towns that had been wiped out by the wrath of the gods, were considered fanciful legends -- a little like Plato's mention of the mythical land of Atlantis sinking beneath the waves.

Then, in 1709, a farmer was plowing his field, and the plow hit the edge of a buried wall.  It turned out to be a surviving piece of masonry from Herculaneum.  Something similar happened in Pompeii in 1748.  Archaeologists were called in, and gradually, the work started that is still ongoing -- clearing away meters-thick layers of welded ash to uncover what is left of the four cities.

Today it's a strange, somber place.  Wandering around its cobblestone streets, and looking at the snaggletoothed silhouette of Vesuvius in the distance -- the mountain lost almost half of its original height in the eruption -- was chilling despite the bright warmth of the sun.  We looked at remnants of homes, shops, temples, baths, the central forum, and even a brothel (each room decorated with highly explicit paintings of what services you could expect within).

We got to see some of the casts of the people who died during the eruption, their names long forgotten, their bodies entombed in fused hot ash, then burned and decayed away to leave a cavity that archaeologists filled with plaster to reveal their ghostly forms.

Many of the 1,044 molds of human victims were found with their hands over their faces, futilely trying to shield themselves from the choking, scalding ash.

Today, around three million people live in the shadow of Vesuvius, most of them in the city of Naples and the nearby towns of Pozzuoli, Bagnoli, San Giorgio a Cremano, and Portici.  Our guide said there were two reasons for this, and for the number of people living in other volcanic areas, such as Indonesia, Japan, Costa Rica, Cameroon, and Ecuador -- (1) volcanic soil is wonderfully fertile for agriculture, and (2) people have short memories.  But now that we have a better understanding of plate tectonics and geology, you have to wonder why people are willing to accept the risk.  A man we talked to in Rome had an explanation for that, too.  "Those people down in Naples," he said, shaking his head, "they're crazy."

Today Pompeii is seemingly at peace, its ruins as quiet as the cemetery it in fact is.  Flowers grow in profusion in every grassy spot.

But not far beneath the surface, the magma is still moving.  The processes that destroyed the region in the first century C.E. are haven't stopped, and the tranquil scene up above is very much an illusion.  After seeing the city, we hiked up to the summit of Vesuvius and looked down into the crater, the hole blasted out of the center of the mountain.

The whole thing was enough to make me feel very small and very powerless.  We flatter ourselves to think we can control the forces of nature, but in reality, we're still at their mercy -- no different from the residents of Pompeii on October 23, who knew the mountain was rumbling but figured there was nothing to worry about.  The rain of fire that was to come only twenty-four hours later was unstoppable.  Although now we can predict volcanic eruptions better than the first-century Romans, we still are at the mercy of a natural world that cares little for our lives.

But there's nothing wrong with being reminded of this periodically.  A bit of humility is good for the mind.

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The echoes of Carrhae

Back on the ninth of June, 53 B.C.E., seven legions of Roman heavy infantry were lured into the desert near the town of Carrhae (now Harran, Turkey) by what appeared to be a small retreating force of Parthian soldiers.  It was a trap, and the leader of the Roman forces, Marcus Licinius Crassus (who was one-third of the First Triumvirate, along with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great) fell for it.  Well-armed and highly mobile Parthian horsemen swept down and kicked some legionnaire ass.  Just about all of the Roman soldiers were either captured or killed, and Crassus himself was executed -- in some accounts, by having molten gold poured down his throat.

Not the way I would choose to make my exit.  Yeowch.

A bust thought to be of the unfortunate Marcus Licinius Crassus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sergey Sosnovskiy, Bust of a Roman, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In any case, very few soldiers from Crassus's seven legions made it back to Italy.  They didn't all die, though, so what happened to the survivors?

This is where it gets interesting -- not only because historical mysteries are intrinsically intriguing, but as another example of "please don't believe whatever you see on the internet, and more importantly don't repost it without checking it for accuracy."

The Battle of Carrhae comes up because a couple of days ago I got one of those "sponsored" posts on Facebook that are largely clickbait based on what stuff you've shared or liked in the past.  With my interest in archaeology and history, I get a lot of links of the type, "Archaeologists don't want you to find out about this ONE WEIRD HISTORICAL FACT," as if actual researchers just hate it when people hear about what they're researching and love nothing better than keeping all of their findings secret from everyone.

In any case, the claim of this particular post was that the survivors of the Battle of Carrhae were absorbed into the Parthian Empire (plausible), but never were accepted there so decided after a while to up stakes and move east (possible), where they eventually made their way to northwestern China (hmmm...) and there's a place called Liqian where their descendants settled.  These guys were recruited by the Chinese as mercenaries to fight against the Xiongnu in 36 B.C.E., and when the Xiongnu were roundly defeated the grateful Chinese Emperor allowed the Romans to stay there permanently.

This idea was championed by historian Homer Dubs, professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, who as part of his argument claimed that the "fish-scale formation" used by the Chinese army against the Xiongnu had been copied from the Roman "testudo formation" -- a move where legions go forward with their shields overlapping to prevent spears and arrows from their opponents from striking home.  The Romans had taught the Chinese a new tactic, Dubs said, and that's how they won the battle.

So far, I have no problem with any of this.  There's nothing wrong with researchers making claims, even far-fetched ones; that's largely how scientific inquiry progresses, with someone saying, essentially, "Hey, here's how I think this works," and all his/her colleagues trying their best to punch holes in the claim.  If the claim stands up to the tests of evidence and logic, then we have a working model of the phenomenon in question.

But the link I got on social media pretty much stopped with, "Hey, some Romans ended up in China, isn't that cool?"  There was no mention of the fact that (1) Dubs made his claim in 1941; (2) because there has never been a single Roman artifact -- not one -- found near Liqian, just about all archaeologists and historians think Dubs was wrong; and (3) a genetic test of a large sample of people around Liqian found not the slightest trace of European ancestry.  Everyone there, apparently, is mostly of Han Chinese descent, just as you'd expect.

And the genetic tests that conclusively put Dubs's claim to rest were conducted seventeen years ago.

Look, it's not that I don't get clickbait.  These sites like "Amazing Facts From History" exist to get people to click on them, boosting their numbers and therefore their ad revenue, irrespective of whether anything they're claiming is true.  In other words, if they can get you to click on it, they win.

But what I don't understand is the number of people who shared the link -- over five thousand, at the point I saw it -- and appended comments like, "This is so interesting!" and "History is so fascinating!", apparently uncritically accepting what the site claimed without doing what I did, a (literally) two-minute read of Wikipedia that brought me to the paper from The Journal of Human Genetics I linked above.  Not a single one of the hundreds of commenters said, "But this isn't true, and we've known it's not true for almost two decades."

I can almost hear the objections.  What's the harm of believing an odd claim about ancient history, even if the (very strong) evidence is that it's false?  To me, there is actual harm in it; it establishes a habit of credulity, of accepting what sounds cool or fun or weird or interesting without any apparent consideration of whether or not it's true.  Sure, there's no immediate problem with believing Roman soldiers settled in China.

But when you start applying that same lack of critical thinking to matters of your health, the environment, or politics, the damage accrues awfully fast.

So please do some fact-checking before you share.  Apply skepticism to what you see online -- even if (or maybe, especially if) what you're considering sharing conforms to your preconceived notions about how things work.  We can all fall prey to confirmation bias, and these days, with the prevalence of clickbait sites run by folks who don't give a rat's ass if what they post is real or not, it's an increasing problem.

Check before you share.  It's that simple.

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The vanished legion

In the Doctor Who episode "The Eaters of Light," the Twelfth Doctor and his companions, Bill and Nardole, go back to second-century Scotland to settle a dispute they're having over what actually happened to the Roman Ninth Legion (the Legio IX Hispania), which was deployed in the British Isles during the first century but rather suddenly disappears from the records in around 120 C.E.

Being Doctor Who, of course there are aliens involved -- a mysterious and powerful creature that feeds off of light, and which the native Picts knew how to control, but the attacks by the Romans (specifically the Ninth Legion) disrupted their ability to manage the portal behind which it was trapped, and it was in danger of getting loose and wreaking havoc.  In the end, the Doctor convinces the Picts and the Romans to set aside their hostilities and work together to deal with the bigger danger, and the Pictish leader, along with some of her warriors, and the entire legion choose to sacrifice their lives to contain the creature behind the door (which lies amongst a very atmospheric ring of standing stones out on the windswept heather), thus saving the world and also explaining why the Ninth Legion suddenly vanished.

The disappearance of the Legio IX Hispania is one of the more curious historical mysteries.  An early hypothesis, promoted by German historian Christian Theodor Mommsen, was that the Ninth had been wiped out in a battle with the Picts in 108 C.E., but there are a couple of problems in this claim.  First, the Romans were meticulous record-keepers, and didn't shy away from writing down what happened even when they'd lost.  If an entire legion had been destroyed in battle, it's curious that no one ever mentioned it.  Second, there's some evidence that at least a few members of the Ninth survived -- there are inscriptions that may be from them in the ruins of the Roman base at Nijmegen (now in the Netherlands) dating from the 120s.  It's possible, of course, that the artifacts -- including a silver-and-bronze military medal with "LEG HISP IX" engraved on the back -- were brought there by someone else.  After all, inscriptions about the Ninth Legion showing up at a particular time and place doesn't mean the Ninth Legion was there at the time.

Despite this argument, some have suggested that there were members of the Ninth at Nijmegen -- perhaps only a handful of survivors of a rout in Scotland.  Other historians go even further, believing the entire legion survived and was merely redeployed elsewhere, ultimately meeting their end in the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E.) or even as late as Marcus Aurelius's war against the Parthians (161-166 C.E.).

But again, we run up against the fact that although there are records of both of those battles, the Ninth Legion is never mentioned.  If they fought -- and possibly were destroyed -- in either of those conflicts, why did no one ever say so?

Most historians still subscribe to the idea that the Ninth was wiped out in Scotland, despite it leaving considerable questions about how it happened and why no one documented it.  British archaeologist Miles Russell, in his book The Celtic Kings of Roman Britain, says, "by far the most plausible answer to the question 'what happened to the Ninth' is that they fought and died in Britain, disappearing in the late 110s or early 120s when the province was in disarray."

Of course, a historical mystery like this leaves fertile ground for fiction writers to invent their own solutions, and the episode of Doctor Who is far from the only fanciful solution that has been proposed.  A good many of them involve time slips and transportation to an alternate reality, but none is as out there as the fate proposed in a Doc Savage novel wherein the Ninth is transported through an interdimensional gateway and ultimately end up in the African Congo, where their descendants survive until the 1930s.

And people say the plots of Doctor Who are ridiculous.

In any case, from a factual perspective what we're left with is a great big question mark.  An entire legion of Roman soldiers suddenly stops showing up in the records, and no one is really sure why.  The frustrating thing is that given the unlikeliness of finding any documents from that time that we don't already know about, it's doubtful we'll ever know for certain -- a highly unsatisfactory answer to our natural human curiosity.

Me, I'm voting for the light-eating alien having something to do with it.

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Cups and scrolls

I recently finished the outstanding novel The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which tells the story of the events of The Iliad, focusing on the doomed love affair between Achilles and Patroclus (it's told from Patroclus's point of view).  The best novelizations of history and historical fiction -- other examples that come to mind are Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Sigrid Undset's Kristen Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, and Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven -- don't just tell a story but actually transport you back into a different time and place.  They succeed at portraying the underlying humanity we share with all people, however far back you go, while communicating the fascinating otherness we experience when immersed in a different culture.

It's this same curiosity about other times and places that explains why I'm fascinated with archaeology.  The idea of seeing, or even touching, an item that was handled by people hundreds or thousands of years ago is an absolute thrill.  This is why I was so excited to read two wonderful pieces of research sent my way by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

The first one is why I started this post with The Song of Achilles, because it's a study of an artifact called Nestor's Cup, a 2,800 ceramic vessel with the inscription, "I am Nestor's Cup, good to drink from.  Whoever drinks this cup empty, straightaway the desire for beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize him."

As an aside, I'm not sure that getting the hots for Aphrodite would, in the long run, be a good thing.  In The Iliad and The Odyssey the gods mostly come across as petulant, willful, and perpetually horny teenagers, and mortals were generally better off avoiding getting noticed by them.  As far as Nestor himself, he's over and over called "a great and wise counselor," but if you know the story, this comes across as a little weird because Nestor is the one who convinced Agamemnon to take the Achaeans into battle (with disastrous results), and was also the one who gave Patroclus the advice that ended up getting him killed.

So if Nestor handed me a cup and said, "Hey, drink this and Aphrodite will be ready to hop in bed with you!" I doubt I'd be all that inclined to take him up on it.

Be that as it may, the artifact itself is fascinating.  It was found in a burial site in Pithekoussai, a Greek colony on the island of Ischia (currently owned by Italy).  It may have originally been used as a drinking vessel, as per the inscription, but in the eighth century B.C.E. it was buried along with the ashes of three adults, and various other fancy and expensive items.

"Our research rewrites the history and the previous archaeological interpretation of the tomb, throwing new light on funeral practices, culture and society of the Greek immigrants in the ancient West Mediterranean," said study co-author Melania Gigante.  "Pithekoussai is widely considered one of the most important archaeological findings of pre-classical Mediterranean archaeology."

The other story comes from an even more famous site -- Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was destroyed by a catastrophic pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  Wealthy communities like Pompeii and Herculaneum were mostly inhabited by the Roman upper crust, who were well-read and owned extensive libraries.

Unfortunately, Roman books and scrolls -- being made of parchment or paper -- would have been incinerated during the eruption, as the material in pyroclastic flows can easily reach a temperature of 1,000 C.  However, the temperatures rose (and then dropped) so fast, and the remains then blanketed by ash, that the scrolls in the libraries weren't burned to cinders but instead were carbonized in situ, where they were found, still rolled up, when the ruins were excavated.

The problem is that these blackened cylinders are exceptionally fragile.  Unrolling them would immediately cause them to crumble into tiny fragments.  So while there might be traces of the ink left behind, how could you ever open them up to see it?

It was impossible... until now.

Using a non-invasive laser imager and a complex machine-learning algorithm, archaeologist Luke Farritor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has succeeded in discerning a single word -- πορϕυρας, meaning "purple" -- in a proof-of-concept that gives antiquarians hope of reading at least some of Herculaneum's damaged scrolls.

The most exciting part is that the majority of the documents we have from the Greeks and Romans are copies of copies of copies that finally made their way into medieval libraries.  The inevitable errors (not to mention deliberate editing) from this kind of literary Game of Telephone mean that we really have no idea how close our versions are to the originals.  If we could read the scrolls of Herculaneum, this would bring us one step closer to seeing what the ancients actually wrote, as well as opening up the thrilling possibility of recovering works that were thought to be lost forever.

So that's the news from the world of antiquity.  My thanks to the eagle-eyed reader who sent me the links.  Now I think I'll sit and drink my coffee (from an ordinary, non-Aphrodite-summoning mug) and ponder what it was like to live thousands of years ago, and see -- at least faintly -- through the eyes of the ancients.

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All roads lead to... North Tawton?

You may have heard that upstate New York is called a "four-season climate."  Sounds nice, doesn't it?  What they neglect to tell you prior to moving here is that the four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction.

That last bit is a frustrating one, because even though the summers here are quite nice, the constant freeze-thaw cycle of the other three seasons plays absolute hell on our roads.  Ithaca, the nearest decent-sized town to where I live, is a lovely place in many respects, but it often seems like little more than a giant maze of potholes.  So it's no wonder that the road construction crews use our fleeting summers to make what repairs they can before the deluge of snow, ice, and road salt starts once again.

The difficulty we have in maintaining our transportation corridors highlights how amazing it is that there are still largely intact roads from Roman times, nearly two thousand years ago.  To be fair, they didn't have the amount (nor type) of traffic our highways have to endure, but still, it's a testament to Roman engineering prowess that they even still exist.

Blackstone Edge Long Causeway, West Yorkshire, second century C.E. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nigel Homer, Looking down the Roman Road - geograph.org.uk - 92590, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The topic comes up because of a cool new study out of the University of Exeter that used LIDAR (Laser Imaging, Detection, And Ranging), a technique that can detect surface structures even through dense undergrowth, to locate traces of a network of Roman roads in Devon and Cornwall that archaeologists didn't even know existed.

What was most surprising is that the hub of the road network wasn't the city of Exeter, but the much smaller town of North Tawton (which currently only has about two thousand inhabitants).  Exeter was a Roman town -- they called it Isca Dumnoniorum, after the Dumnonii, a local Celtic tribe -- but the more centrally-located site of North Tawton (the Roman Nemetostatio) was the center of the radial spokes of the network.

"Despite more than seventy years of scholarship, published maps of the Roman road network in southern Britain have remained largely unchanged and all are consistent in showing that west of Exeter, Roman Isca, there was little solid evidence for a system of long-distance roads," said Christopher Smart, who led the study.  "But the recent availability of seamless LIDAR coverage for Britain has provided the means to transform our understanding of the Roman road network that developed within the province, and nowhere more so than in the far southwestern counties, in the territory of the Dumnonii."

The result was that they were able to identify over a hundred kilometers of roads that were previously unknown to archaeologists, giving them a much better picture of how people moved in Romano-Celtic Britain.  The map they generated suggests that the network not only connected Roman outposts to each other, but incorporated pre-existing Celtic towns -- showing that the conquering Romans preferred to leave intact the settlements of the people they ruled (at least the ones who didn't fight back).

"In terms of chronology, it is likely that the proposed network is an amalgam of pre-existing prehistoric routeways, Roman military campaign roads or 'tactical roads' formally adopted into the provincial communications system, and of those constructed during peacetime in a wholly civilian context," said João Fonte, who co-authored the study.  "This evolutionary model is supported by the fact that the network does not solely connect Roman forts and their hinterlands directly, which are often connected by branch roads, but instead appears to serve a broader purpose than required by military supply."

It's astonishing to think that nearly two millennia later, we can still find the remnants of the roads used by the Romans in Britain.  Makes me wonder what future archaeologists will find of our civilization.  Will there be anything left of the asphalt paths we create for our cars?

Hey, if we can still locate the remains of the cobblestone paths put down by the Romans, I think there's an excellent chance the archaeologists of the future will be able to find out a good bit about our highways, too.  "Wow," they'll say.  "Those people in upstate New York sure knew how to repair potholes."

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A library of ghosts

I'm currently working on a trilogy about the fall of civilization that is not, I hasten to state, inspired by current events.

It's actually a story I've been cogitating on since I was in college.  How would ordinary people cope with the collapse of the comfortable support network we're all so very used to?  The three books of the trilogy are set about five hundred years apart, and center around (respectively) the time when everything fell apart, a period of "Dark Ages" during which a significant chunk of what's left of humanity has lost technology and even literacy, and the time during which things come full circle and people begin to rediscover science and mathematics and all that comes with it.  In the second book, The Scattering Winds, there's a sequence when the main character comes across the mostly-intact remnants of a library from before the fall -- and is overwhelmed by the magnitude of what was lost:

"Do these books come from the Before Time?" Kallian asked in a near whisper.

Kasprit Seely nodded, looking around them at the shadowed shelves, laden with dust-covered books.  "Before the flood, you mean?  I’ve no doubt that many of them do.  During the Black Years, with the floods and the plagues, people were trying their hardest just to survive.  A lot of them didn’t, of course.  From what I’ve read, in the times before, there were a thousandfold more people than there are now, and they had ample food and living space and comfort and could spend their time reading and writing books.  But when a hundred years passes with deprivation and famine and death on your doorstep every day, a lot is forgotten.  You’ll see in some books there are numbers that I believe were some sort of system of keeping track of the passage of years.  But I’ve not been able to decipher how it’s to be read, nor how it relates to the present day.  Nowadays we simply track time by the year of the reign of the current king.  So this is the twenty-first year of the reign of High King Sweyn VII, long may he live."  Kasprit pulled a book off a shelf in the room they’d entered—the cover said The Diversity of Life by E. O. Wilson, and was adorned with a design of a brightly-colored beetle with long antennae.  He blew the dust off the top and opened the cover, flipped a couple of pages in, and rested the tip of his long index finger on a line that said, "Copyright 1992."

I thought about this scene when I came upon an article about an archaeological discovery made in 2017 in the center of the German city of Cologne.  Cologne is immensely old; it was the main settlement of the Ubii, a Germanic tribe that (unlike many of their neighbors) forged a strong and long-lasting alliance with the Romans.  Eventually, the place got so thoroughly Romanized that it was renamed Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium -- "Colony of Claudius and the Altar of the Agrippinians."  This proved to be a clumsy appellation, and it was shortened to Colonia, which is where the modern name of Cologne comes from.

Well, it turns out in the center of modern Cologne, a city with a million inhabitants, are the remnants of what used to be the Library of Colonia.  At first, it was thought that the foundation was part of a stone-walled fortification, but when the archaeologists began to discover deep niches in the walls, they realized that its purpose was something altogether different.

"It took us some time to match up the parallels – we could see the niches were too small to bear statues inside," said Dirk Schmitz, of the Roman-Germanic Museum of Cologne, who participated in the research.  "But what they are are kind of cupboards for the scrolls.  They are very particular to libraries – you can see the same ones in the library at Ephesus."

The foundations of the Roman Library of Cologne [Image courtesy of the Romano-Germanic Museum of Cologne]

The library of Cologne in its heyday -- the middle of the second century C.E. -- is thought to have housed around twenty thousand scrolls, of which not a single one survives.  All that remains are the spaces they occupied, now inhabited only by the ghosts of long-gone books whose titles we'll never know.

When I read this article, I was struck with same feeling of longing and grief I get whenever I think about the Great Library of Alexandria and the other repositories of human knowledge.  It's what I tried to communicate in Kallian Dorn's character in The Scattering Winds; perhaps lost knowledge can be regained, but the creativity, hearts, and voices of the people who wrote these scrolls are gone forever.  Impermanence is part of reality, and -- in the words of the band Kansas -- "Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and sky."  But seeing the remains of this once-great library makes me mourn for what was housed there, even so.

I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way.  And if time travel is ever invented, I think the Great Libraries of Antiquity tour is going to be sold out indefinitely.

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Cheers!

Humans have been making and consuming alcoholic drinks for a very long time.

We're hardly the only animal species to experience the psychotropic effects.  You may recall that about ten years ago a story from Sweden (Höme of the Majestic Mööse!  Extra points if you know the reference) in which one of the antlered behemoths got drunk eating fermented fallen apples, tried to climb the apple tree, and got stuck.  Not all species experience the same effects, though.  A 2008 study of pen-tailed tree shrews in Malaysia found that they habitually consume naturally-fermented nectar that raises their blood alcohol levels to well above the legal limit for humans, and show no ill effects whatsoever.  Presumably if they've evolved with that kind of diet, they've developed a mechanism for detoxifying the alcohol, or at least avoiding the psychological effects.  The jungles of Malaysia are thick with predators, and for a small furry mammal to spend all its time stumbling around dead drunk would be a good way to end up actually dead.

The earliest hard evidence of humans making wine or beer comes from near Jiahu, in the Yellow River Valley of China.  Pottery dating from about 6800 B.C.E. was found that had residues of fermented rice, honey, grapes, and hawthorn berries; around the same time, there's evidence of grape wine and barley beer being made in the Middle East.  I've often wondered what that stuff tasted like, as compared to our refined and filtered wines, beers, and spirits a lot of us enjoy today.  Back then, they were relying on wild yeasts and bacteria to do the fermenting, and that undoubtedly led to highly variable results (and a lot of spoilage).

The written records of the Greeks and Romans certainly mention wine and beer, and (especially with the Romans) we know a good bit about their winemaking techniques.  Grape juice, sometimes flavored with spices, honey, or other fruit juices, was boiled, then filtered, poured into clay amphorae, the lids sealed with beeswax, and then buried for a period that could vary from weeks to years.  The resulting liquid was then decanted and bottled.  This was when it was discovered that the soil type, climate, and grape variety had huge effects on the outcome; Roman wines ran the spectrum from surrentine (which the Emperor Tiberius sneeringly called "generous vinegar") to falernian (so expensive it was only available to the very rich but potent -- it was not only delicious, but was aged for up to twenty-five years and had an alcohol content of around fifteen percent).

[Image is in the Public Domain]

We just learned a little more about the production of vino from an archaeological find from the harbor of San Felice Circeo, ninety kilometers south of Rome.  Wine jars were unearthed in a seabed deposit that still had residues of the wines they contained.  Both red and white wines were found, along with pollen identifiable as coming from several varieties of wild grapes that grow in the area.  (Whether the vines themselves were cultivated is unknown; but those varieties are still found growing wild nearby.)  Interestingly, the amphorae were sealed not with beeswax but with pine tar, and apparently the pine tar was used not only as a sealant but to flavor the wine itself.  Maybe the result was something like Greek retsina, which people seem either to love or hate (I like the flavor, but my wife's opinion is if she wanted to chew on a pine branch, she'd go do it).

It'd be interesting if we went back to Roman times and attended a feast, where it would fall on the spectrum between delectable and revolting.  I wrote last October about a fellow named Andrew Coletti who has tried to recreate bunches of historical recipes as accurately as possible, and found that one of the Roman dishes bore an uncanny resemblance to french fries with ketchup.  But I have no doubt that some of the food and drink would taste pretty strange to us.  I'd still want to try it, though.  I don't hesitate to try local foods when I travel, and have rarely had a bad experience, although I did draw the line at the Icelandic "delicacy" hákarl, which is fermented shark meat.  It apparently has a "strong ammonia smell," and the late Anthony Bourdain said it was "the single worst, most disgusting, and terrible-tasting thing" he'd ever consumed.  Chef Ainsley Harriott was even more descriptive, describing eating it as being like "chewing on a urine-soaked mattress."

I've heard of "acquired tastes," but that's over the line.  In fact, for me, that's so far over the line that from there I wouldn't be able to see the line using a powerful telescope.

But Roman wine?  Sure, I'd give it a go, even the "generous vinegar" one.  Who knows, maybe I'd love it.  Chacun à son goût, and all that sort of thing.  But think about this if you go out for a pint or a glass of wine with friends tonight -- you're partaking in a tradition that goes back in some form or another for thousands of years.  Pretty cool, when you think about it.

Cheers!

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