The late Italian actress Virna Lisi, top, is clearly having a wonderful time, and though its not clear what the occasion might be, the smile, the eye-contact and the raised glass together comprise an ensemble of gestures instantly recognizable as a toast. It’s a ritual so intimately linked to wine drinking that its origins are shrouded in the mists of pre-history. What we can say for sure is that by the time something like a culture of wine can be discerned in the archaeological/art history record, toasting has already assumed its familiar shape.
As evidence, consider the 8th century BCE Assyrian royal, below, resplendent in his cornrows and intricately braided beard who seems as fully at home with the practice as Ms. Lisi. The same lifted cup and focused gaze; the hint, perhaps, of a smile.
The juxtaposition of glam starlet and complacent monarch is more than a little eerie — as if the millennia separating them had melted away and each were transfixed by the gaze of the other. “I’m about to drink,” our prince seems to say. “You drink, too.”
So deeply imbued are we with the notion of the toast as a social gesture conveying goodwill and bonhomie that it’s easy to lose sight of what was very likely responsible for the emergence of the practice in the first place: the danger associated with undisciplined group drinking.
The problem was obvious to the ancients. In a group where the pace of drinking isn’t supervised, a situation can quickly develop in which some teeter on tipsy while others remain sober — putting the former at a distinct disadvantage. To address this risky situation, rules were established by which the company might indulge themselves enthusiastically, but only reciprocally and symmetrically. Drinking in sync, glass for glass, at a measured pace, lent a kind of parity to the partying. Consumption proceeded in rounds; no freestyle swigging allowed.