id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
grbs-16925	Wash, Leon	Empedocles’ Account of Wine (fr.81) and Premodern Oenology	2024	33	.pdf	application/pdf	13004	572	66	Finally, in a study of Orphic-Dionysian ideas, Eisler situated fr.81 among intriguing parallels representing wine as a mixture of fire and water and as coming directly from the vine.31 Curiously, Eisler claimed that the conception shared by Empedocles comes from an ancient tradition of making intoxicating drinks out of tree sap: evidently a wine from ash tree sap, akin to birch beer, was once consumed in ancient Sumer and England—but not Greece.32 Appealing as this beverage sounds, then, Eisler seems to be bark- ing up a better tree when noting the warming effect of wine and linking Empedocles’ φλοιοῦ with Dionysus’ cult titles Φλεύς and Φλοῖος, which suggest that the idea of grape wine as “fire-water” coming ἀπὸ φλοιοῦ (whatever its precise meaning) was likely rooted in more immediate experiences.33 Before we consider the fragment in light of the rest of what we know about Empedocles’ thought, it will be helpful to examine the passages in which Aristotle and Plutarch quote it. At the same time, it is reported that Empedocles held the distinct characters of different soils responsible for the distinct characters of wines: Aëtius (5.26.4) reports that Empedocles thought that the differences among juices arise as alterations of the multipartite nature ⟨of earth⟩ and of plants, since they draw in different ways the homoeomeries from what nourishes them, just as in the case of vines: for the differences among these do not make wine good, but the differences of the soil nourishing it.	cache/grbs-16925.pdf	txt/grbs-16925.txt