This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
They also that at Heliopolis (Sun-town) wait upon
the sun never bring wine into his temple, they looking
upon it as a thing indecent and unfitting to drink by daylight, while their lord and king looks on. The rest of
them do indeed use it, but very sparingly. They have
likewise many purgations, wherein they prohibit the use
of wine, in which they study philosophy, and pass their
time in learning and teaching things divine. Moreover
their kings, being priests also themselves, were wont to
drink it by a certain measure prescribed them in the sacred
books, as Hecataeus informs us. And they began first to
drink it in the reign of Psammetichus; but before that
time they were not used to drink wine at all, no, nor to
pour it forth in sacrifice as a thing they thought any way
grateful to the Gods, but as the blood of those who in
ancient times waged war against the Gods, from whom, falling down from heaven and mixing with the earth, they
conceived vines to have first sprung; which is the reason
(say they) that drunkenness renders men besides themselves and mad; they being, as it were, gorged with the
blood of their ancestors. These things (as Eudoxus tells
us in the second book of his Travels) are thus related by
the priests.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 4.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.