Zumpt interprets ‘Græco more’ as ‘Mos propinandi,’ or the custom of addressing the person to whom you wish well, and offering him a glass to empty, after having first put it to your lips.--Cf. Martial, lib. i. Ep. 72, Horace iii. Ode 19. [9] The moral depravity and social degradation of the Roman world at this time is forcibly described by Salvian, the Bishop of Marseilles, in his _De Gubernatione Dei_. This treatise was translated into English, London, 1700. [10] It is recorded of the Emperor Bonosus that so notorious a drinker was he that when he committed suicide, A.D. 281, after his defeat in Banffshire, it was the common jest with the soldiers that there hung a tankard and not a man. CHAPTER II. SAXON PERIOD. It is to the heroic songs of the day that we must at this period mainly look for the history of manners and of convivial life. The chieftains assembled on the mead-bench, and were diverted by the literary genius of the ‘scóp’ or poet. Whether in the capacity of household retainer or wandering minstrel, he commanded protection, respect, and admiration. He was the popular exponent of the fashion of the time, and from his productions we can form a tolerable estimate of the prodigious part which drink played in the social life of the Anglo-Saxon. In this respect it is not too much to say that we inherit from the Saxons a perfect legacy of corruption; it is therefore with considerable qualification that we can accept the eulogies passed upon our forefathers by some historians, and notably by Sharon Turner, who represents our Saxon ancestors as bringing with them a superior domestic and moral character, as well as new political, juridical, and intellectual blessings. One record we have of the manners of the Saxons before they occupied Britain; from it we are able to gather what were their essentially individual usages, and thus are able to draw a definite line between their native customs and those derived after their settlement amongst us from the Romanised Britons.