Nectar

Below a mountain called Olympus in Lydia, a long way from the one the gods are supposed to live on, people used to make the stuff themselves. Ariston of Chios held that the finest drink was the one carrying sweetness and fragrance at once, and there they obliged him: wine, honeycombs and the most fragrant flowers they could gather, mixed in a bowl and called nectar. Athenaeus sets the recipe down without comment, in a book otherwise concerned with what to put in front of dinner guests. The drink of the deathless had a mortal knockoff, and it smelled of flowers.

What the gods actually get is red. Homer says so with the same adjective he uses of wine, and the resemblance does not stop at the colour. Calypso does not pour nectar for Hermes, she mixes it, using the technical verb for cutting wine with water in a krater. Hephaestus draws it out of a krater too. Hebe serves it with the wine-pouring verb, and so does everyone else who holds the job. Take the word away and the Olympian feast is an ordinary Greek drinking party with better guests: the same bronze bowl, the same dilution, the same slow circuit with a jug.

That circuit gives the best scene in the whole record. Hera has just been talked down from a quarrel by her son, the lame one, and he decides to do the serving himself. He takes the cup out of her hand and works his way rightwards round the assembled gods, drawing sweet nectar from the bowl and filling every cup on the way. What goes up is not applause. Homer calls the laughter unquenchable, which is a fire word, and what the blessed gods are laughing at is Hephaestus puffing and bustling up and down his own hall. The drink of immortality makes its first appearance in European literature as a prop in a joke about a limping man.

Hebe does the job straight. Three books later the gods are sitting in council on the golden floor, she carries the nectar round, and they pledge one another in gold cups while looking down at the city of Troy, which they are in the middle of deciding to destroy. Nobody remarks on the drink. It is just what happens to be in the cups while that gets settled.

Then Ganymede, where the record splits in a way the retellings smooth over. The Iliad has the gods snatch away the loveliest mortal ever born so that he can pour wine for Zeus, for the sake of his beauty. Wine. The word nectar is not in the passage. It turns up in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where the boy draws red nectar from a golden bowl and is honoured by all the immortals for it, and where Zeus settles with his grieving father by sending him a team of horses of the kind that carry gods. The handover from Hebe is later still, and the poets who describe it are catty. Statius gives Hebe her robe hitched up and calls her more charming than the banished Phrygian lad. Nonnus has Ganymede usurping the untouched cup of heavenly Hebe, and then, once the Trojan War starts, has Zeus quietly put Hebe back on the pouring so the boy will not have to stand there listening to what is being done to his city.

For all that pouring, no mortal ever gets a cup. The clearest proof is a piece of staging in Calypso’s cave. Hermes arrives, sits, and the goddess lays a table of ambrosia and mixes the ruddy nectar, and he eats and drinks. A hundred lines later Odysseus sits down in the very chair Hermes has left, and the handmaids set out food and drink of the sort mortal men eat, while Calypso takes ambrosia and nectar herself. Two menus at one table, and the man she has just offered to make immortal gets the ordinary one.

Nobody drinks it. It gets put into them. Thetis, standing over Patroclus, drips ambrosia and red nectar through the dead man’s nostrils so his flesh will stay sound. Athena, sent down because Achilles has refused food, drips nectar and ambrosia into his chest so that hunger will not reach his knees. Both times the verb is the same, both times a goddess administers it, and both times the mouth is bypassed altogether. In the only two cases where the substance touches a human being it behaves like something applied rather than something offered.

The one man in Homer who claims to have tasted it is wrong. Polyphemus, two cups into the wine Odysseus carried up from the ship, announces that the Cyclopes have vines and rain enough of their own, but that this is a streamlet of ambrosia and nectar. He is drunk, he is about to lose his eye, and the line is flattery rather than testimony. Georg Autenrieth, compiling his Homeric dictionary, was tart about the lexicographers who cited it as evidence that nectar simply means wine, and said in print that he did not know why they had.

There is no origin. Nobody says who makes nectar, where it is kept, what it is pressed or gathered from, or how it gets to Olympus. Ambrosia at least has a delivery service, timid doves carrying it to Zeus past the Wandering Rocks and losing one of their number to the crag every single time, with the god sending in another to keep the count up. The drink has nothing of the kind. It is simply in the bowl, and no ancient writer seems to have wondered about it.

Even the division of labour wobbles. Athenaeus collects the poets who had it the other way round and quotes a speech by the comic writer Anaxandrides in which somebody boasts of eating nectar and gnawing it, drinking ambrosia, pouring for Zeus and sitting about with Aphrodite. Alcman has the gods eating nectar at will. Homer, as Athenaeus points out, knew it as the drink, and Homer won.

The word has been argued over for two centuries without resolution. The reading everyone quotes takes it as an inherited poetic compound meaning something close to overcoming death, built from the roots for death and for getting across. Paul Thieme made the case rigorously in 1952 and usually gets the credit, though Prellwitz had printed it in 1905 and traced the idea back to Jacob Grimm. Rudiger Schmitt supplied the neatest argument in its favour: neither root survives on its own anywhere in Greek, which suggests the compound arrived whole from something older rather than being assembled by Greek speakers. The problem is the ending, which on that reconstruction should have come out as a different word, and the repairs offered have not convinced the field. Frisk’s dictionary records the verdict as no secure etymology. Chantraine lists five possibilities and concludes that none is established.

The rivals are better company than the impasse. Saul Levin argued in 1971 that the word is a Semitic loan, from a root meaning to fume or rise as smoke, and that the original nectar was wine scented with altar incense, on the reasonable ground that what the poets keep insisting on about the divine substances is the smell. Drew Griffith proposed Egyptian, from a word meaning divine that was used of natron, the salt Egyptian embalmers packed into bodies, which sits uncomfortably well next to Thetis and the nostrils. Filip De Decker, defending the inherited reading, replies that Greek had already borrowed that Egyptian word once as nitron and asks why it would take it a second time in a shape nobody could recognise. Robert Beekes filed the word as Pre-Greek, which is to say it came from whoever was living in Greece before the Greeks arrived.

What it does is narrower than its reputation. It keeps dead flesh sound. It holds off hunger. It is what the deathless are drinking, and in the Iliad’s one attempt to explain why a wounded god runs ichor instead of blood, the reason given is that the gods eat no bread and drink no gleaming wine. Abstention, not the cup. The limits are sharper. Tantalus was made immortal on nectar and ambrosia, stole them, handed them round his own drinking companions, and is still standing under the stone. And no one who is going to die is ever passed a cup, not even by a goddess who has just said she wants to keep him forever.

The afterlife is quieter than the myth. English writers had begun using nectar for the sugar inside flowers by about 1600, and Linnaeus turned nectarium into a technical term of botany, writing the first monograph on nectaries himself and having a student defend it as a dissertation in 1762. A word that may once have meant the overcoming of death now names the thing a bee has come for.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is nectar in Greek mythology?

Nectar is the drink of the Greek gods, served at the feasts on Olympus and described by Homer as red. It is repeatedly handled like wine: mixed with water in a krater, drawn from the bowl, and poured with the ordinary wine-pouring verb. Alongside its use as a drink it works as a preservative on a corpse and as a substitute for food in a living body.

Who pours the nectar for the Greek gods?

Three figures do the pouring in the sources. Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera, serves the assembled gods on the golden floor in the Iliad; Hephaestus takes over for one scene in Book 1 and the gods laugh at him for it; and Ganymede, a Trojan prince snatched up for his beauty, becomes Zeus’s cupbearer. Later poets such as Nonnus and Statius treat the handover from Hebe to Ganymede as a small scandal.

What colour is nectar?

Red. Homer attaches the adjective for red to nectar when Thetis drips it into Patroclus and when Calypso mixes it for Hermes, and it is the same word he uses of wine. The only other quality he gives it is sweetness. No ancient source describes it any further than that.

Can humans drink nectar in Greek myth?

No mortal in Homer is ever given nectar to drink. Calypso feeds Hermes ambrosia and nectar and then serves Odysseus ordinary mortal food in the same seat, and the two men who receive nectar at all, the dead Patroclus and the fasting Achilles, have it dripped into the nostrils and the chest by a goddess rather than handed to them. Tantalus stole nectar and ambrosia after the gods had made him immortal with them, shared them among his friends, and was punished forever.

Does the word nectar really mean “overcoming death”?

That is the most widely quoted etymology, treating nektar as an inherited compound of roots meaning death and getting across, argued in detail by Paul Thieme in 1952 and traceable back through Prellwitz to Jacob Grimm. It is not settled. The reconstruction produces the wrong ending for the Greek word, Frisk and Chantraine both record the etymology as unproven, and rival proposals derive it from a Semitic root for incense smoke, from an Egyptian word used of embalming salt, or from a pre-Greek language entirely.

Related Entries

Ambrosia, Hebe, Ganymede, Zeus, Hephaestus, Hermes, Calypso, Odysseus (Ulysses), Thetis, Achilles, Tantalus, Polyphemus, Heracles (Hercules), Soma, Idun