In spite of the contempt which ancient writers all manifest for these wine-shops and inns, we remark that men of the senatorial order, like Cicero, did not scorn at times to stop for a few hours on their summer journey at some country inn like the “Three Taverns,” in the neighborhood of Rome, to call for a letter or to write one. This was the same “Tres Tabernæ” to which the Roman Christians went out to meet the Apostle Paul, to welcome him with brotherly greetings after the trials of his Christian Odyssey. We read in the Acts of the Apostles how great his joy was when he saw them, and how “he thanked God and took courage.” He had no need, however, of the tavern. The hospitality of Christian fraternity, which he had praised so beautifully in his message to the Roman community, now received him with open arms.
The very name “tavern,” which in its Latin original means a small wooden house built of “tabulæ,” or blocks, indicates the very modest origins of professional hospitality. And we must distinguish, in the olden times as in the Middle Ages, between hospitality proper, which takes the guest in overnight, and the mere charity which refreshes him with food and drink and sends him on his way.
The original sign of the tavern-keeper is the wreath of ivy with which Bacchus and his companions are crowned, and which twines around the Bacchante’s thyrsos staff. As the ivy is evergreen, so is Bacchus ever young (“juvenis semper”), Shakespeare’s “eternal boy.” As the ivy winds its closely clinging vine around all things, so Bacchus enmeshes the senses of men. Thus the custom grew of crowning the wine-jars with ivy, a custom which Matthias Claudius, in his famous Rhine wine song, has described thus:—
“Crown with ivy the good full jars
And drink them to the lees.
In all of Europe, my jolly tars,
You’ll find no wines like these.”
Now, whether a good wine really needed the recommendation of the wreath was a question on which experts were not agreed. In general, the ancients leaned to the opinion that “good wine needs no bush”—“Vino vendibili suspensa hedera non opus est.” The French later expressed the same idea in their proverb, “À bon vin point d’enseigne”; though La Fontaine seems to have been of a different mind when he said, “L’enseigne fait la chalandise.” And Shakespeare enters the controversy in his epilogue to “As You Like It,” when he makes Rosalind say, “If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue.” An English humorist, George Greenfield of Henfield (whoever he may be), is fully of the opinion that there is no need of the bush: “No, certainly not,” says he; “all that is wanted is a corkscrew and a clean glass or two.”
It is perfectly natural that gloomy and distrustful natures like Schopenhauer’s should have no confidence in the sign. He uses the word “sign” always as a synonym for deceit. He calls academic chairs “tavern signs of wisdom”; and illuminations, bands, processions, cheers, and the like, “tavern signs of joy”—“whereas real joy is generally absent, having declined to attend the feast.” Wieland shows the same mistrust in his verses of Amadis:—
“The finest looks prove only for the soul