Getting Tipsy in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Read Marisa's interviews with other SAMA curators:
Getting Tipsy in Ancient Egypt
Interview with:
Lynley J. McAlpine, PhD, Associate Curator of Provenance Research
Marisa Morán Jahn, Gateway 2025–2027 artist
June 11, 2025
Hathor, The Flooding of the Nile, Grains, and Beer
Lynley: In ancient Egypt, everything revolved around the Nile—the inundation of the Nile, when it floods the fields, and how it created this beautiful agricultural land that is in the middle of a desert. When you’re in Egypt you can stand by the Nile and see the desert in the distance beyond the fields.
It floods once a year, which enables them to grow a lot of grain. Grain is really important. And that means that they drink beer. It's their favorite thing to drink. Workers were paid their salaries in beer sometimes.
Hathor and a Devotee, Egyptian, 664-525 B.C., Limestone, height: 15 3/8 in. (39 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., 91.80.122. Photography by Ansen Seale
The goddess Hathor relates both to beer and to the flooding of the Nile. Hathor is generally a mother goddess. She often appears in the form of a cow [91.80.122], because she's sort of this calm, domesticated but also motherly presence. She's protective. And she's also associated with love and beauty and sex and drinking—all of the sort of pleasures, the central pleasures of life that the gods bring.
There's a myth that relates both to beer and to the flooding of the Nile related to Hathor. It’s kind of like the story of the flood in the Bible, but with the opposite ending.
Statue of Sekhmet, Egyptian, ca. 1390-1352 B.C., Granodiorite, 71 × 21 × 40 in. (180.3 × 53.3 × 101.6 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, bequest of Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., 2005.1.28. Photography by Peggy Tenison
The sun god Ra is angry at humankind for being bad. Ra calls a council of other gods, and they decide to ask Hathor to destroy mankind. Hathor transforms from her normal appearance into the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet [2005.1.28]. Sekhmet means power. She's a destructive force. And we [here at SAMA] also have a statue of Sekhmet. She was the protector of kings too. This one comes from the mortuary temple of a king. There were about 600 of these statues at that temple — a whole army to protect him.
After Hathor has transformed into Sekhmet, she starts rampaging up and down the banks of the Nile and killing all the humans that she comes across.
At a certain point, she's killed so many people that Ra's like, “OK, that's enough, time to stop.” But he can't get her to stop, because she's so filled with blood lust that she can't stop killing. His solution is to flood the land with beer. He dyes it red so that she thinks it's blood, and she starts drinking all this blood out of the fields—but it's really beer. So, she gets really drunk, and she falls asleep. And that saves humanity!
To commemorate this, and to celebrate Hathor, Egyptians would have a festival of drunkenness once a year. It’s celebrating the goddess Hathor, but it's also celebrating destruction, fertility, and the flooding of the Nile. So, everyone drinks their red beer and enjoys the pleasures of life. So that's Hathor.
Marisa: What’s interesting to me is that both Hathor and Aphrodite [in ancient Greece] are both mother goddesses that have associations with beauty, sensuality, sexuality, and fecundity. And I see that Hathor is also holding the ankh which was also Aphrodite’s symbol. From my own deep dive into Aphrodite, it’s often assumed that she holds this symbol which was in the shape of a mirror. Her birthplace was the island of Cyprus, which is where they first started mining copper in the West, and because it’s such a soft metal, is what you shined in order to make a mirror. Although we often assume that it’s Aphrodite’s symbol, because the mirror is a symbol of vanity, there are other interpretations that see it as a symbol for self-reflection and inner knowledge — an interpretation I prefer.
Lynley: That's really cool. I never knew that. I suppose mirrors have this magical symbolism to it because you can see the world in it.
For Egyptians, the ankh is a symbol of life, love, music, dance, fertility, and joy. Yeah, I think there's that connection of fertility. And fertility is the core of both sexiness and motherliness, right? In a period when there's large infant mortality, you want them conjoined, as opposed to, say, more puritanical representations of women in which it really makes much less sense.
Ancient Egypt has another god, one named Bes, who's also connected with childbirth as well as wildness and drunkenness. We only have one representation in SAMA’s collection— a little amulet [located in the second Egyptian gallery, freestanding amulet case, number seven]. Bes was represented as a little man with dwarfism, but his facial features are like a lion, because he is also a protector.
One of his roles is protecting mothers during childbirth. But he's also a fun dancing god. The connection between those two things is that he protects the body, but he also protects the heart and the mind: Bes wants you to be filled with joy as a way to protect you from bad influences or bad things in the world.
There was a specific type of ritual that people did to worship or connect with Bes called a dream incubation. Basically, you drink something, you go into the temple, and you lightly hallucinate or do lucid dreaming to commune with Bes.
We don’t know all the details, but sometimes you’ll see jars or cups in the shape of Bes. A cup in the collection of the Tampa Bay Museum of Art was tested, and they discovered it contained traces of milk, honey, and some kinds of human bodily fluids. It also has the residue of a plant called Syrian rue. The elixir can c cause abortions if you take too much. But if you take a small amount, it might help with pregnancy. In certain amounts, it can induce hallucinations. Most of these cups don't have provenance, so we don't know who was using it or when or where, but we do have ancient texts describing this sort of ritual.
Getting Tipsy in Ancient Greece and Rome
Interview with:
Lynley J. McAlpine, PhD, Associate Curator of Provenance Research
Marisa Morán Jahn, Gateway 2025–2027 artist
June 11, 2025
Dionysos, Libations, Wine
Lynley: The majority of vessels from Greek antiquity that we have in our collection are related to wine drinking. And Dionysos—later called Bacchus by the Romans—is ever present.
There are two main gods that can cross between the underworld and come back and do things like cross important boundaries— Hermes and Dionysos. But Dionysos doesn’t just move across the boundaries, he smashes those boundaries— even the boundary between male and female. He is just very fluid. The rules don't apply to him.
The Romans like Dionysos to be like a sexy young man who's naked and a little bit drunk most of the time. The Roman version is a little more tamed and civilized—more associated with the city and the countryside—whereas the Greeks thought of Dionysos as wild and associated him with the wilderness.
Dionysos’s Various Embodiments
Marisa: Can you talk about what a symposium is?
Lynley: Symposia were gatherings where people got together to drink and discuss different topics. Sometimes people played games and there was a master of ceremonies. Drinking and dining parties differed between Greek and Roman cultures.
For the Greeks, the symposia were exclusively for men, and mostly aristocratic men. The only women were female entertainers. But in some Etruscan art, [upper class] women seem to have had more freedom than Greek women and might have attended the symposia as well. Women are usually depicted with pale skin in these scenes, because they stayed indoors more.
Stamnos (jar) with women performing rites for Dionysos, Greek, ca. 450 B.C., Terracotta, red-figure technique, height: 14 13/16 in. (37.7 cm); diam. including handles: 16 3/4 in. (42.5 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., 86.134.64 . Photography by Peggy Tenison
Lynley: Take a look at this vase [86.134.64]. In ancient Greece, there were two main forms of worshipping Dionysos: the public theatrical festivals and the secret mystery religions.
The mystery religions were more egalitarian. Slaves, women, anyone could participate. The rituals might involve dressing up as satyrs or maenads, going into the wild, dancing, drinking, eating raw animals—madness, ecstasy, freedom. There are offerings on the table that might be animal skins, likely goat skins, because Dionysos is “goaty.”
Marisa: Say more—why goats?
Lynley: Goats get into trouble. There's also [in scenes like the one on this vase] part of what makes mystery religions mystery religions. Sometimes you’ll see depictions of baskets covered with a cloth, obscuring what’s inside, which is a phallus. Members of the mystery religion would have known what’s inside the basket. Sometimes you’ll see the phallus depicted. It symbolizes the fertility of the grapevine and the land.
Marisa: Got it. And way cool. So, like the phallus, the goat skins, the grapes, and wine, there are many ways that Dionysos is present but not personified in the form of a human.
Lynley: Right. So, for example, sometimes you’ll see that Dionysos was also worshiped in the form of a pillar with a head. He’s not even really a person; he’s more like a part of the wilderness. Sometimes you’ll see depictions of a wooden pillar out in the woods somewhere with plants stuck to it and his face on it, and there's ivy growing out of it.
Self-Control, Ecstasy
Lynley: In the Greek collection, most of the vessels were used for either serving or drinking wine. The amphoras, which originally had lids, are where you store your wine and your water.
Then we have kraters where you mix wine and water. The Greeks have this interesting fascination with wine, but they're also obsessed with self-control. Whoever hosts the symposium, which is a word that means drinking together, gets to decide the ratio of wine to water. In other words, the host gets to decide how drunk everyone gets. They always drank in rounds, meaning that everyone drank the same amount. The host would mix them in the krater and then ladle it out into the cups.
Eye-cup with Dionysos and Ariadne, Greek, ca. 520-510 B.C., Terracotta, black-figure technique, height: 4 5/8 in. (11.7 cm); width with handles: 14 13/16 in. (37.6 cm); rim diameter: 12 3/16 in. (30.9 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., 86.134.56. Photography by Peggy Tenison
The big flat drinking cups like this one [86.134.56] are likely related to this idea of self-control: you can't hold it and drink out of it without spilling it unless you're pretty sober.
Marisa: I love the ones with animal faces and eyes that only reveal themselves after you’ve already drunk the contents of the cup—as if the wine has transformed you into a bull or a boar. It’s like an analogy for mind-altering substances, that it reveals itself once you’re all in, but from the outset you can’t see what’s in there.
Lynley: Those same eyes—sometimes you see that design on other pots too. This one has a little nose drawn on it, sometimes they have eyebrows. We don't totally know what it means, if it’s some kind of good luck symbol. For the Romans, the evil eye actually is good luck, because it wards off evil.
Bell-krater (mixing bowl) with youths in the palaestra, Greek, ca. 420-410 B.C., Terracotta, red-figure technique, h. 14 3/4 in. (37.4 cm); diam. of mouth: 16 1/4 in. (41.2 cm); diam. of foot: 7 13/16 in. (19.8 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., 86.134.78. Photography by Peggy Tenison
Column-krater (mixing bowl) with revelers, Greek, ca. 490-480 B.C., Terracotta, red-figure technique, h. 15 9/16 in. (39.5 cm); diam. of rim 12 9/16 in. (31.9 cm); w. with handles 14 5/16 in. (36.3 cm); diam. of foot 7 3/16 in. (18.3 cm), San Antonio Museum of Art, gift of Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., 86.134.61. Photography by Peggy Tenison
This tension between abandoning yourself and staying in control of yourself is something especially important for the Greek idea of masculinity. On this pot, you see men who don’t have beards, meaning that they are young men [86.134.78]. On another nearby, they have a wineskin and cups and are dancing around naked [86.134.61]. They’re obviously really drunk. They got too drunk.
We don't know all the details, but some mystery religions seemed more egalitarian. A lot of Greek rituals are open only to like a certain type of person—only for men or women, or certain age groups, or statuses. For example, some rituals were only for married women, and some rituals disallowed slaves from participating. It seems as if at least by the time the Romans adopted the Dionysiac mysteries, anyone could participate, regardless of status—even slaves.
In these rituals, women played really important roles. One part involved imitating the mythological followers of Dionysos, so the satyrs and especially the maenads, who are wild women (the word maenad means “mad woman”).
In Greek society, members of the mystery religions would go out into the wilderness and get drunk, dance, eat wild animals, and just do kind of crazy things in the wilderness. It functioned as a sort of release valve for society. Because Greek women were so controlled—they're supposed to stay in the house—most of the time, they were very limited in who they could interact with. This was one time when they got to totally let loose and go out on their own. They got to experience ecstasy, which comes from the Greek word ek, meaning “out of” or “away from,” and stasis, which means “standing” or a “state of being.” In this context, ecstasy is the experience of standing outside their normal social roles.
So, you see we have all these artifacts related to wine. It wasn’t just used to worship Dionysos —it’s sort of all-purpose. When you make a sacrifice to the gods, you give them food and drink. You might slaughter some animals and sacrifice some of the meat and you eat the rest of it. But you also pour out libations onto the altar or onto the ground, depending to whom you're making a sacrifice. Sometimes you’ll see depictions of people holding a drinking cup and pouring wine onto the altar, which will go up to the gods.
If you wander around here, there's a million Dionysoses everywhere. He's my favorite god. I was just thinking, there has not been a Dionysos exhibition in the US since the ‘70s. Oh, it's overdue. It's so fun and interesting!
