what is supposed, be true, that this miserable man was drunk every day, without fail, for three months together![XXVII_5] Shall we mention Tiberius—surnamed by the army, Biberius (Tippler)—who, after he became Emperor, passed the days and nights drinking with Flaccus and Piso, at the very time they were working at the reformation of the Romans?[XXVII_6]

This pagan Solomon, having to choose from among several very distinguished candidates who offered themselves for the quæstorship, preferred the least known, because he had drunk a whole pitcher of wine, which the prince himself had condescended to fill.[XXVII_7]

Intoxication, with the Greeks, was noted as belonging to low company, if we are to judge by certain personages whom Æschylus and Sophocles did not fear to bring on the stage, and who struck each other with vases—a thing which the modern theatre has judiciously banished.[XXVII_8] Homer is more reserved; for Achilles, after copious libations, only threw a neat’s foot at Ulysses’ head,[XXVII_9] which probably was not of much consequence.

The fact is, that the ancients did not at all profess the same principles that we do respecting intemperance. Hippocrates himself, advised men to seek mirth now and then in wine;[XXVII_10] Seneca recommends us to drown cares and fatigue in it;[XXVII_11] and Musæus decorates with crowns of flowers the foreheads of the sages who, sitting by the side of Plato at all new banquets, should find in continual drunkenness the sweetest reward for their virtues.[XXVII_12] A singular bliss, which only reason in delirium could have imagined.

We have spoken of the delicious beverage which was so costly a seduction to choice epicureans, who took merit to themselves for not resisting it; for this reason, it was necessary to invent vessels worthy of containing it; and art, encouraged by luxury, produced those magnificent vases of which ostentatious antiquity has only left us a faint idea.

The cups of the Homeric times were all of equal capacity; one of them was offered to each guest, but several were offered to persons of high distinction.[XXVII_13]

The Greeks thought much of their cups; for them they were sacred relics from father to son, and were only used on certain solemnities. Thus Œdipus delivers the most frightful imprecation against his son Polynices, who had presented, at a common repast, the cup of his ancestors.[XXVII_14] That of Nestor was so large that a young man could hardly carry it; as to him, he lifted it up without the slightest difficulty.[XXVII_15]

The Athenians drank from cups in the shape of horns.[XXVII_16] Wax vases were sufficient for the Spaniards.[XXVII_17] The Gaul who had thrown down an Urus (wild ox) took its horns, decorated them with silver and gold rings, and made his guests drink out of them.[XXVII_18] Often the skull of an enemy, killed in single combat, was transformed into a cup of honour, and reminded a Gallic family of the memorable action of a valiant ancestor.[XXVII_19]

The first cups of the Romans were made of horns, or of the earthenware of Samos.[XXVII_20] Those conquerors of the world had not yet enervated their manly courage with the luxurious spoils of conquered nations. Afterwards, some very simple ones were made of beech-wood[XXVII_21] or elder;[XXVII_22] these possessed a marvellous property which they ought to have always preserved—the wine only escaped from them, and they retained the water which had been mixed with it.[XXVII_23]

But Rome, already tired of its austere simplicity, and its disdain for the Greek cups of glass and crystal, soon began to desire something finer. Those magnificent chalices, master-pieces of patience and skill, in which gold and silver were amalgamated with a more brittle material,[XXVII_24] were soon in much request, and appeared worthy of their renown.

But it is to be observed, that the crystal of which the most precious cups were made, had not the slightest similarity to that which we make use of now, and which the least shock will break; it was flexible and malleable;[XXVII_25] it might be thrown on the pavement with impunity, and remained unhurt.[XXVII_26]

Here is, on this subject, a curious anecdote, which has been left to us by Petronius:—

A certain skilful workman used to make crystal vases as strong as vases of gold and silver. He produced an incomparable masterpiece; it was a chalice of astonishing beauty, which he thought worthy of Cæsar only, and which he felt a pride in offering to him. Tiberius highly praised the skill and the rich present of the artist. This man, wishing to increase still more the admiration of the prince, and secure his favours to a greater degree, begged of him to give back the vase. He then threw it with all his might on the marble pavement of the

apartment: the hardest metal could never have resisted this terrible shock. Cæsar appeared moved, and was silent. The artist, with a triumphant smile, picked up the vase, which had only a slight dent, and which, by striking it with the hammer, was soon brought to its original state. This being done, no doubt remained on his mind that he had conquered the good graces of the Emperor, and the esteem of an astonished court. Tiberius asked him if he was the only one who knew how to work crystal in so remarkable a manner? The workman immediately answered that no one possessed his secret. “Very well,” said Cæsar, “let his head be struck off without loss of time; for if this strange invention were known, gold and silver would very soon have not the least value.”[XXVII_27] Thus did the Emperor Tiberius encourage artists and the arts.

There were, besides, cups made of the most pure crystal, “the brittleness of which seems to have added to their price,”[XXVII_28] and which were paid for dearer than gold and precious stones;[XXVII_29] but much less, however, than those famous Murrhine vases, which have so long exercised the useless sagacity of ancient commentators.

Among the rich spoils that Pompey, conqueror of Mithridates and master of a part of Asia, ostentatiously displayed in his triumph,[XXVII_30] the Romans, for the first time, admired vases and cups, the material and workmanship of which surpassed all that the imagination could fancy the most graceful and delicate.[XXVII_31] They were much in request; the price was exorbitant, and thenceforth they were indispensable. One of the ancient consuls thought himself too happy to give only a little more than £6,000 for one of those Murrhines. Such was the name given to this brittle and rare novelty. Petronius paid for a large basin £28,800;

and Nero spent the like sum for a vase with two handles, which he forgot two days afterwards.[XXVII_32]

The Murrhine cups appeared on the table with the wine of the “hundred leaves,” and the Falernian was poured into them, so as to preserve all the generous delicacy of its odour.[XXVII_33]

The Murrhines were much sought after, on account of their form and brilliant transparency: they were made of mother of pearl, according to Belon, but others say of agate. Their dimensions, however, would incline one to doubt it. Scaliger,[XXVII_34] Cardan,[XXVII_35] and Madame Dacier,[XXVII_36] thought that the ancients gave unheard-of prices for simple porcelain vases, which were precious on account of their rarity. This opinion, which several modern literati[XXVII_37] have adopted, rests plausibly enough, it appears, on one verse of Propertius, in which this poet speaks of “Murrhine cups, baked in the furnace of the Parthians.”[XXVII_38] It has been said that, perhaps the Parthians learnt from the Chinese how to make porcelain; but this supposition, entirely void of proof, has been contradicted in a most peremptory manner by the author of a very curious book, who demonstrates irrefragably that the Murrhines were not of porcelain, but of stones of the species of onyx.[XXVII_39] The following fact will leave but very little doubt on that subject:—

In 1791, the Constituent National Assembly, appointed a commission to make an inventory and valuation of all objects in the Garde-Meuble of the crown. They found, among other very beautiful sardonyx, two very antique vases: one made in the form of an ewer, ten inches in height and four inches in diameter, having its handle cut out of the same piece, and the second, hollowed out as a bowl, ten inches in diameter, which were recognised as real Murrhines—beautiful white and blue veins and other shades, circulated about the bowl without interfering with its semi-transparency; the bottom was of the same colour as the ewer. The jewellers estimated these vases at £6,000 each, although there was nothing engraved in the hollow nor in relief, but merely on consideration of the beauty of the material, the fineness of the polish, and the difficulty that must have attended the hollowing out of the ewer.[XXVII_40]

These valuations would appear exaggerated, if it were not known that the antique vase of the Duke of Brunswick, which formerly belonged to the Dukes of Mantua, in 1631, and made of sardonyx, in the cruet shape, was valued at 150,000 German crowns—or dollars of 4s. 3d. The relief

engraving represented the mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus; but it had no primitive handle, and the diameter was only two inches and a-half.[XXVII_41]

By the side of these inestimable Murrhines were standing very graceful chalices of amber, the prodigious workmanship of which absolutely gave to them a most arbitrary value,[XXVII_42] but which Roman prodigality never found too high.

Silver cups engraved were also nearly as much esteemed, when they came from the hands of some well-known workman—such as Myos, Mentor, or Myron.[XXVII_43] They were even preferred to gold cups,[XXVII_44] unless these latter were enriched with precious stones.[XXVII_45]

All these vases presented still greater varieties in their forms than in the materials employed. There were very large ones, some narrow, some oblong; many ornamented with two handles, others had only one.[XXVII_46] Some were much like a tympanon—or zoph, a musical instrument of the ancient Hebrews—a small boat or ewer.[XXVII_47] In one word, the Greek or Roman artist never listened to anything but his own fancy, and was then far from supposing that he was preparing very long and wakeful hours of study to many antiquarians, zealous to explain seriously the strange wanderings of a fantastical imagination.

XXVIII.

WINE.

Bacchus, son of Ammon, was born in Egypt, and was the first who taught his countrymen the art of cultivating the vine, and of making wine. He is the same as Osiris, the famous conqueror of India.[XXVIII_1] Should this assertion be contradicted, we shall only entreat any and every disputant to make his own choice of the god of vineyards, from among the five heroes bearing the name of Bacchus, as we are too impartial to prefer any one in particular.[XXVIII_2]

Œnopion, worthy son of one of these heroes, enriched the inhabitants of Chios with the first rosy wine that ever yet obscured their reason.[XXVIII_3] Greece, Italy, and Sicily owed this wonderful liquor to the Egyptians. The Gauls received this sweet present from a Tuscan, who had been banished from Clusium, his country;[XXVIII_4] and the cultivation of the grape spread rapidly till the reign of the sanguinary Domitian, who completed the catalogue of his crimes by tearing up the vines.[XXVIII_5] The Emperor Probus restored them to the disconsolate Gauls.[XXVIII_6] That prince was certainly worthy of his name!

Modern science, agreeing with holy writ,[XXVIII_7] looks upon the east as the common cradle of the vine and the human race.

Palestine was renowned for its vines. Pliny speaks in praise of them.[XXVIII_8] The vineyards constituted a part of the riches of the country, and they were preserved with the greatest care; so much so that Moses, with an especial view to vines, forbade the sowing of different seeds in the same field, on pain of confiscation:[XXVIII_9] and it was done to encourage their cultivation, that that wise legislator exempted every person who had planted one from military service, and from all public duties, until the first vintage.[XXVIII_10]

The growths of Lebanon,[XXVIII_11] of Helbon,[XXVIII_12] and of Sorec,[XXVIII_13] enjoyed an extraordinary reputation, and the delicious wine they produced was capable of inspiring the lyric David with that celebrated praise[XXVIII_14] by which intemperance has often dared to authorize reprehensible excesses.

However, the Hebrews, a sober people, like all eastern nations, rarely made use of pure wine; they generally mixed it with a quantity of water, and only drank a little at some ceremonial feasts, and at the end of their repasts.[XXVIII_15] They sometimes mixed with it perfumes and odoriferous drugs.[XXVIII_16]

Some nations seem to have had a great horror of wine. The Persians drank nothing but water;[XXVIII_17] and the inhabitants of Pontus, the Scythians, and the Cappadocians, partook of this strange taste.[XXVIII_18] The Arcadians, who lived on chesnuts and acorns, were not worthy of the favours of Bacchus; neither were the troglodytes, the ichthyophagists, and other swarms of hydropotes who were as yet too little civilized to ask of drunkenness its illusions and its enchantments.[XXVIII_19]

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

him permanently the remembrance of his fault and of the rights of property.[XXVIII_40]

The imperial jurisprudence afterwards softened the Draconian rigour of this law of the Decemviri.[XXVIII_41]

The ancients, like ourselves, were fond of seeing fresh grapes appear on their tables at all periods of the year. They preserved them by covering them with barley flour,[XXVIII_42] or by placing fine bunches in rain water, diminished to a third by boiling. The vase was hermetically sealed with pitch and plaster, and then placed in a spot where the sun’s rays could not enter. This water was an excellent beverage for the sick.[XXVIII_43]

The method of making wine was precisely the same both in Greece and Italy.

The vine gatherers carefully rejected the green grapes,[XXVIII_44] and piled the others in deep baskets,[XXVIII_45] the contents of which were instantly emptied into large vats. There men, hardly clothed in the lightest garments, trampled them under their feet,[XXVIII_46] whilst joyous songs and sounds of flutes hastened their movements, and animated them to work faster.[XXVIII_47]

Wine obtained in this manner was much esteemed, and kept very well.[XXVIII_48] The wort which escaped from the vat as soon as they had thrown in the grapes, and which came from the pressure occasioned by their laying one on the other, enjoyed the preference. This first liquor was transformed into an exquisite wine.[XXVIII_49]

The grapes, crushed by the feet, were placed under the press,[XXVIII_50] and an opening made in the lower part of the vat allowed the wort to flow into earthen jars, whence it was subsequently poured into the barrels.[XXVIII_51]

The press was always raised at a little distance from the cellar and kitchen.[XXVIII_52] Its mechanism was very simple. The antiquities of Herculaneum will furnish us with an example. Two trees were firmly fixed in the ground, at a few feet distance one from the other, and a strong horizontal beam rested on their summit. Other pieces of wood, similar

to the top piece, were placed underneath. The grapes occupied the space between the vat and the lower plank. Between each of the cross planks wedges were introduced, and two persons kept striking them with hammers, one on each side; it is thus the pressure was effected.[XXVIII_53] Wine from the press, inferior to those just mentioned, served for the ordinary consumption of the family, and for the servants.[XXVIII_54] It was not racked, but simply taken from the barrel as it was wanted.[XXVIII_55]

The lees were taken from the press when it yielded no more liquor; a certain quantity of water was poured over them, and the whole subjected to a second pressure. The weak kind of wine obtained by this new operation must have somewhat resembled that acrid stuff called piquette, in France; it was the beverage of the people, and especially of the country people during the winter.[XXVIII_56]

A part of the wort—that which was required for immediate use—was put aside, and clarified with vinegar.[XXVIII_57] A portion of that obtained from the crushed grapes was put to boil on furnaces, supported on three legs, at a little distance from the press, in coppers, the contents of which were continually stirred.[XXVIII_58] This liquor, reduced by a third, was called carenum;[XXVIII_59] when the half only remained, it was called defrutum;[XXVIII_60] and, lastly, when the ebullition left only a third part remaining, this substance, very similar to honey, took the name of sapa.[XXVIII_61] It was mixed with flour, to fatten the snails reared by skilful speculators, who reserved them for the Roman sybarites.[XXVIII_62]

This wort, thus prepared by night, when the moon did not shine,[XXVIII_63] and carefully skimmed,[XXVIII_64] served to preserve wines, to give more body to those which were thought too weak, and became the base of several beverages sought in preference by Roman ladies, at that period of life when maturity of years made alliance with sensuality.[XXVIII_65]

Those who wished to preserve sweet wine during a whole year, filled with the second wort—that is to say, that which was produced by the pression of the feet—some amphoræ covered with pitch inside and out. They were then hermetically sealed, and buried in the sand, or plunged in cold water, where they remained at least two months.[XXVIII_66]

There still was left a large quantity of wort as it came from the grapes. This was taken into the cellar,[XXVIII_67] which was always situated a little below the level of the ground; or to the ground floor, where no kind of smell was allowed to penetrate, or any emanation capable of spoiling the bouquet of the wine it contained.[XXVIII_68]