Tulloch translates calda as “a hot mix of wine and water mixed together.”48 In Rodolfo Lanciani’s Pagan and Christian Rome, published in 1893, we get a little more detail: The meaning of the word calda is not certain. There is no doubt … that the ancients had something to correspond to our tea: but the calda seems to have been more than an infusion; apparently it was a mixture of hot water, wine, and drugs, that is, a sort of punch, which was drunk mostly in winter.
