‘Te nominatim voco in bibendo.’
‘Bene te! Bene tibi!’
‘Salutem tibi propino.’
‘Bacchi tibi sumimus haustus.’
Compare also Tibul. II. i. 33: ‘Bene Messalam! sua quisque ad pocula dicat.’
Plautus. Curcul. ii. 3, 8: ‘Propino poculum magnum, ille ebibit.’
Cicero. Tuscul. Disput. i. 40: ‘Propino hoc pulcro Critiæ, qui in eum fuerat teterrimus; Græci enim in conviviis solent nominare cui poculum tradituri sint.’
Zumpt interprets ‘Græco more’ as ‘Mos propinandi,’ or the custom of addressing the person to whom you wish well, and offering him a glass to empty, after having first put it to your lips.—Cf. Martial, lib. i. Ep. 72, Horace iii. Ode 19.
[9] The moral depravity and social degradation of the Roman world at this time is forcibly described by Salvian, the Bishop of Marseilles, in his De Gubernatione Dei. This treatise was translated into English, London, 1700.
[10] It is recorded of the Emperor Bonosus that so notorious a drinker was he that when he committed suicide, a.d. 281, after his defeat in Banffshire, it was the common jest with the soldiers that there hung a tankard and not a man.