Alcoholism : a chapter in social pathology / by W.C. Sullivan.

  • Sullivan, W. C. (William Charles)
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Alcoholism : a chapter in social pathology / by W.C. Sullivan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/232 (page 4)
    south in the terramares of the plain of the Po, going back to the first bronze age, we ascertain the exist- ence of the true wine of the grape” (G. de Mortillet). Whether the vine and the art of wine-making came from East to West, or, as more recent research seems rather to indicate, travelled from West to Kast, they are found at a very early period in the civilisations of antiquity, associated with legends suggestive of remote and Divine origin, as in the Hellenic myth which represents the vine as a gift of Zeus to Dionysus. In antiquity the use of wine, or of the artificial wines that replaced it where the culture of the grape was impracticable, seems to have been mainly con- vivial. In civilisations low in the scale of civilisa- tion there was then, as now, a strong tendency to excess, while in societies which had reached a higher level of refinement the virtue of moderation was at all events esteemed, if it was not always practised. Drunkenness, no doubt, appears to have been neither very rare nor very strongly reprobated even in the best times of Greek civilisation ; but its grosser forms were at least discouraged by tradition ; the drinking of undiluted wine was accounted a barbarism, and though intoxication was often a result of the sym- posium, it was not its aim. And to some extent, at all events, the Romans before the decadence followed the same traditions. The decline of the empire, however, and the dominance of the barbarians of the North brought coarser habits into vogue, and drunkenness of a bestial sort became the ideal of pleasure in wine.