-to understand
what happened in Italy and in Rome, as gradually wars, tribute,
blackmailing politics, pitiless usury, carried into the peninsula the
spoils of the Mediterranean world, riches of the most numerous and
varied forms. The old-time aversion to wine diminished; men and
women, city-dwellers and countrymen, learned to drink it. The cities,
particularly Rome, no longer confined themselves to slaking their
thirst at the fountains; as the demand and the price for wine
increased, the land-owners in Italy grew interested in offering the
cup of Bacchus, and as they had invested capital in vineyards,
they were drawn on by the same interest to excite ever the more the
eagerness for wine among the multitude, and to perfect grape-culture
and increase the crop, in imitation of the Greeks. The wars and
military expeditions to the Orient not only carried many Italians,
peasants and proprietors, into the midst of the most celebrated
vineyards of the world, but also transported into Italy slaves and
numerous Greek and Asiatic peasants who knew the best methods of
cultivating the vine, and of making wines like the Greek, just as the
peasants of Piedmont, of the _Veneto_, and of Sicily, have in the last
twenty years developed grape-culture in Tunis and California.

Pliny, who is so rich in valuable information on the agricultural and
social advances of Italy, tells us that it opened its hills and plains
to the triumphal entrance of Dionysus between 130 and 120 B.C., about
the time that Rome entered into possession of the kingdom of Pergamus,
the largest and richest part of Asia Minor, left to it by bequest
of Attalus. Thenceforward, for a century and a half, the progress of
grape-growing continued without interruption; every generation poured
forth new capital to enlarge the inheritance of vineyards already
grown and to plant new ones. As the crop increased, the effort was
redoubled to widen the sale, to entice a greater number of people to
drink, to put the Italian wines by the side of the Greek.

At the distance of centuries, these vine-growing interests do not
appear even in history; but they actually were a most important factor
in the Roman policy, a force that helps us explain several main
facts in the history of Rome. For example, vineyards were one of the
foundations of the imperial authority in Italy. That political form
which was called with Augustus the principality, and from which was
evolved the monarchy, would no