This is by no means an exaggerated picture of the drunkenness and debauchery which prevailed in Rome under the Empire. Amusements, if the practice of the lowest vices can be so called, were introduced into the entertainments of the rich which are quite unfit to be mentioned, and a number of unnatural devices were resorted to for the purpose of enabling the guests to protract their debauches. Accounts of these are to be found not only in the pages of the satirists, but in the sober philosophical writings of Pliny and other historians. Pliny says,[175] that on no object was so much ingenuity expended as upon the manufacture of wine, and that so common was its use, it was given even to beasts of burden. He speaks of it as a liquid which deprives man of his reason and “drives him to frenzy and the commission of a thousand crimes.” One of his statements seems almost incredible, but it is made by other writers as well, and that is, that men actually drank hemlock (to which, as already stated, wine was considered an antidote), before commencing a carouse, “that they may have the fear of death before them, to make them take their wine.” “The more prudent,” he says, “have themselves parboiled in hot baths, from whence they are carried away half dead,” and emetics were commonly resorted to after a large quantity of wine had been swallowed, so that the drinking might be renewed. Premiums upon the exercise of the drinking capacity were offered to such as liked to make exhibitions of themselves at banquets, and the result of these and similar practices is said to have been the rupture of all ties of decency and modest bearing on the part of the guests of both sexes.