When written history begins, all civilized and semi-civilized people, and many savages besides, are found drinking some sort of fermented liquor, wine, cider, or one of the many kinds of beer. Back of written history, tradition has it that the practice was from immemorial time. No people had handed down a story of an early past when such liquor was not an integral and familiar part of each day’s diet, usually with meals. It is true that the Greeks said that Bacchus-Dionysus came from Asia, bringing the Vine, the youngest of the Gods, and that some scholars have held that this indicated the memory of a time when the primitive Greeks were wineless wretches. The argument, however, will not hold water. For, in the first place, even if we imagine an early time before the Greeks drank wine, there is nothing to prove that they did not know some other sort of fermented stuff, as the Gauls did before Rome conquered them. And, furthermore, people in the Iliad and Odyssey drink wine but seem to know nothing of its God; it was familiar but it was not yet holy. Besides being everywhere, fermented liquor was everywhere used in much the same way. It was an article of daily diet, so much so that no meal was complete without it. At feasts and festivals it was drunk more freely. Drunkenness was extremely rare. The Old Testament assumes that people had to “rise up early in the morning” and “continue until night” before wine would “inflame them,”[37] and denounces those persistent enough to do so. It was the Greek custom to mix their wine with water, several parts of water to one of wine. Schliemann speaks of an inscription recording a law of one of the Ionian cities which prescribes penalties for drinking neat wine. One of the early Babylonian codes of law prescribes severe penalties against the keeper of any wine shop (an Englishman would call him a “publican,” an American a “saloon keeper”) in which a disturbance occurs. The reader should be warned, however, that the danger of disturbance was no doubt quite as much due at that early time to the presence of numbers of men not known to one another, as it was to the drinking that went on there. At all events, the Hebrew and the Greek examples are enough to prove the attitude of the earliest historical time toward the instances of drunkenness (apparently rare) which they saw. No sooner had the keen Greek mind developed itself and begun to analyse than it laid down the general principle of temperance as one of the chief virtues. In the particular case of fermented drinks which we are now considering, Belloc has neatly remarked that “It has been noticed (also from immemorial time) that if a man drank too much of any of these things he got drunk, and that if he got drunk often his health and capacity declined.”[38] So much for the historical background.