The Egyptians would have thought it a profanation of their temples to carry in a flagon of the rosy liquid; but Psammetichus came (670 B.C.), and that wise prince made them understand that a pot of beer is not worth a cup of good wine.[XXVIII_20]
The Romans asserted that their old king, Janus, planted the first vine in Italy,[XXVIII_21] and that, later, Numa taught them how to trim it.[XXVIII_22] That noble people knew how to appreciate such blessings, and in order to demonstrate that wisdom is always to be found in wine, they never failed to place on their altars the statue of Minerva beside that of Bacchus.[XXVIII_23]
The inflexible muse of history has preserved to us the name of the individual who doomed himself to a sorry sort of immortality by inventing the custom of mixing water with wine; it was Cranaüs, King of Athens, 1532 B.C.[XXVIII_24] The gods, doubtless to punish him, caused a great part of Greece to be inundated, and it was not long before he was dethroned.[XXVIII_25] Pliny accuses the obscure Staphil, sou of Sithen,[XXVIII_26] of this depravation of taste, which gained upon imitators to such an extent that, in the time of Diodorus of Sicily (45 B.C.), the guests still mixed water with their wine at the end of the repast.[XXVIII_27] It is true that they were then all intoxicated.
Lycurgus was, no doubt, ignorant of this practice, when he had the barbarity to destroy the vines of the Lacedæmonians, under pretext of putting an end to the disorders caused by intemperance. It would have been preferable, says Plutarch, to have united the nymphs with Bacchus.[XXVIII_28] The ingenious philosopher insists on the mixture being made by a fourth, a fifth, or an octave, in the same manner as the chords in music, which charm our ears. The fifth was obtained by pouring three measures of water on two of wine; one part water and two parts wine made the octave; a quarter of wine and three quarters of water produced the fourth,[XXVIII_29] a most inharmonious chord, struck only by inexperienced and unskilful hands.
Hippocrates, great physician as he was, had already somewhere advised[XXVIII_30] this deplorable dereliction from all wise doctrines, so true is it, that science sometimes goes astray; but, happily for his glory, that learned man, further on,[XXVIII_31] recommends us to drink pure wine, and to drink enough for joy to dissipate our griefs, and rock us in the sweet errors of hope.
The god of grapes had everywhere fervent admirers, except, perhaps, among the Scythians. These schismatics refused to worship a divinity who caused the faithful to become intoxicated.[XXVIII_32] In other places they sacrificed to him a tiger, in order to show the power of his empire;[XXVIII_33] and zealous disciples, with their heads crowned with branches of the vine, holding in one hand a crater and in the other a torch, ran with dishevelled hair about the streets, shouting to the son of Jupiter, the terrible Evius,[XXVIII_34] in the silence of the night.[XXVIII_35]
The Romans addressed to him special prayers twice a year, on the occasion of the wine festivals,[XXVIII_36] which took place in the months of May and September. In the first, they tasted the wine;[XXVIII_37] and, during the second, they implored the god to grant Italy fine weather and abundant vintages.[XXVIII_38]
The god could not reasonably refuse this request, for the vine-dressers spared neither labour nor fatigue to procure an abundant harvest. They were constantly seen disincumbering the plant of a too luxurious foliage, thereby exposing the grapes to the sun’s rays, which bring them to maturity, and breaking with indefatigable perseverance the least clods of earth which, accumulating around the tendrils, appeared to fatigue them by their weight.[XXVIII_39] And woe to the thief whom they detected by night stealing any of these carefully reared grapes; his crime was punished with death, unless the inexperience of youth pleaded in his favour. In that case a severe flagellation impressed on
