1. Wine libation is just one of a number of Roman libation and sacrificial practices, but “data from domestic shrines suggests that libationes of liquids, incense, fruits, or cakes were often seen as more practicable and economically more feasible, and hence much more common, than animal sacrifice,” Andreas Bendlin, “Libations, Roman,” in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, ed. Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine R. Huebner, 4052–4053 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013).
2. See Hal Taussig, In the Beginning Was the Meal: Social Experimentation and Early Christian Identity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 79–82, for an exploration of the power dynamics of role of symposiarch.
3. Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24, explains that although most drinking wine is mixed, wine poured to gods is unmixed, 20. By the time of Hellenistic and Roman meals, one no longer finds the large krater for mixing wine, but smaller personal vessels.
4. m. Avod Zar 2.3. The biblical foundation of this prohibition (Deut 32:28) indicates that concern with libation practices likely predates awareness of Greek and Roman practices, nevertheless, the rabbis work out halalchic details of what it means to benefit from this wine, see Simcha Fishbane Deviancy in Early Rabbinic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 153.
5. Jeffrey Lawrence Rubenstein, “The Sukkot wine libation,” in Ki Baruch Hu; Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Judaic Studies in Honor of Baruch A. Levine, ed. Robert Chazan, William W. Hallo, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, 575–591 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), explores traces of Jewish wine libation practices in connection with Sukkot, although these do not seem to happen in the context of a meal.