Chap. 28.] 
273 
selected by him to have the charge and custody"^^ of the City of 
Eome ; he having kept up a drinking-bout at the residence of 
Tiberius, just after he had become emperor, two days and tvro 
nights without intermission. In no point, too, was it gene- 
rally said that Drusus Csesar took after his father Tiberius 
more than this.*^^ 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 -^^ 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 olf a couple of congii at a single 
draught, and with having thrown a cup, when in a state of 
drunkenness, at M. Agrippa 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."^^ 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 Actium that he vomited forth 
''^ As Praefectus ITrbis. "^^ Love of drinking*. 
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 
cottahus. 
'^^ Dr. Middleton, in his Life of Cicero, in his unlimited partiality for the 
family, quotes this as an instance of courage and high spirit. 
"^^ According to Paterculus, he was fond of driving about in a chariot, 
crowned with ivy, a golden goblet in liis hand, and dressed like Bacchus, 
by which title he ordered himself to be addressed. 
VOL. III. T 
