These, O Cynulcus, are the words of Lysias. But I, in the words of Aristarchus the tragic poet,
Saying no more, but this in self-defence,
will now cease my attack upon you and the rest of the Cynics.
BOOK XIV.
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 lose 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.[1]
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.
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 ([Greek: exoinos]), saying,—Where do you find that word [Greek: exoinos]? But he rejoined,—Why, in Alexis, who, in his play called the New Settler, says—
He did all this when drunk ([Greek: exoinos]).
- ↑ Odyss. xxi. 293.
