Abstem. Wretched man, what do you think drunkenness is?

Asot. A fine thing! It is to give oneself up to one’s genius.

Abstem. Yes, but which genius, your good one or your bad one?

Glauc. If you will rightly look into all these matters, you will never find which genius they give themselves up to. For it is neither to the heart, nor to pleasure, nor any other cause for which others indulge, who follow vices and the depraved desires of the mind. To be drunk is different. It is to lose the power of the senses, to go away from the power of reasoning, of judgment; clearly, from being a man to become either cattle or, indeed, a stone. What follows afterwards I can easily imagine, had I never seen a drunkard; to speak, and not to know what you are saying; if any secret, of especial importance not to be divulged, is committed to you, to blab it out, and to say things which may lead into grave danger yourself, your people, and often your whole province and fatherland, to have no discrimination of friend and foe, of wife and mother—and it leads to quarrels, contentions, enmities, snares, wounds, maiming, killing!

Tric. Even without sword and blood, for not a few pass on from drunkenness to death.

Glauc. Who would not prefer to be shut up at home with a dog or a cat than with a drunkard? For those animals have more intellect in them than the drunkard.

Abstem. After the drunkenness follows indigestion, weakening of the nerves, paralysis, the tortures of gout, heaviness in the head and the whole body, dulness of all the senses; memory is extinguished; the sharpness of the intellect is stunned; thence there is a stupor in the whole mind which precludes intelligence, wisdom, and eloquence.

[161]

Asot. Now I begin to understand what a serious evil drunkenness is; henceforward, I will take the keenest pains to drink up to the point of cheerfulness, not to that of drunkenness.

Glauc. Joviality is the gate of drunkenness. No one comes to be drunk with the idea in his mind that he will get drunk; but he is exhilarated by drinking; then going on and on, drunkenness follows afterwards, for it is difficult to place the bounds of joviality and to remain in it. Slippery is the step from joviality to drunkenness!