the form of brigand
bands that destroyed vines and olives, the accumulated capital of
centuries. Whence, the emperor became gradually a tutelary deity of
the vine and the olive, the fortune of Italy. It was he who stopped
the barbarians still restless and turbulent on the frontiers of Italy,
hardly over the borders; it was he who kept peace within the country
between social orders and political parties; it was he who looked
after the maintenance and guarding of the great highways of the
peninsula, periodically clearing them of robbers and the evil-disposed
that infested them; and the land-owners, who held their vineyards
and olive groves more at heart than they did the great republican
traditions, placed the image of the Emperor among those of their
Lares, and venerated him as they had earlier revered the Senate.

Still more curious is the influence that this development of Italian
viticulture exercised on the political life of Rome; for example,
in the barbarous provinces of Europe, wine was an instrument
of Romanisation, the effectiveness of which has been too much
disregarded. In Gaul, in Spain, in Helvetia, in the Danube provinces,
Rome taught many things: law, war, construction of roads and cities,
the Latin language and literature, the literature and art of
Greece; more, it also taught to drink wine. Whoever has read the
_Commentaries_ of Caesar will recall that, on several occasions, he
describes certain more barbarous peoples of Gaul as prohibiting the
importation of wine because they feared they would unnerve and
corrupt themselves by habitual drunkenness. Strabo tells us of a great
Gaeto-Thracian empire that a Gaetic warrior, Borebiste by name, founded
in the time of Augustus beyond the Danube, opposite Roman possessions;
while this chieftain sought to take from Greek and Latin civilisation
many useful things, he severely prohibited the importation of wine.
This fact and others similar, which might be cited, show that these
primitive folk, exactly like the Romans of more ancient times, feared
the beverage which so easily intoxicates, exactly as in China all wise
people have always feared opium as a national scourge, and so many in
France would to-day prohibit the manufacture of absinthe.

This hesitation and fear disappeared among the Gauls, after their
country was annexed to the Empire; disappeared or was weakened among
all the other peoples of the Danube and Rhine regions, and even in
Germany, when they f