In Greece the origin of wine and wine-bibbing belongs to the mythical age. The discovery of wine was attributed to Dionysus, better known to modern readers as Bacchus, the son of Jupiter and Semele, the daughter of Cadmus of Thebes.[144] He is said to have travelled in Egypt, Syria, and parts of Asia, and there to have introduced the manufacture of wine along with the other arts of civilisation, and on his return to Greece he was at length acknowledged as a deity through the miracles which he is said to have performed. After his death he was worshipped as the god of wine, and the festivals in his honour became more and more riotous and dissolute, both in Greece and Rome, until they degenerated into saturnalia of the most disgraceful character. In the latter city they were entirely suppressed by a consular edict B.C. 186 and a more innocent festival was substituted. This celebration known as the Liberalia was held annually on the 16th March, and was made the occasion of investing all the Roman youths who had attained their sixteenth year with the _toga virilis_ or vestment of manhood.[145] We shall have occasion hereafter to refer to the ancient god of wine, but for the present we must leave him for the purpose of considering another narrative of the heroic age. Homer, who is variously placed in the world’s history between 1184 and 684 B.C., also carries us back into the realm of fiction, and in his pages we find mention made on more than one occasion of wine and its injurious effects upon those who partook of it to excess. He tells us, for example, that when Ulysses and his companions came to the land of the fabled Cyclops, they found it rich in natural productions which required no human aid to cultivate them. “Trusting to the gods,” the natives neither plant a plant with their hands nor plough, but all things unsown, untilled, spring up, wheat, and barley, and vines, which bear wine from large clusters, and the shower from Jove nourishes them.[146] In this paradise Ulysses and his companions disembarked, and finding goats, they killed them and prepared a banquet. They are then described as feasting on flesh and sweet wine during the whole day until the setting sun, “for the ruby wine was not yet expended from the ships, but was in them,” says the chronicler, “for each of us had drawn much wine in kegs when we captured the sacred citadel of the Ciconians.” After thus indulging, Ulysses and his companions had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who confined them in a cave and devoured six of them. The monster was, however, unacquainted with the intoxicating effects of the juice of the grape, and Ulysses succeeded in making him drunk “with an ivy-wreathed cup of black wine,” and by that means he effected his escape with his remaining companions.