Chillin' at the Symposium with Plato: Refrigeration in the Ancient World

摘要

During the nineteenth century, many of the mechanical refrigeration technologies that are used today were pioneered. However, thousands of years previously the Greeks had shared chilled wine at their symposia. In fact, in most ancient civilizations at least the wealthy appear to have had access to ice or snow to cool their drinks. Sometimes the ancients harvested ice from cold regions, which was transported to temperate climates and stored in insulated pits. In other cases, it seems that ice was generated via radiation of heat from shallow pools into the night sky, whilst in other cases evaporative cooling was used to chill amphorae filled with wine. In this paper, ancient uses for ice and the strategies for its production are examined.