EVILS OF DRUNKENNESS. celebrated the festivals in honour of Bacchus all his life, wearing a dress such as is worn by the votaries of Bacchus, and maintaining a troop of fellow-revellers. And he was constantly leading revels both day and night; and he was the first man who invented that kind of poetry which depends upon compound words, which Asopodorus the Phliasian afterwards employed in his conversational Iambics. And he too used to write comedies and many other pieces in the same style of poetry, which he used to recite to his phallus-bearers.
64. When Ulpian had heard all this he said,—Tell me, my good Pontianus, says he, in what author does the word [Greek: paroinos] occur? And he replied—
You will undo me with your questions. . . .
(as the excellent Agatho says)—
. . . and your new fashion,
Always talking at an unseasonable time.
But since it is decided that we are to be responsible to you for every word, Antiphanes, in his Lydian, has said—
A Colchian man drunken and quarrelsome ([Greek: paroinos]).
But you are not yet satisfied about your [Greek: paroinoi], and drunkards; nor do you consider that Eumenes the king of Pergamus, the nephew of Philetærus, who had formerly been king of Pergamus, died of drunkenness, as Ctesicles relates, in the third book of his Times. But, however, Perseus, whose power was put down by the Romans, did not die in that way; for he did not imitate his father Philip in anything; for he was not eager about women, nor was he fond of wine; but when at a feast he was not only moderate himself, but all his friends who were with him were so too, as Polybius relates, in his twenty-sixth book. But you, O Ulpian, are a most immoderate drinker yourself ([Greek: arrhythmopotês]), as Timon the Phliasian calls it. For so he called those men who drink a great quantity of unmixed wine, in the second book of his Silli—
Or that great ox-goad, harder than Lycurgus's,
Who smote the [Greek: arrhythmopotai] of Bacchus,
And threw their cups and brimming ladles down.
For I do not call you simply [Greek: potikos], or fond of drinking; and this last is a word which Alcæus has used, in his Ganymede. And that a habit of getting drunk deceives our eyesight, Anacharsis has shown plainly enough, in what he says where he shows that mistaken opinions are taken up by drunken men.
