Vineyard Ownership: A Habitus of Power? The Roots of Land Tenure and the Culture of Wine-Making among a New Political Class, from Constantine to Julian

At the beginning of the fourth century, with the emergence of a Constantinopolitan nobility, the attention devoted to investments in viticulture continued to thrive but shifted in its nature. At the same time, we can observe a marked development in practices—especially in vine training systems and winemaking techniques—and in vintages, with a renewed interested in wines that had been part of the Greek tradition. The winegrowing estates of Bithynia, neighboring the new capital, became a pleasurable environment for the in-group that arose and cultivated a viticultural art that set them apart and whose resonances can still be heard in the grand epic of Nonnos of Panopolis, the Dionysiaca. This article thus demonstrates how the ownership of vineyards, which was of itself advantageous for the accumulation of knowledge and of an internalized savoir-faire as well as the development of ways of being constitutive of a certain habitus, gradually became a matter of social, cultural, and symbolic significance for the ruling classes.

(This article has been translated from the French by Sean Northrup)