Kitap 14
Jesters Concerts Songs Rhapsodists Magodi Harp-players Music Dancing Dances Music Musical Instruments Music Love Songs Sweetmeats Different Courses at Dinner Dessert Cheesecakes Cakes Vegetables Pomegranates Figs Grapes Peacocks Partridges The Helots Cheese Cooks The Thessalians ματτύη
1
MOST people, my friend Timocrates, call Bacchus frantic, because those who drink too much unmixed wine become violent To copious wine this insolence we owe, And much thy betters wine can overthrow The great Eurytion, when this frenzy stung, Pirithous' roofs with frantic riot rung: Boundless the Centaur raged, till one and all The heroes rose and dragg'd him from the hall; His nose they shorten'd, and his ears they slit, And sent him sober'd home with better wit. Odyss. xxi. 293. For when the wine has penetrated down into the body, as Herodotus says, bad and furious language is apt to rise to the surface. And Clearchus the comic poet says in his Corinthians— If all the men who to get drunk are apt, Had every day a headache ere they drank The wine, there is not one would drink a drop: But as we now get all the pleasure first, And then the drink, we lose the whole delight In the sharp pain which follows.
1
And Xenophon represents Agesilaus as insisting that a man ought to shun drunkenness equally with madness, and immoderate gluttony as much as idleness. But we, as we are not of the class who drink to excess, nor of the number of those who are in the habit of being intoxicated by midday, have come rather to this literary entertainment; for Ulpian, who is always finding fault, reproved some one just now who said, I am not drunk (ἔξοινος), saying,—Where do you find that word ἔξοινος? But he rejoined,—Why, in Alexis, who, in his play called the New Settler, says— He did all this when drunk (ἔξοινος).
