1892 Drinks of the world

DRINKS.

32

it has endeared to some of our own caviare and putrescent game. « To drink wine unmixed was, it has been said before, held by the Greeks to be disreputable. Those who did so were said to be like Scythians. The Maronean wine of Homer was mixed with twenty measures of water. The common proportion in the more polished days of Greece was three or four parts of water to one of wine. But probably Greece, like Rome, had many a Menenius who loved a cup of hot wine with not a drop of allaying Tiber in it. If the condition of Alcibiades in the Platonic symposium was the result of wine so diluted, the wine must have been strong indeed. The Grecian and Roman banquet began with the mulsum, of mingled wine and honey. The dessert wines among the Greeks were the Thasian and Lesbian ; among the Romans the Alban, Csecuban, and Falernian, and afterwards the Chian and Lesbian. In the triumphal supper of Caesar in his dictatorship Pliny says Falernian flowed in hogsheads and Chian in gallons. At the well-known Horatlan supper of Nasidienus the Caecuban and indifferent Chian were handed round before the host advised Maecenas that Alban and Falernian were procurable if he preferred them. Juvenal and Martial tell us of the complaint of clients, that while the master and his friends drank the best wine out of costly cups, they themselves had to put up with ropy liquors in coarse, half-broken

Human nature has changed little in this

vessels.

respect since those satirists wTOte.