“Then it is,” says Pliny, “that the secrets of the mind are revealed: one man is heard to disclose the provisions of his will; another lets fall some expression of fatal import, and so fails to keep to himself words which will be sure to come home to him with a cut throat: and how many a man has met his death in this fashion! Indeed, it has become a common proverb that ‘in wine there is truth.’” He goes on to describe the appearance of the drunkard, which agrees with the picture of him that was drawn by the satirists, and which may be viewed at the present day: the blotched and purple skin, the crimson nose, the bleared and watery eyes! _Delirium tremens_, or, as the historian calls it, “sleep agitated by furies,” was also common, and was accompanied by loss of memory; “and this,” he adds, “this is what they call seizing the moments of life! Whereas, in reality, whilst other men lose the day that has gone before, the drinker has already lost the day that is to come!” He censures the fashionable physicians of his day who prescribed alcoholic drinks to their patients for the purpose of pleasing them, and so securing their custom; and he does not hesitate to expose the habits of those who were great topers as well as eminent citizens. Alcibiades comes in for severe reproof; so, too, an eminent Roman, Novellius Torquatus, of Mediolanum, a man who held all the honours of the state from the prefecture to the proconsulate, of whom he says that he could drink off three congii at a single draught,[176] from which he obtained the name of Tricongius. This he is said to have done before the eyes of Tiberius, and to the extreme surprise of the Emperor, who was himself a renowned toper. Another hero, we are told, kept up a drinking bout at the residence of the same Emperor for two days and two nights; and these little dissipations do not seem to have interfered in the least with the exercise of the civil or military duties of those who indulged in them. But drunkenness and debauchery were not confined to the higher classes in the days of Roman decadence. In describing the baths of Caracalla, Gibbon says, on good authority, that there issued from those stately palaces crowds of dirty and ragged plebeians, without shoes and without a mantle, who loitered away whole days in the street or Forum to hear news and to hold disputes; who dissipated in extravagant gaming the miserable pittance of their wives and children, and spent the hours of the night in obscene taverns and brothels in the indulgence of gross and vulgar sensuality.[177]