Chap. 28.] DETJNKEXNESS. 2?3 



selected by him to have the charge and custody 71 of the City of 

 Home ; he having kept up a drinking-bout at the residence of 

 Tiberius, just after he had become emperor, two days and two 

 nights without intermission. In no point, too, was it gene- 

 rally said that Drusus Caesar took after his father Tiberius 

 more than this. 72 Torquatus had the rather uncommon glory — 

 for this science, too, is regulated by peculiar laws of its own — 

 of never being known to stammer in his speech, or to relieve 

 the stomach by vomiting or urine, while engaged in drinking. 

 He was always on duty at the morning guard, was able to 

 empty the largest vessel at a single draught, and yet to take 

 more ordinary cups in addition than any one else ; he was al- 

 ways to be implicitly depended upon, too, for being able to drink 

 without taking breath and without ever spitting, or so much 

 as leaving enough at the bottom of the cup to make a plash 

 upon the pavement ; 73 thus showing himself an exact observer 

 of the regulations which have been made to prevent all shirk- 

 ing on the part of drinkers. 



Tergilla reproaches Cicero, the son of Marcus Cicero, with 

 being in the habit of taking off a couple of congii at a single 

 draught, and with having thrown a cup, when in a state of 

 drunkenness, at M. Agrippa ; n such, in fact, being the ordinary 

 results of intoxication. But it is not to be wondered at that 

 Cicero was desirous in this respect to eclipse the fame of M. 

 Antonius, the murderer of his father ; a man who had, before 

 the time of the younger Cicero, shown himself so extremely 

 anxious to maintain the superiority in this kind of qualifica- 

 tion, that he had even gone so far as to publish a book upon 

 the subject of his own drunkenness. 75 Daring in this work to 

 speak in his own defence, he has proved very satisfactorily, to 

 my thinking, how many were the evils he had inflicted upon 

 the world through this same vice of drunkenness. It was but 

 a short time before the battle of Actiuni that he vomited forth 



71 As' Praefectus Urbis. 72 Love of drinking. 



73 The mode of testing whether any "heeltaps" were left or not. It 

 was this custom, probably, that gave rise to the favourite game of the 

 cottabus. 



74 Dr. Middleton, in his Life of Cicero, in his unlimited partiality for the 

 family, quotes this as an instance of courage and high spirit. 



75 According to Paterculus, he was fond of driving about in a chariot, 

 crowned with ivy, a golden goblet in his hand, and dressed like Bacchus, 

 by which title he ordered himself to be addressed. 



Vol. III. 1' 



