According to Theopompus the dark wine originated among the Chians
and they first learnt
how to plant and tend vines from Oenopion, son of DIONYSUS.
DIONYSUS was welcomed by Icarius, king of deme Icaria of Attica,
who received from
him a branch of a vine and learned the process of making wine.
The same author declares that the king of Calydon Oeneus was the
first to receive a
vine-plant from.
According to Hyginus DIONYSUS relied to Icarius the cultivation
of the vine and the
preparation of the wine.Icarius planted the vine and he did care
about it as long as it grew
up. One day a goat (ôñÜãïò)
entered the vine yard and ate all the new leaves. Icarius was
afflicted and was very angry to see such a disaster. He first
killed the goat and after with its
hide he constructed a skin-bag which he inflated and fastened
it. Then he throw it among
some friends which he obliged to danse round the skin-bag. So
Eratosthene has writen, that
for the first time, near Icarius, men danced in round by a goat.
The physician Philomides says that when the vine had been brought
by DIONYSUS from
the Red Sea into Greece most men perversely turned to unmeasured
enjoyment of it, and
drank it unmixed; some, in their insame perversity, became delirious,
others became like
corpses in their stupor. But once upon a time, when some men
were drinking at the
seashore, a rain-storm fell upon them and broke up the pasty,
but filled up the bowl, which
still had a little wine left in it. After the weather cleared
they returned to the same place, and
tasting the mixture of wine and water they found pleasant and
painless enjoyment. When the
unmixed wine is poured during the dinner the Greeks call upon
the name of the good
Divinity, doing honour to the divinity who discovered the wine;
he was Dionysus. But with
the first cup of mixed wine given after the dinner they call
upon ZEUS the Saviour, because
they assume that he, as the originator of rain-storms, was the
author of the painless mixture
desired from the mingling of wine and rain.
Dionysus travels in the sea (530 B.C.) Hecataeus of Miletus declares
that the vine was
discovered in Aetolia and he adds: Orestheus, son of Deucalion,
went to Aetolia to assume
the kingship and a bitch of his gave birth to a stalk. He ordered
that it be buried, and from it
sprang a vine with many clusters. For this reason he called his
own son Phytius
("Vine-grower"). When his son Oineus was born, he was named after
the vines. For the
ancient Greeks, Athenaeus completed, called grape - vines &laqno;oinai».
Theopompus from Chios relates that the vine was discovered in
Olympia on the banks of
the river Alpheius and there is a district in Elis, a mile away,
in which at the festival of
DIONYSUS the inhabitans shut up and seal three empty cauldrons,
in the presence of
visitors; later they open the cauldrons and find them full of
wine.
~source unknown