CHAP. 28. (22.)—DRUNKENNESS.
If any one will take the trouble duly to consider the matter,
he will find that upon no one subject is the industry of man
kept more constantly on the alert than upon the making of wine;
as if Nature had not given us water as a beverage, the one, in
fact, of which all other animals make use. We, on the other
hand, even go so far as to make our very beasts of burden
drink
1 wine: so vast are our efforts, so vast our labours, and
so boundless the cost which we thus lavish upon a liquid
which deprives man of his reason and drives him to frenzy
and to the commission of a thousand crimes! So great, however, are its attractions, that a great part of mankind are of
opinion that there is nothing else in life worth living for.
Nay, what is even more than this, that we may be enabled to
swallow all the more, we have adopted the plan of diminishing
its strength by pressing it through
2 filters of cloth, and have
devised numerous inventions whereby to create an artificial
thirst. To promote drinking, we find that even poisonous
mixtures have been invented, and some men are known to
take a dose of hemlock before they begin to drink, that they
may have the fear of death before them to make them take
their wine:
3 others, again, take powdered pumice
4 for the
same purpose, and various other mixtures, which I should
Feel quite ashamed any further to enlarge upon.
We see the more prudent among those who are given to this
habit have themselves parboiled in hot-baths, from whence they
are carried away half dead. Others there are, again, who cannot wait till they have got to the banqueting couch,
5 no, not
so much as till they have got their shirt on,
6 but all naked
and panting as they are, the instant they leave the bath they
seize hold of large vessels filled with wine, to show of, as it
were, their mighty powers, and so gulp down the whole of the
contents only to vomit them up again the very next moment.
This they will repeat, too, a second and even a third time,
just as though they had only been begotten for the purpose of
wasting wine, and as if that liquor could not be thrown away
without having first passed through the human body. It is
to encourage habits such as these that we have introduced the
athletic exercises
7 of other countries, such as rolling in the
mud, for instance, and throwing the arms back to show off a
brawny neck and chest. Of all these exercises, thirst, it is
said, is the chief and primary object.
And then, too, what vessels are employed for holding wine!
carved all over with the representations of adulterous intrigues,
as if, in fact, drunkenness itself was not sufficiently capable of
teaching us lessons of lustfulness. Thus we see wines quaffed
out of impurities, and inebriety invited even by the hope of a
reward,—invited, did I say?—may the gods forgive me for
saying so, purchased outright. We find one person induced
to drink upon the condition that he shall have as much to eat
as he has previously drunk, while another has to quaff as
many cups as he has thrown points on the dice. Then it is
that the roving, insatiate eyes are setting a price upon the
matron's chastity; and yet, heavy as they are with wine, they
do not fail to betray their designs to her husband. Then
it is that all the secrets of the mind are revealed; one man is
heard to disclose the provisions of his will, another lets fall
some expression of fatal import, and so fails to keep to himself
words which will be sure to come home to him with a cut
throat. And how many a man has met his death in this fashion!
Indeed, it has become quite a common proverb, that "in wine
8
there is truth."
Should he, however, fortunately escape all these dangers,
the drunkard never beholds the rising sun, by which his life
of drinking is made all the shorter. From wine, too, comes
that pallid hue,
9 those drooping eyelids, those sore eyes, those
tremulous hands, unable to hold with steadiness the overflowing vessel, condign punishment in the shape of sleep agitated by Furies during the restless night, and, the supreme
reward of inebriety, those dreams of monstrous lustfulness and
of forbidden delights. Then on the next day there is the breath
reeking of the wine-cask, and a nearly total obliviousness of
everything, from the annihilation of the powers of the memory.
And this, too, is what they call "seizing the moments of life!
10
whereas, in reality, while other men lose the day that has gone
before, the drinker has already lost the one that is to come.
They first began, in the reign of Tiberius Claudius, some
forty years ago, to drink fasting, and to take whets of wine
before meals; an outlandish
11 fashion, however, and only patronized by physicians who wished to recommend themselves
by the introduction of some novelty or other.
It is in the exercise of their drinking powers that the Parthians look for their share of fame, and it was in this that
Alcibiades among the Greeks earned his great repute. Among
ourselves, too, Novellius Torquatus of Mediolanum, a man
who held all the honours of the state from the prefecture to the
pro-consulate, could drink off three congii
12 at a single draught,
a feat from which he obtained the surname of "Tricongius:" this he did before the eyes of the Emperor Tiberius,
and to his extreme surprise and astonishment, a man who in
his old age was very morose,
13 and indeed very cruel in general; though in his younger days he himself had been too
much addicted to wine. Indeed it was owing to that recommendation that it was generally thought that L. Piso was
selected by him to have the charge and custody
14 of the City of
Rome; he having kept up a drinking-bout at the residence of
Tiberius, just after he had become emperor, two days and two
nights without intermission. In no point, too, was it generally said that Drusus Cæsar took after his father Tiberius
more than this.
15 Torquatus had the rather uncommon glory—for this science, too, is regulated by peculiar laws of its own—of never being known to stammer in his speech, or to relieve
the stomach by vomiting or urine, while engaged in drinking.
lie was always on duty at the morning guard, was able to
empty the largest vessel at a single draught, and yet to take
more ordinary cups in addition than any one else; he was always to be implicitly depended upon, too, for being able to drink
without taking breath and without ever spitting, or so much
as leaving enough at the bottom of the cup to make a plash
upon the pavement;
16 thus showing himself an exact observer
of the regulations which have been made to prevent all shirking on the part of drinkers.
Tergilla reproaches Cicero, the son of Marcus Cicero, with
being in the habit of taking off a couple of congii at a single
draught, and with having thrown a cup, when in a state of
drunkenness, at M. Agrippa;
17 such, in fact, being the ordinary
results of intoxication. But it is not to be wondered at that
Cicero was desirous in this respect to eclipse the fame of M.
Antonius, the murderer of his father; a man who had, before
the time of the younger Cicero, shown himself so extremely
anxious to maintain the superiority in this kind of qualifica-
tion, that he had even gone so far as to publish a book upon
the subject of his own drunkenness.
18 Daring in this work to
speak in his own defence, he has proved very satisfactorily, to
lay thinking, how many were the evils he had inflicted upon
the world through this same vice of drunkenness. It was but
a short time before the battle of Actium that he vomited forth
this book of his, from which we have no great difficulty in
coming to the conclusion, that drunk as lie already was with
the blood of his fellow-citizens, the only result was that he
thirsted for it all the more. For, in fact, such is the infallible
characteristic of drunkenness, the more a person is in the
habit of drinking, the more eager he is for drink; and the
remark of the Scythian ambassador is as true as it is well
known—the more the Parthians drank, the thirstier they were
for it.