“People are shirking their duty to human life by shutting everyone out and hiding away at home all day and night, and they gradually become like animals.”
Since March we’ve labored under a demi-Prohibition, a brief era of public drought when most saloons and taverns were shuttered by government decree. We took to drinking at home, in the dark. We lost contact with our pack; we have gone feral.
Yet now the doors are cracking open, gradually, and we’re being invited back into bars, albeit under new rules of engagement. Bar owners have had to hit a reset button, figuring out how to advance through a fog of public anxiety and fear.
Now bar patrons have a chance to reset as well—to rethink and relearn our habits of drink. Were we doing it wrong before? How can our drinking be improved? Let’s rethink this.
Conveniently, a new guide was published in April to help us plot our route ahead. Well, by new I mean nearly 500 years old.
The quote above is from this book, which has the forthright title of How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing. It was written in 1536 by a German poet named Vincent Obsopoeus. He was inspired by two things: Ovid’s Art of Love, a semi-serious self-help manual for the yearning and smitten, first published in Rome in the year 2. (It’s sometimes referred to as the Latin kama sutra, and was salacious enough to be banned in Florence a millennium and a half later.)
The second thing that inspired Obsopoeus was his revulsion at the drinking habits of his fellow countrymen. And how better to convince someone to improve their way of tippling than by writing a book-length poem, in Latin?
How to Drink is now published in English for the first time by Princeton University Press, and is translated and edited by Michael Fontaine, a classics professor at Cornell University. For readers who love Latin as much as they love to drink, good news! The entire Latin text is printed on even-numbered pages; Fontaine’s translation runs opposite.
Obsopoeus’s book is divided into two sections. The first outlines the art of moderation—it’s the carrot for the drinker. The second is the stick, entitled “Excessive Drinking, What it Looks Like.” This is a deep dive into binging and other ill-advised rituals of drink. “Look at [these stories] as if you were looking in a mirror, and see how truly disgraceful the sight is!” the author writes.
Underlying both sections is an unwavering belief that proper drinking is not simply a matter of etiquette. It’s a form of art. “Without art, Bacchus gets accompanied by insane maenads, and those drunken monsters are nothing but binge drinkers—believe it.”
Craft bartenders often fashion themselves as artists. They have the coupe as their canvas, and bottles and eyedroppers as their brushes. But we drinkers are also artists: We have the entirely of a bar as our medium, and our words, decisions and actions shape it, influencing the experience of those around us.
Obsopoeus understood that without ever having entered a retro-speakeasy through a hidden passageway. He was particularly offended at those who were, in modern parlance “overserved.” (In his translation, Fontaine uses a lot of modern words to convey timeless activity—like “bro” and “frat” and “college kids” instead of the blander “youth.” In is introduction, he wrote that he opted for “clear and idiomatic English as it is spoken in the United State today, especially as I hear it spoken on college campuses.” This makes it more accessible, but also weirdly time-travelly.)
An artist of drink begins by selecting the right materials to work with. For starters, drink with companions whose hearts are pure: “Friends whose outlook is positive, respectful, and committed to dignity.” It’s an added bonus if they’re also endowed by “the Muses, the Graces, Cyllenian Mercury, and that fearsome marksman, Delian Apollo.” Who among us has not muttered that to ourselves as we slip out the door for an evening’s carousing?
Those to avoid include heretics, belligerents and blowhards. (“Everyone hates these obnoxious guys—unruly and never shutting up.”) Buzzkills should also be shunned: “They aren’t human—they’re born from tigers and nursed on savage lion-milk. They’re devoid of human feeling; everything’s crap to them…”
Another useful tip: avoid drinking with ex-monks, as “they can get rid of their dark vestments but not the darkness in their thought.”
All the while, be alert to your own qualities as a drinking companion. “Don’t be a jerk and offend somebody who’s downing drinks with you.” That’s a little vague; this is not: “Do keep your bodily functions under control. Avoid buffoonish gestures; farting; laughing like an idiot; belching; and anything genital-related.”
As for advice on what to drink, well…there is no advice. You’re drinking wine.
But not too much. A lot of his book is devoted to tempered drinking. “Moderation must forever be your guiding principal,” he writes. “Drunkenness is an ugly failing and a disgraceful pleasure.”
When he wrote this, there was plenty of disgraceful pleasuring in 16th century Europe and England. It was the start of the gin craze in Great Britain; Swedish beer consumption was estimated to be forty times drinking current levels. Beer drinking was taken seriously enough that the German Beer Purity laws went into effect in 1516.
Yet Obsopoeus doesn’t take moderation entirely seriously. It’s more like a yellow traffic light, something to be sped through quickly to get to the other side before you miss your chance. “Either don’t get drunk at all, or get so drunk it takes away your worries,” he writes. “Anything between these two will hurt you.”
He also offers up some tricks you might want to try if moderation fails you. Like amethyst. This gemstone was apparently prized as a preventative for drunkenness, but also a cure for hangovers. (I have trouble squaring this circle, but let’s just go with it.) If you turn up an amethyst ring, purchase it “at whatever price you find it,” he advises. It is “the guardian of eternal sobriety and the enemy of Drunkenness.”
On more familiar ground, Obsopoeus also has a section devoted to the Irish goodbye. “You ought to hightail it out of there before you do something stupid and end up as a funny story for the whole bar to laugh at.” An argument could be made to rename this the German goodbye.
In 1936, H.G. Moody wrote in the American Mercury about the emergence of Americans from their homes back into the taverns after the 13-year exile of Prohibition. “Let the modern American who wishes to drink be made to know that he is starting from scratch, that he has to acquire a form of culture to do the trick even half well.”
It’s been three months rather than 13 years. But Moody’s advice was good advice then. And it’s good now.
