its fame spread!
There is no doubt that the wealth in the first and second century
A.D., which flowed for every section of Italy, came in part from the
nourishing vineyards planted upon its hills and plains; and that
the Italians, who had gone to the Orient for reasons political and
financial, had fallen upon yet greater fortune in contrabanding
Bacchus from the superb vineyards of the AEgean islands, and
transporting him to the hills of Italy; a new seat whereon the
capricious god of the vine rested for two centuries, until he took
again to wandering, and crossed the Alps.

We may at this juncture ask ourselves if this enologic pre-eminence of
Italy was the result only of a greater skill in cultivating the vine
and pressing the grapes. I think not. It does not seem that Italy
invented new methods of wine-making; it appears, instead, that it
restricted itself to imitating what the Greeks had originated. On the
other hand, it is certain, at least in northern and central Italy,
that, although the vine grows, it does so less spontaneously and
prosperously than in the AEgean islands, Greece, and Asia Minor,
because the former regions are relatively too cold.

The great fame of the Italian wines had another cause, a political:
the world power and prestige of Rome. This psychological phenomenon
is found in every age, among all peoples, and is one of the most
important and essential in all history. What is beautiful and what is
ugly? What is good and what is bad? What is true and what is false?
In every period men must so distinguish between things, must adopt
or repudiate certain ideas, practise or abandon certain habits, buy
certain objects and refuse others; but one should not believe that
all peoples make these discernments spontaneously, according to their
natural inclination. It always happens that some nations succeed, by
war, or money, or culture, in persuading the lesser peoples about them
that they are superior; and strong in this admiration, they impose
upon their susceptible neighbours, by a kind of continuous suggestion,
their own ideas as the truest, their own customs as the noblest, their
own arts as the most perfect.

For this reason chiefly, wars have often distant and complicated
repercussions on the habits, the ideas, the commerce of nations. War,
to which so many philosophers would attribute a divine spirit, so
many others a diabolic, appears to the historian as above all a
means--allow me the phrase,