Ariousian
The north-west of Chios, a stretch of steep and largely inhospitable coast between Volissos and the northern cape, was known in antiquity as Ariousia, and it produced the most celebrated wine in the Greek world.
Chian wine in general held the highest reputation of any Greek vintage; Ariousian, from that particular district, was the top of the range and priced accordingly. Strabo calls it the best of the Greek wines, without qualification. Pliny the Elder ranks Chian among the finest of all imports to Rome and records a detail that says a great deal about how the Romans regarded it: Chian was the first foreign wine served at a Roman public banquet, at a feast given by Julius Caesar. Virgil names it. Horace names it repeatedly, generally in the context of an evening that is going well. Physicians prescribed it. Athenaeus devotes pages to it, and quotes the comic poet Hermippus, who staged a scene in which Dionysus himself reviews the wines of the world and awards the palm to Chian.
What was it like? The ancient descriptions suggest something dark, strong, and sweet, quite possibly made from partially raisined grapes — a wine of the general family that later produced Commandaria, Vin Santo, and the great sweet wines of the eastern Mediterranean. It was expensive. And, crucially for a trading island, it kept and travelled.
The literary evidence is confirmed by the pots. Chian amphorae are among the most recognisable and most widely distributed transport containers of the ancient Mediterranean; their typology has been worked out in fine detail, and the distribution map is enormous. Chian amphorae turn up along the whole Anatolian and Levantine coast, in Egypt, in Sicily and southern Italy, in southern France, in Spain, in the Adriatic — and, above all, in vast quantity around the Black Sea. At Olbia, at Panticapaeum, in the Greek cities of the Crimea and the Sea of Azov, Chian amphora stamps appear in such numbers that archaeologists use them to date the layers they are digging.
The island's coinage tells the same story in miniature. The standard type, struck for centuries with a consistency few Greek states matched, shows the sphinx on one side and, on the other, an amphora, usually with a bunch of grapes beside it. A state that puts a wine jar on its money is telling you exactly what it lives on and expects you to know it already.
Two things about this trade deserve to be held in mind, because they will return.
The first is the Black Sea run. Selling wine from Chios to the Greek colonies of the Crimea was not a matter of a captain loading amphorae and hoping. It required capital, ships capable of the passage through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, agents resident at the far end, warehousing, credit, and — critically — a return cargo, which was grain, salt fish, hides, and slaves. That is, structurally, the identical trade that the Genoese would run through Chios eighteen hundred years later; the identical trade that the Chian houses of Odessa and Taganrog would run in the nineteenth century; and, in the sense that matters, the identical trade that Chian-owned bulk carriers run out of the Black Sea today. The route from the Aegean through the Straits to the grain plains of the north is one of the oldest continuously worked commercial arteries on earth, and Chios sits at a natural staging point on it. Empires, religions, and languages have changed around that fact without changing it.
The second is the resin, which we should now meet properly, because it is about to become the central character.
Mastic is the resin of the Chian lentisk, and the way it is harvested has changed remarkably little in two thousand years. The trees are slow: fifteen years or more before a plant is in full production, after which it may go on producing for a century. In June and July, the ground beneath each tree is cleared of weeds and stones, levelled, swept smooth, and dusted with fine white earth, so that the floor beneath the tree becomes a clean pale dish. Then, with a specialised iron, the harvester cuts the trunk and main branches — a series of shallow, deliberate, spaced incisions, repeated over the following weeks.
The tree responds by weeping. The resin runs from each wound; some of it hardens on the bark in stalactites, and some drips onto the swept earth below and sets there in tears. Over August and September the crop is gathered by hand, tear by tear, and then washed, sieved, and picked over — traditionally by women sitting for whole days with a tray, separating out grit, leaf and bark from each individual piece with a needle. The best grade is large, clear, pale tears. The lower grades are the fragments and the scrapings off the bark.
And the uses were, and are, remarkable in their range. Mastic was chewed, for pleasure and to clean the teeth and sweeten the breath; the Greek verb mastichan, to gnash or chew, is the ancestor of the English "masticate," and the modern habit of chewing gum descends in an unbroken line from the Chian one. It was burned as incense in temples and churches. Dissolved in oil or spirit it made a varnish, and mastic varnish remained the standard picture varnish of European painting into the modern era. It was medicine: Dioscorides, Galen, and the entire Greek, Arabic, and Latin medical tradition after them prescribed it for the stomach and the gums, in plasters, in pastilles, in digestive preparations. It flavoured wine, bread, and confectionery. It went into perfume and into embalming.
And it grew nowhere else. That fact, established early and never subsequently overturned, is the single most important economic datum in the history of this island. Every ruler of Chios from the Genoese onward understood that possession of a few villages in the south conferred a genuine, unforgeable, worldwide monopoly on a luxury good with steady demand across the whole Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. That understanding shaped Genoese criminal law, Ottoman fiscal policy, and the physical architecture of two dozen villages that are still standing.