Rare is the Greek god or goddess who is not a cosmic annoyance to human beings. They are immeasurably flawed, vindictive, irrational, self-serving, mean-spirited and use their powers to outwit each other and mankind.        
       They were also gluttons: According to Homer (left), the gods lounging atop Mount Olympus “feasted all day until sunset and ate to their hearts content,” then they would put up their feet and listen to music and poetry.
         Dionysus  (right) was a god the Greeks most happily imitated. Called Bacchus by the Romans, he was the privileged son of Zeus himself and god of agriculture, who showed men how to grow wine grapes and make wine; he was also a  comic sower of decadence, though he was never depicted as obese by Greek sculptors.
         He would conduct his conquests surrounded by a retinue of Bacchii that included drunken satyrs and mad women known as maenads who wore crowns of snakes and would tear animals and enemies to pieces.
         The feasts celebrating Dionysus date to Attica, where a yearly wine festival was held during the winter solstice and grew into raucous, sexually charged, raunchy scenes in which masked men dressed in goat skins, giant phalluses were carried about and flaunted and dances tended towards the obscene.
        Drinking parties held in Dionysus’s honor, called sympósions (below), became very deliberate gluttonous events, despite Dionysus’s own dictum that a man should drink only three cups of wine at dinner: toasting the first to health, the second to love and pleasure and the third to sleep, after which a guest should go home to bed. Few paid much attention once the party got going.
         Such banquets were all male, with the exception of naked dancing girls, and the manners and rituals of inviting guests, making the menus and deciding on the entertainment were very involved. During a sympósion guests arrived, their feet would be washed by slaves, then they reclined on couches; a communal cup called a psycter (below) of aromatics was passed around, and the eating part of the banquet began. But the serious drinking came after dinner.
         The meal would consist of an enormous number of dishes.  A poem written around 400 BC called The Banquet describes a feast well appreciated by its enthusiastic author.
        

        In came a pair of slaves with a shiny table, and another, and
         another until they filled the room.
         They fetched in show-white barley-rolls baskets,
         A casserole— no bigger than that—call it a marmite, full of a 
         noble eel with a look of the conger about him.
         Honey-glazed shrimps besides, my love,
         Squid sprinkled with sea-salt,
         Baby birds in flaky pastry,
         And a baked tuna, gods! What a huge one fresh from the fire                  
        and the pan and the carving knife.
         Enough steaks from its tender belly to delight us both as long
          as we might care to stay and munch.
         . . . . Then the same polished tables, loaded with more good        
           things, sailed back to us, “second table,” as men say
         Sweet pastry shells, crispy flapjacks, toasted sesame cakes              
         drenched in honey sauce,
         Cheesecake, made with milk and honey, baked like a pie;
         Cheese-and-sesame sweetmeats fried in the hottest oil in               
          sesame seeds were passed around.     

    At that point, with only small bites called tragemata to nibble on, the guests began to drink as much as they liked of wine cut two-thirds by water. If a man protested that he’d had enough wine and refused another cup, he had to perform some silly entertainment, like dancing naked or carrying the girl flute-player around the room. Parasites was the name given to those who arrived late to the party and mooched off the remains. Only around 500 BC were women invited to join the fun, but they were largely courtesans, prostitutes and female artists.
         How such a gentle philosopher named Epicurus became equated with  the term “epicureanism” as a license to excessive indulgence, particularly in food and drink, is a unfortunate because he actually advocated “katastematic pleasure” that is experienced through a harmonious state of mind free of mental distress and pain achieved through a simple life rather than by activating unnatural pleasures like gluttony that take hold of the mind’s free will.
   
In Homer’s Odyssey, the poet insists that while heroes need proper nourishment, mostly meat and bread, it would be foolhardy for them to indulge in gluttonous behavior. Nevertheless, in The Iliad the hero Odysseus is called by an opponent “wild for fame, glutton for cunning, glutton for war,” while Odysseus uses the word “glutton” to describe King Agamemnon as a “dog-faced” glutton” and “people-devouring king.” 
    When Odysseus sails into the clutches of the breathtakingly beautiful goddess Circe (left), she  turns  his men into swine with a drugged drink (she turns them back, too) and persuades him to feast with her and her maidens on “enough food and drink to last forever.” And then to bed. Odysseus and his men gave in to her seductions and stuck around the island  “day after day, eating food in plenty, and drinking sweet wine” for an entire year.
         But the candidate for Super Glutton is the god Herakles (Hercules to the Romans), a bastard son of Zeus whose wife Hera tried to abort him and afterwards tried to make his life miserable. Herakles (below) is, of course, a person of inhuman strength, but he emerges as a comic figure among Greeks who regarded his gluttonous antics as human foibles. From the earliest days of Greek drama Herakles is ridiculed for his brutish way of eating his food, his preference for a good meal versus a good woman and, in Aristophanes’s The Bird, even his reluctance to leave a barbecue in order to help save  his own father. In an earlier play, The Frogs, Aristophanes had also portrayed Herakles as a god led around by his nose at the thought of food, describing how in a trip to the underworld he had gobbled up sixteen loaves of bread, 20 portions of beef stew, a mess of fish and a newly made goat’s cheese—baskets included—then, bellowing and drawing his sword, skipped out on the bill. 
         Though sometimes depicted in terracotta figurines from the 5^th and 4^th centuries BC as pot-bellied, overwhelmingly Herakles was sculpted in marble and bronze by both Greek and Romans as a male figure of daunting musculature with what today are called “killer abs.”
         Alexander the Great (below) was a mere mortal and a big drinker who on “on such a day, and sometimes two days together, slept after a debauch.” On one occasion he held a drinking contest with 41 contenders chosen from his army ranks, others local citizens. Whoever drank the most would be awarded a crown worth a talent in gold––worth about $250,000 today.  One of Alexander's soldiers, named Promachus. won the prize after knocking down four gallons of wine (unmixed with water). But not everyone, especially the local people, was used to drinking so much wine, resulting in 41 deaths from alcohol poisoning.

         Kōvar said, “It was a very excitable night, I can tell you that. It was about eight o’clock, and I had just come back from dinner with a Russian friend who was also staying in the hotel. We had had a Cognac in the bar, then I went upstairs to bed. I was in the bathroom when all of a sudden I began to feel strangely fatigued. I thought it was the wine and the Cognac, though I’d never felt quite that way before.  I went to bed and fell asleep quickly, but when I woke up I was feeling a little dizzy at first. I went in to sit on the bed, and my breathing became heavy and I started to cough violently. In some ways it felt like a flu when it first begins, but this was very, very fast. I tried to lie down and let it pass but by morning it was becoming more difficult to breathe every moment. My head started pounding, too. This was just not normal.”
         “What time was this?” asked David.
         “About nine in the morning. Then, outside my room I heard a great deal of bustling about, so I opened the door and found all these people in the hallway, many of them coughing and most bracing themselves on the hotel wall. I was walking very weakly, trying not to fall over. I passed my Russian friend’s door and banged on it but there was no answer, so I kept on to the stairs. We were only on the third floor so some of us walked down, holding onto the banister. From the first floor landing I could see, I don’t know, ten, fifteen people in the lobby, some sitting in a chair and others collapsed on the floor. The hotel night staff also showed signs of illness. Within moments more people staggered down the stairs and others literally fell out of the elevator door when it opened. It was terrible, and women started to scream in panic.
         “It felt like an eternity but I later learned the police and the ambulances were there at the front door within minutes. Next thing I knew I was being placed on a stretcher and carried to an ambulance. By then there must have been a dozen ambulances at the hotel, and the last thing I remember before passing out was the sound of police cars and emergency vehicles’ blaring horns coming from all directions.
         “I woke up in the hospital around five o’clock that evening with an oxygen tube in my nose.”
         “It all sounds terrifying,” said Catherine. “Not knowing what the cause was.”
         “At first I thought it was some kind of gas attack,” said Kōmar, “even though I didn’t smell anything. There was no smoke, no explosion. In the hospital I was told that it had been some kind of germ that had gone through the hotel and sickened everyone, or at least those below the seventh floor. Only later that day did I heard about the incidents at the other two hotels. It’s a terrible, terrible tragedy. But, at least no one has died from it. Yet.”
         “Did you ever find out what happened to your Russian friend?”
         “Ilya? No, I didn’t see him in the lobby when I stumbled down there. I remember that the  night before he got into the elevator with me just before the door closed. We went up to the third floor and I said, ‘After you, Ilya,’ but he said he was going up to another floor. Which was odd, now that I think of it, because his room was on the third floor where mine was. I don’t know where he was going. Maybe a business associate.”
         “So, this would have been before ten o’clock?” asked David.
         “Yes, perhaps eighty-thirty or nine. I started feeling really sick about around midnight.”
         The three Americans looked at each other, and Catherine asked, “Have you been in touch with this Ilya since the attack?”
         “No, we were not so close that he would come see me in the hospital, assuming he was not ill. Besides, all the patients were restricted from having visitors until we were released.”
         “So, you don’t know if Ilya did become sick or not,” said Katie.
         “No, I have no idea. He’s attached to the Russian Embassy here so you might inquire here.”
         “I think we’d better,” said David, glancing at Katie and Catherine.
         They did so immediately by showing up at the embassy on the Boulevard Lannes, just off the Bois de Boulogne. It was a brutishly modern structure with not a single reference to French architectural tradition. It was very wide, with two floors composed of two slabs, with an endless series of banal rectangular windows and a rooftop with visible heating and air-conditioning units and other box structures containing whatever it was they contained.
         The interior lacked any decorous interest as well, and it reminded Katie of the dreary quarters of the Russian security service headquarters in Moscow that Katie and David had visited on another investigation. There was a long desk manned by three attendants and four armed soldiers milling around the lobby.
         Catherine spoke to an attendant in French, explaining that they she was a journalist from CNN International and these were journalists from the United States.
         “We’d like to inquire if Ambassador Ilya Bazarov would be available to speak with us.”
         The woman asked what this was in reference to. Catherine said they were interviewing people who had been at the Hôtel Anastasia the night of the event. The woman said nothing but made a phone call, speaking in Russian. Two minutes later she picked up the phone, saying several times, “Da. . . da. . . da,” hung up then said, “I am afraid the Ambassador cannot see you at this time, but if you wish to e-mail some questions, I will see that he gets them.”
         Catherine said thank you and left her card, in case the ambassador wished to speak with her directly. The woman nodded, hit a buzzer to open the door and said, “Au revoir.”
         “That’s about the way I thought it’d go,” said Catherine, outside.
         “I’m sure Ilya is a very busy man,” David said sarcastically.
         “And I’m sure he would never answer our questions without having them in writing, then gone over by his superiors, if they’d let him answer at all.”
         David suggested their next stop should be to talk with Catherine’s concierge friend at the Anastasia. Katie said, “Why don’t you two go ahead. I’m going to try to speak with Dr. Baer as to any update on the virus.”
         Katie took the Métro back to her hotel, while Catherine attempted to reach her friend Yves, whose phone recorder said he would call back as soon as possible.
         “What now?” asked David.
         “Well, I’ve got to hustle to get to the fashion show. It’s Courrèges today, then Lagerfeld.”
         “Okay, I’ll just stroll the boulevards. I have to pick up my new jacket, too.”
       
     When he was a cop, David knew most every neighborhood in New York and felt knowledgeable about most of them. He even spoke a little street Spanish, so he could make himself understood in various Latino neighborhoods. On the rare occasions he had been in a foreign country—outside of London and Dublin—he usually only had contact with English-speaking colleagues in the police departments. Katie had been able to handle Italian and French well enough so that he felt pretty comfortable when they had travelled to Rome, Naples and now Paris.
         Now here he was feeling sheepish and lost, reluctant to ask anyone for directions, still queasy about how to plot a trip on the Métro, and, even though he was getting hungry for lunch, he felt funny about opening a menu all in French. Why do so few Parisians speak English? he thought. So, to alleviate any fears of appearing like a total American jerk, he simply returned to his hotel and had lunch there. About an hour later, that’s where Katie found him finishing off a slice of tarte Tatin and coffee.
         Katie knew enough not to ask a question like “What are you doing here?” knowing it would sound like she knew the reason why David was having lunch in a safe place. So, she just said, “Hey, I’m glad you’re here. I just got off the phone with Baer and Catherine called and said we could go over to Yves’s apartment to speak with him this afternoon at four.”
        “Great news,” said David, signing his check. “Gives us time to pick up my new jacket. So, what did Baer have to say?”
         “She said that most people were being let out of the hospital and that they’re no longer infectious. Which means there are a lot more potential guests we could interview, I suppose. I asked her how serious the virus was, and she said that it had been carefully engineered not to be a killer, although the immediate effects were far more debilitating than a seasonal flu. She said that many of the elderly patients would probably remain in the hospital, and a few had developed pneumonia, which kills more old people than the virus itself, so there could still be some deaths.”
         “Meaning that whoever stole this particular virus knew that it was not all that deadly,” said David. “And that means that the attack was more of a scare tactic.”
         “Uh-huh, a tactic that would effectively put the hotels out of commission for a long time.”
         “Did Baer say how long?”
         “She said it’s hard to tell because, first, it’s a brand new virus, and second, because even if you scrub down and fumigate every interior surface, it could linger deep in the recesses of the air ducts for who know how long.”
         “So, there’ll be no way anyone will want to stay at those hotels until there’s a guarantee every trace had been wiped out.”
         “That’s what she suggested would be the case. And even after the hotels tell everyone they’re absolutely in no danger, how many people are going to take the chance?”
         “Which all coincides with our theory that this incident was not just to hurt and embarrass the Saudi owners but to make the value of the properties plummet.”
         “Frankly,” said Katie, “Whatever the Saudis spent to buy those hotels is a drop in their bucket, or should I say just a few buckets of oil. They must also be insured. I don’t know what French insurance companies are like, but this was obviously no act of God. I don’t know where they stand on terrorist attacks.”
         “Neither do I,” said David, “but I hear the insurers of all the 9/11 businesses are eventually going to have to pay billions.”
         “Well, we’ll see. Baer did say she didn’t expect any more widespread infections, although the people who did not get sick that night may not have had symptoms and might have carried the virus to wherever they went after the incident, but it’s a low probability.”
         The two had a couple of hours before the meeting with Yves, so they walked over to the men’s store to pick up David’s new jacket. He’d even put on a fresh shirt for the event.
         “Whaddaya think?” he said, hunching his shoulders up and down, the way men do when putting on a new jacket.
         “You look really good, very. . . debonair?”   
        “Maybe I should buy a beret and start tying my scarf the way they do over here.”
        “One step at a time, Monsieur, one step at a time.”
        David had to admit the jacket looked and fit a lot better than his old blazer. “Makes me look taller,” he said, pulling down his shirt cuffs.
    He paid the bill—which was more than twice what he’d ever paid for a jacket—extended his arm to Katie and said, “Well, Mademoiselle, may I have the pleasure of a stroll through Par-ee with you?”