Prometheus, right. Nice guy, bad press. You know the old legend: he populated the planet and pissed Zeus off by making Man in the image of the Gods. The final straw, the story goes, was when he stole fire from Zeus’ hearth and gave it to the shivering peoples, carrying it down Olympus in a cone of slow-burning Fennel.

The legend is wrong. What Prometheus stole was was not fire, but firewater. Prometheus gave to men the secret of making alcohol, the one thing that could truly make them feel as Gods. The Tree of Knowledge was a vine: man learnt to ferment, brew, and distill its fruit. Fennel is native to Southern Europe and the countries of the Mediterranean. In Greece, home of the legend, fennel is used to flavour ouzo and its precursors, raki and arak. It is one of the ‘holy trinity’ of herbs used to make absinthe, along with wormwood and anise.

The proof is in the punishment: for his crime, Prometheus was sentenced by Zeus to be chained to Mount Caucasus, where every day the great eagle Ethon would arrive to gnaw on – get this – his liver. Fixed in the burning Central Asian sunlight, sweating, thirsting, aching, regenerating each night his battered organ, Prometheus is taking on the greatest of all hangovers, suffering for our sins, a scapegoat for all our Friday nights. His one attempt to pacify the furious Zeus was to teach the humans to make sacrifices to the Gods; violent, bloody festivals that became orgies of drinking and debauchery.

All this is a round-about way of saying that the 3:AM party was fun, and more than a few people are feeling a little delicate today.