But to return to Rome. Drinks more or less intoxicating were made from honey (_hydromeli_), and from a great variety of fruits, shrubs, and herbs; but our space will not allow us even to enumerate them. The views which were entertained at that time concerning the use and abuse of wine seem to be somewhat similar to those which are held in the present day. Pliny, for example, describes its effects as follows:—“It causes a feeling of warmth in the interior of the viscera, and when poured upon the body is cool and refreshing;” and he adds, that there is nothing more useful than wine for strengthening the body, while at the same time there is nothing more pernicious as a luxury if we are not on our guard against excess.[164] Some wines, we are told, had the virtue of prolonging life; thus Livia Augusta, who lived to her eighty-second year, attributed her longevity to the wine of Pucinum, as she never drank any other. The fact is hardly conclusive, for we do not know how long she would have lived if she had drunk no wine at all. The author knows an old gentleman who has attained nearly the same age, and he never drinks anything but brown brandy, yet he has never heard him attribute his longevity to that cause. Wine was believed to possess distinctly medicinal properties. Pliny says, “It acts as an antidote to cantharides and stings inflicted by serpents,” and that “it is good for the kidneys, liver, and inner coat of the bladder, and is an antidote for various poisons, especially hemlock;”[165] whilst Mnesitheus, an Athenian physician, although he admitted that people who drink a great quantity of unmixed wine at banquets often receive great injury from so doing, recommended “occasional hard drinking,” which appeared to him to produce “a certain purging of the body and a certain relaxation of the mind.”[166] We have heard opinions expressed almost as irrational as the last named, even in our time.