Homer knew also the use and advantages of wine, when he said that if a man drank it in too large draughts it did harm. And he was acquainted, too, with many different ways of mixing it. For else Achilles would not have bade his attendants to mix it for him with more wine than usual, if there had not been some settled proportion in which it was usually mixed. But perhaps he was not aware that wine was very digestible without any admixture of solid food, which is a thing known to the physicians by their art; and, therefore, in the case of people with heartburn they mix something to eat with the wine, in order to retain its power. But Homer gives Machaon meal and cheese with his wine; and represents Ulysses as connecting the advantages to be derived from food and wine with one another when he says-- Strengthen'd with wine and meat, a man goes forth:[16:1] and to the reveller gives sweet drink, saying-- There, too, were casks of old and luscious wine.[16:2] 18. Homer, too, represents the virgins and women washing the strangers, knowing that men who have been brought up in right principles will not give way to undue warmth or violence; and accordingly the women are treated with proper respect. And this was a custom of the ancients; and so too the daughters of Cocalus wash Minos on his arrival in Sicily, as if it was a usual thing to do. On the other hand, the poet, wishing to disparage drunkenness, represents the Cyclops, great as he was, destroyed through inebriety by a man of small stature, and also Eurytian the Centaur. And he relates how the men at Circe's court were transformed into lions and wolves, from a too eager pursuit of pleasure. But Ulysses was saved from following the advice of Mercury, by means of which he comes off unhurt. But he makes Elpenor, a man given to drinking and luxury, fall down a precipice. And Antinous, though he says to Ulysses-- Luscious wine will be your bane,[16:3] could not himself abstain from drinking, owing to which he was wounded and slain while still having hold of the goblet. He represents the Greeks also as drinking hard when sailing away from Troy, and on that account quarrelling with one another, and in consequence perishing. And he relates that Æneas, the most eminent of the Trojans for wisdom, was led away by the manner in which he had talked, and bragged, and made promises to the Trojans, while engaged in drinking, so as to encounter the mighty Achilles, and was nearly killed. And Agamemnon says somewhere about drunkenness-- Disastrous folly led me thus astray, Or wine's excess, or madness sent from Jove: placing madness and drunkenness in the same boat. And Dioscorides, too, the pupil of Isocrates, quoted these verses with the same object, saying, "And Achilles, when reproaching Agamemnon, addresses him-- Tyrant, with sense and courage quell'd by wine."