, unbalanced, and still crude, notwithstanding the luxuries
and refinements superficially imitated from the Orient; a society
eager to enjoy, yet still ill educated to exercise upon itself that
discipline of good taste, without which civilisation and its pleasures
aggravate more than restrain the innate brutality of men. During the
first period of peace, arrived after so great disturbance, that
poetry so perfect in form, which analysed and described all the
most exquisite delights of sense and soul, infused a new spirit of
refinement into habits, and co-operated with laborious education
in teaching even the stern conquerors of the world to enjoy all the
pleasures of civilisation, alike literature and love, the luxury of
the city and the restfulness of the villa, fraternal friendship and
good cookery. It taught, too--this master poetry of the senses--to
enjoy wine, to use the drink of Dionysos not to slake the thirst, but
to colour, with an intoxication now soft, now strong, the most diverse
emotions: the sadness of memories, the tendernesses of friendship, the
transports of love, the warmth of the quiet house, when without the
furious storm and the bitter cold stiffen the universe of nature.

In the poetry of Horace, therefore, wine appears as a proteiform god,
which penetrates not only the tissues of the body but also the inmost
recesses of the mind and aids it in its every contingency, sad or
gay. Wine consoles in ill fortune (i., 7), suffuses the senses with
universal oblivion, frees from anxiety and the weariness of care,
fills the empty hours, and warms away the chill of winter (i., 9). But
the wine that has the power to infuse gentle forgetfulness into the
veins, has also the contrasting power of rousing lyric fervour in the
spirit, the fervour heroic, divining, mystic (iii., 2). Finally, wine
is also a source of power and heroism, as well as of joy and sensuous
delight; a principle of civilisation and of progress (ii., 14).

I wish I could repeat to you all the Dionysic verse of this old poet
from Venosa, whose subjects and motives, even though expressed in the
choicest forms, may seem common and conventional in our time and to
us, among whom for centuries the custom of drinking wine daily with
meals has been a general habit. But these poems had a very different
significance when they were written, in that society in which many did
not dare drink wine commonly, considering it as a medicine, or as a
beverage inju