When any one, O Crito, drinks ten cups,
Consider, I do beg you, whether he
Who never once allows the wine to pass
Is in a fit state for discussion.
And it was not without some wit that Lysander the Spartan, as Hegesander relates in his Commentaries, when some vintners sold wine which had been much watered in his camp, ordered some one to supply it properly tempered, that his men might buy it with less water in it. And Alexis has said something which comes to nearly the same thing, in his Æsop; thus—
A. That is a good idea of yours, O Solon,
And cleverly imagined, which you have
Adopted in your city.
S. What is that?
A. You don't let men drink neat wine at their feasts.
S. Why, if I did, 'twould not be very easy
For men to get it, when the innkeepers
Water it ere it comes out of the waggon.
No doubt they do not do so to make money,
But only out of prudent care for those
Who buy the liquor; so that they may have
Their heads from every pang of headache free.
This now is, as you see, a Grecian drink;
So that men, drinking cups of moderate strength,
May chat and gossip cheerfully with each other:
For too much water is more like a bath
Than like a wine-cup; and the wine-cooler
Mix'd with the cask, my friend, is death itself.
39. "But to drink to the degree of drunkenness," says Plato, in his sixth book of the Laws, is neither becoming anywhere—except perhaps in the days of festival of the god who gave men wine for their banquets,—nor is it wholesome: and, above all, a man ought to guard against such a thing who has any thoughts of marriage; for at such a time, above all other times, both bride and bridegroom ought to be in full possession of their faculties; when they are entering upon what is no small change in the circumstances of their life; and also they ought to be influenced by anxiety that their offspring shall be the offspring of parents in the fullest possible possession of all their faculties; for it is very uncertain what day or what night will be the originating cause of it." And in the first book of his Laws he says—"But respecting drunkenness it may be a question, whether we ought to give way to it as the Lydians do, and the Persians, and the Carthaginians, and the Celtæ, and the Spaniards, and the Thracians, and other nations like them; or whether like you, O Lacedæmonians, one ought wholly to abstain from it. But the Scythians and the Thracians, who indulge altogether in drinking unmixed wine, both the women and all the men, and who spill it all over their clothes, think that they are maintaining a very honourable practice, and one that tends to their happiness. And the Persians indulge to a great extent in other modes of luxury which you reject; but still they practise them with more moderation than the Scythians and Thracians.
40. And a great many of the guests were drinking, and putting lumps of meal into their wine, a custom which Hegesander of Delphi mentions. Accordingly Epinicus, when Mnesiptolemus had given a recitation of his history, in which it was written how Seleucus had used meal in his wine, having written a drama entitled Mnesiptolemus, and having turned him into ridicule, as the comic poets do, and using his own words about that sort of drink, represents him as saying:—
LACEDÆMONIAN FASHIONS.
Once I beheld the noble king Seleucus,
One summer's day, drinking with mighty pleasure
Some wine with meal steep'd in it. (So I took
A note of it, and show'd it to a crowd,
Although it was an unimportant thing,
Yet still my genius could make it serious.)
He took some fine old Thasian wine, and eke
Some of the liquor which the Attic bee
Distils who culls the sweets from every flower;
And that he mingled in a marble cup,
And mix'd the liquor with fair Ceres' corn,
And took the draught, a respite from the heat.
And the same writer tells us that in the Therades islands men mash lentils and pease into meal, instead of ordinary corn, and put that into the wine, and that this drink is said to be better than that in which the meal is mixed.
41. Now it was not the fashion among the Lacedæmonians to practise the system of pledging healths at their banquets, nor to salute one another with mutual greetings and caresses at their feasts. And Critias shows us this in his Elegies:—
And this is an old fashion, well establish'd,
And sanction'd by the laws of noble Sparta,
That all should drink from one well-fill'd cup;
And that no healths should then be drunk to any one,
Naming the tender object: also that
The cup should not go round towards the right.
The Lydian goblets . . . . . .
* * * *
And to drink healths with skill and well-turn'd phrase,
Naming the person whom one means to pledge.
For, after draughts like this, the tongue gets loose,
And turns to most unseemly conversation;
They make the body weak; they throw a mist
Over the eyes; and make forgetfulness
Eat recollection out of the full heart.
The mind no longer stands on solid ground;
The slaves are all corrupted by licentiousness,
And sad extravagance eats up the house.
But those wise youths whom Lacedæmon breeds
Drink only what may stimulate their souls
To deeds of daring in th' adventurous war,
And rouse the tongue to wit and moderate mirth.
Such draughts are wholesome both for mind and body,
And not injurious to the pocket either:
Good, too, for deeds of love; authors of sleep,
That wholesome harbour after toil and care:
Good, too, for health—that best of goddesses
Who mortal man befriend: and likewise good
For piety's best neigbour temperance.