2 4 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Turning from Greece to Rome, we find the same general 

 course of events. At first the Romans were a band of fierce 

 banditti, fighting first for life, then for conquest, against the 

 surrounding tribes. During the few hundred years that this 

 struggle continued the Romans were a temperate, a painfully 

 temperate race. We read that wine was scarce and poor, and, 

 such as it was, reserved exclusively for the men, and for men over 

 thirty. Women were forbidden to use it under pain of death, 

 for the alleged reason that it was an incentive to licentiousness. 

 According to Pliny, this last law was by no means a dead letter. 

 Women were obliged to greet all their male relatives with a kiss 

 on the mouth, so that it could be told if they had been at the wine 

 cellar. He quotes the case of one Ignatius Mecenius, who cud- 

 geled his wife to death for this offense, about B. c. 700, and was 



DELIVEKING WINK. (From a wall painting at Pompeii.) 



pardoned by Romulus for the deed ; and he tells of another case, 

 four hundred years later, where a Roman dame was starved to 

 death by her relatives for similar reasons. 



Later on, when they had conquered most of Italy, wine be- 

 came more common, and when the Roman arms reached Greece 

 and Asia Minor the country was flooded with it. We learn from 

 contemporary writers that manners and customs changed within 

 one generation. Old Cato used to tell how, at his father's table, 

 only common Italian wine was served, and that sparingly, while 

 the Greek wine was handed round as a great luxury in small 

 glasses at dessert. And before his death one general, Lucullus, 

 returning from the East, distributed one hundred thousand gal- 

 lons of fine Chian wine to the populace. 



The later Romans cared more for their wine than for any 

 other natural or artificial product of land or sea. Pliny mentions 

 that there were one hundred and ninety-five varieties in general 

 use, of which about eighty were of fine quality. Common wine 

 was extraordinarily cheap and abundant, so much so that it was 

 a jest of the poets that it was less expensive than water. Fine 

 sweet dessert wines were imported in large quantities from the 

 Grecian isles, Chios, Samos, Lesbos, Mitylene, and the rest. And 



