In America, the word "cocktail" may mean either a mixed drink, as opposed to straight spirits, or any alcoholic beverage sipped before lunch or dinner. In the second sense, the cocktail has been with us for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks had a cocktail hour in the late afternoon or evening, complete with hors d'oeuvres. An Athenian gentleman would drop by a neighbor's house during the "happy hour" with a goatskin of wine, and expect to be treated to an outlay of appetizers-the Greeks called them "provocatives to drinking", that might include caviar, oysters, nuts, olives, shrimp, and pate. The cocktail in the sense of a mixed drink is a much more recent invention. In the past, not only wine and beer but hard liquor, too, was usually drunk straight, or at most diluted with water. As for tomato juice, tonic water, ginger ale, club soda, orange juice, and other mixers, few of these had yet made the trip from the grocery store to the barroom as recently as 200 years ago.