Wine, Women, and the Polis: Gender and the Formation of the City-State in Archaic Rome

When my husband and I have dinner in a restaurant, if I order a steak and he orders a salad, the waiter almost invariably returns and puts the steak in front of him and the salad in front of me.Or in a bar, if I order Scotch and my husband orders Diet Coke, it is fairly certain that the waitress will come back and give him the whiskey and me the diet soda.Food and drink act in our society, as they acted in Roman society, as social signi®ers.What a person eats and drinks conveys information about gender, class, and status.When a construction worker goes to a blue collar bar after work, the bartender ®lls his order of a beer without a second thought, but would probably stop and look twice at the man if he ordered a Campari and soda or a white wine spritzer.Popular culture, and ®lm in particular, provides endless examples of this.We expect Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly to sip champagne cocktails, and Clint Eastwood as the high plains drifter to throw back a whiskey, neat.A drink can be such a meaningful signi®er that every person who reads this will know immediately who is meant when a certain cinematic character is identi®ed only by what he drinks: vodka martini, shaken, not stirred.As Oswyn Murray writes in a study of the Greek symposion, or drinking party, `just as society `inhibits' or `problematizes' sexual relations in order to control and use them, so it `problematizes' another of man's most basic pleasures, that of eating and drinking, in order to create and support its socio-cultural structures.' 1 In this paper, I will examine how the Romans `problematized' the consumption of wine by forbidding it to women.I will ®rst examine some of the literary evidence for the Roman prohibition, and then review the archaeological testimony which partially refutes it.Next, I will discuss the social ± and even the political ± signi®cance of wine in archaic Rome, setting this into comparative context with Greek and Celtic society, and also, more broadly, within the context of anthropological theory and ethnographic 1