According to Theopompus the dark wine originated among the Chians and they first learnt how to plant and tend vines from Oenopion, son of DIONYSUS.
DIONYSUS was welcomed by Icarius, king of deme Icaria of Attica, who received from him a branch of a vine and learned the process of making wine. The same author declares that the king of Calydon Oeneus was the first to receive a vine-plant from. According to Hyginus DIONYSUS relied to Icarius the cultivation of the vine and the preparation of the wine. Icarius planted the vine and he did care about it as long as it grew up. One day a goat (ôñÜãïò) entered the vine yard and ate all the new leaves. Icarius was afflicted and was very angry to see such a disaster. He first killed the goat and after with its hide he constructed a skin-bag which he inflated and fastened it. Then he threw it among some friends which he obliged to danse round the skin-bag. So Eratosthene has written, that for the first time, near Icarius, men danced in round by a goat.
The physician Philomides says that when the vine had been brought by DIONYSUS from the Red Sea into Greece most men perversely turned to unmeasured enjoyment of it, and drank it unmixed; some, in their insame perversity, became delirious, others became like corpses in their stupor. But once upon a time, when some men were drinking at the seashore, a rain-storm fell upon them and broke up the pasty, but filled up the bowl, which still had a little wine left in it. After the weather cleared they returned to the same place, and tasting the mixture of wine and water they found pleasant and painless enjoyment. When the unmixed wine is poured during the dinner the Greeks call upon the name of the good Divinity, doing honour to the divinity who discovered the wine; he was Dionysus. But with the first cup of mixed wine given after the dinner they call upon ZEUS the Saviour, because they assume that he, as the originator of rain-storms, was the author of the painless mixture desired from the mingling of wine and rain.
Dionysus travels in the sea (530 B.C.) Hecataeus of Miletus declares that the vine was discovered in Aetolia and he adds: Orestheus, son of Deucalion, went to Aetolia to assume the kingship and a bitch of his gave birth to a stalk. He ordered that it be buried, and from it sprang a vine with many clusters. For this reason he called his own son Phytius ("Vine-grower"). When his son Oineus was born, he was named after the vines. For the ancient Greeks, Athenaeus completed, called grape - vines &laqno;oinai».
Theopompus from Chios relates that the vine was discovered in Olympia on the banks of the river Alpheius and there is a district in Elis, a mile away, in which at the festival of DIONYSUS the inhabitans shut up and seal three empty cauldrons, in the presence of visitors; later they open the cauldrons and find them full of wine.
~source unknown
