Meditrinalia

Wine jug. Stux / Pixabay.com / 2016 / CC0 1.0

The 11th of October is Meditrinalia.

It was a minor Roman festival celebrating what they felt were the health-giving properties of wine. Today, the debates about whether wine is good for us or not go back and forth, but the Romans never questioned it!

For the ceremonial part of the festival, a priest mixed old wine with grape must, which is grape juice from this year’s harvest, just starting to ferment, and poured some of it out as an offering to a god, which was likely Jupiter ^[1]De Saint Denis E. A propos du culte de Bacchus (Virgile, Georg., II, 385-396). In: Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, tome 27, fasc. 3-4, 1949. pp. 702-712; doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/rbph.1949.1843 . Page 707. , who was also associated with two other Roman wine festivals.

The festival was probably actually more of a health ceremony than a wine drinking festival.

The Romans felt that different ages of wine could be used to cure different ailments. By mixing old wine with very wine, so new it was just being started even, all bases would be covered! While the priest was performing the ceremony, he said, “I pour new wine with old; of new and old illnesses I am cured.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary says, “Meditrinalia probably ‘healed’ by mixing new wine with old.” ^[2]Phillips, Robert C. Meditrinalia. In: Whitmarsh, Tim, Ed. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 4th Edition. Online. 07 March 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.4043

#Meditrinalia #Roman

See also: Wine, Roman Food, Vinalia Rustica, Vinalia Urbana, Wine Day, Mustacae, Roman Holidays

Roman wine festivals

The cycle of Roman wine festivals was:

1. Vinalia rustica: August. Celebrate and dedicate to Jupiter the first wine-giving grapes being harvested;
2. Meditrinalia: October. Acknowledge and extol the virtues of the coming wine that will be made, including its health-giving nature, and acknowledging Jupiter; 
3. Vinalia urbana: April. Dedicate to Jupiter the first wine ready to drink, and begin its actual consumption. ^[3]De Saint Denis E. A propos du culte de Bacchus (Virgile, Georg., II, 385-396). In: Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, tome 27, fasc. 3-4, 1949. pp. 702-712; doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/rbph.1949.1843 . Page 707.

History

Very little background information about the festival has come down to us.

Some people surmise that the festival went way back in Rome’s history, but in fact, it may not have been:

“Early Roman religious practices prohibited the use of wine as a sacred libation because of its rarity. Pliny the Elder notes how: “Romulus poured libations of milk, not wine; proof of this lies in rites established by him that preserve the custom to this day. The Postumina law of king Numa says ‘Do not sprinkle wine on a funeral pyre.’ Nor can anyone doubt that his reason for sanctioning this law was the scarcity of wine.” ^[4] Sheldon, Natasha. Raise a Glass to the Meditrinalia – The Festival of Good Health and Wine. Leicester, England: History and Archaeology Online. 10 October 2018. Accessed September 2021 at https://historyandarchaeologyonline.com/october-11th-raise-a-glass-to-the-meditrinalia-the-festival-of-good-health-and-wine/

And to be clear, despite the general agreement that it probably had to do with health as explained about, no one is actually exactly sure what the purpose of it was.

Some argue that it was to celebrate and taste the “new wine”, but at this point, the 11th of October, there would have been no new wine yet, as the grapes had only recently been pressed for juice. The stage between grape juice and wine is called “must” — mustum in Latin, which is grape juice that has just barely started to ferment. Consequently, there couldn’t have been any drinking of the new wine, as some surmise, as there wasn’t any new wine yet to be drunk: only grape juice starting to “go off” by being colonized with yeasts.

New wine tasting, in fact, had another festival entirely, which was the Vinalia Urbana on the 23rd of April.

The best guess seems to be that Meditrinalia celebrated the healing attributes that wine had in the Roman mind:

“On the surface, sources suggest it was a celebration of the tasting of the first new wine of the autumn vintage. However, dig a little deeper, and another significance emerges, one that explains why the Romans were more than happy to raise a glass to the benefits of wine.” ^[5] Sheldon, Natasha. Raise a Glass to the Meditrinalia – The Festival of Good Health and Wine. Leicester, England: History and Archaeology Online. 10 October 2018. Accessed September 2021 at https://historyandarchaeologyonline.com/october-11th-raise-a-glass-to-the-meditrinalia-the-festival-of-good-health-and-wine/

The Roman author Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) wrote:

“In October is the day which Flaccus the priest of Martial called ‘Meditrinalia’; on this day it was customary for new and old wine to be poured out and tasted in order to be healed. Which even now many people have the habit of doing while saying: I pour new wine with old; of new and old illnesses I am cured.” — Varro. De Lingua Latina 6, § 21 ^[6]“Octobri mense Meditrinalia dies dictus a medendo, quod Flaccus flamen Martialis dicebat, hoc die solitum vinum novum et vetus libari et degustari medicamenti causā: quod facere solent etiam nunc multi cum dicant: Novum vetus vinum libo: novo veteri vino morbo medeor.”

Modern-day classicist E. de Saint-Denis speculates that the name of the festival probably actually stems from the Greek word for (grape) must: “the name of this festival was undoubtedly linked to the root * medhu (cf. Greek μέθυ, the must)”. ^[7]De Saint Denis E. A propos du culte de Bacchus (Virgile, Georg., II, 385-396). In: Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, tome 27, fasc. 3-4, 1949. pp. 702-712; doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/rbph.1949.1843 . Page 707. But Varro felt that “Meditrina” came from “mederi“, meaning “to be healed”.

The 2nd-century writer Sextus Pompeius Festus later aetiologically explained the festival name by writing about a hitherto unknown goddess “Meditrina” who, most scholars agree, seems to have been retroactively invented to explain the holiday. ^[8] Schmitz, Leonhard. Meditrinalia. In: Smith, William. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, John Murray, London, 1875. Page 748. (Available at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Meditrinalia.html

Relief of Meditrina in Grand, France. Carole Raddato / flickr / 2012 / CC BY-SA 2.0

Activities for Today

A website named “Nova Roma”, which specializes in how to recreate Roman customs, details how they think the ceremony might be recreated today: http://www.novaroma.org/religio_romana/Meditrinalia.html

Sources

Mastrocinque, Attilio (Verona), “Meditrinalia”, in: Brill’s New Pauly, Antiquity volumes edited by: Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, English Edition by: Christine F. Salazar, Classical Tradition volumes edited by: Manfred Landfester, English Edition by: Francis G. Gentry. Consulted online on 23 September 2021 at http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_e728370