_A._ That is a good idea of yours, O Solon, And cleverly imagined, which you have Adopted in your city. _S._ What is that? _A._ You don't let men drink neat wine at their feasts. _S._ Why, if I did, 'twould not be very easy For men to get it, when the innkeepers Water it ere it comes out of the waggon. No doubt they do not do so to make money, But only out of prudent care for those Who buy the liquor; so that they may have Their heads from every pang of headache free. This now is, as you see, a Grecian drink; So that men, drinking cups of moderate strength, May chat and gossip cheerfully with each other: For too much water is more like a bath Than like a wine-cup; and the wine-cooler Mix'd with the cask, my friend, is death itself. 39. "But to drink to the degree of drunkenness," says Plato, in his sixth book of the Laws, is neither becoming anywhere—except perhaps in the days of festival of the god who gave men wine for their banquets,—nor is it wholesome: and, above all, a man ought to guard against such a thing who has any thoughts of marriage; for at such a time, above all other times, both bride and bridegroom ought to be in full possession of their faculties; when they are entering upon what is no small change in the circumstances of their life; and also they ought to be influenced by anxiety that their offspring shall be the offspring of parents in the fullest possible possession of all their faculties; for it is very uncertain what day or what night will be the originating cause of it." And in the first book of his Laws he says—"But respecting drunkenness it may be a question, whether we ought to give way to it as the Lydians do, and the Persians, and the Carthaginians, and the Celtæ, and the Spaniards, and the Thracians, and other nations like them; or whether like you, O Lacedæmonians, one ought wholly to abstain from it. But the Scythians and the Thracians, who indulge altogether in drinking unmixed wine, both the women and all the men, and who spill it all over their clothes, think that they are maintaining a very honourable practice, and one that tends to their happiness. And the Persians indulge to a great extent in other modes of luxury which you reject; but still they practise them with more moderation than the Scythians and Thracians. 40. And a great many of the guests were drinking, and putting lumps of meal into their wine, a custom which Hegesander of Delphi mentions. Accordingly Epinicus, when Mnesiptolemus had given a recitation of his history, in which it was written how Seleucus had used meal in his wine, having written a drama entitled Mnesiptolemus, and having turned him into ridicule, as the comic poets do, and using his own words about that sort of drink, represents him as saying:— [Sidenote: LACEDÆMONIAN FASHIONS.]