A goodly number of instances may be found in various old Greek writers of the mention of barley-wine under the various terms of κρίθινον πεπωκότες οινον,[6] ἐκ κριθῶν μεθυ, βρῦτον ἐκ τῶν κριθῶν, but it does not appear that beer was ever a popular beverage in Hellas. Further north, the Thracians, as Archilochus tells, brewed and drank a good deal of beer.
[6] Hipp. 395. 1, Athen. 1 & 10, Aesch. Fr. 116, Archil. 28.
Among the Greek writers, Xenophon gives the most interesting and complete account of beer in the year 401 B.C. In describing the retreat of the Ten Thousand, he tells how, on approaching a certain village in Armenia which had been allotted to him, he selected the most active of his troops, and making a sudden descent upon the place captured all the villagers and their headman. One man alone escaped—the bridegroom of the headman’s daughter, who had been married nine days, and was gone out to hunt hares. The snow was six feet deep at the time. Xenophon goes on to describe the dwellings of this singular people. Their houses were under ground, the entrance like that of a well, but wide below. There were entrances dug out for the cattle, but the men used to get down by a ladder. And in the houses were goats, sheep, oxen, fowls and their young ones, and all the animals were fed inside with fodder. And there was wheat, and barley, and pulse, and barley-wine (οἶνος κρίθινος) in bowls. And the malt, too, itself was in the bowl, and level with the brim. And reeds lay in it, some long, some short, with no joints, and when anyone was thirsty he had to take a reed in his hand and suck. The liquor was very strong, says Xenophon, unless one poured water into it, and the drink was pleasant to one accustomed to it. And whenever anyone in friendliness wished to drink to his comrade, he used to drag him to the bowl, where he must stoop down and drink, gulping it down like an ox. The inhabitants of the Khanns district of Armenia, through which Xenophon’s world-famed march was made, still pursue much the same life as they did more than two thousand years ago. They live in these curious subterranean dwellings with all their live stock about them, but, alas! modern travellers aver that they have lost the art of making barley-wine.