The boundless wine-dark sea, as it was formed in the course of millennia from verses that hymned wine. From Homer, Anacreon, Theognis, Aristophanes, and Euripides to Philodemos and Palladas, and from the Byzantine Wine-Father to Athanasios Christopoulos and to Cavafy and Karyotakis, Greek poetry (as well as the poetry of many other languages, with creators like Omar Khayyam and Baudelaire) honored, as it should, the gift of Dionysus. It elevated it as a source of pleasure but also as a method of forgetting the heavy concerns of life, as a mirror of our inner truth, as a measure of love, as an additional muse, and as a willing healer of the company that philosophizes or philologizes while sipping wine.
The 64 epigrams of the 11th book of the Palatine Anthology that have come down to us as symposiastic creations, with their recognized fathers (Agathias the Scholastic, Alcaeus the Messenian, Antipater the Thessalonian, Automedon the Cyzicenian, Diogenes Zona, Lucilius, Macedonius the Consul, Marcus Argentarius, Nicarchus, Palladas, Paulus Silentiarius, Strato, Philodemos, etc.) or anonymous, like folk songs, cover almost a millennium, from the 3rd century BC to the 6th century AD. Their poets take the wine torch from their great predecessors, but also from the philosophers, to sing about wine and to pass on their perspective and motifs to the next generations. Thus, "give to drink" in Palladas becomes "give me to drink" in Cavafy, "pour to drink" in Myrtiotissa, and "pour me to drink and pour me again" in the folk song.