conqueror of the Pontus, told how in his father’s house—­in the house, therefore, of a noble family—­Greek wine was never served more than once, even at the most elegant dinners.  Moreover, this must have been a common custom, because Pliny says, speaking of the beginning of the last century of the Republic, “Tanta vero vino graeco gratia erat ut singulae potiones in convitu darentur”; that is, translating literally, “Greek wine was so prized that only single potions of it were given at a meal.”  You understand at once the significance of this phrase; Greek wine was served as to-day—­at least on European tables—­Champagne is served; it was too expensive to give in quantity.

This condition of things began to change after Rome became a world power, went outside of Italy, interfered in the great affairs of the Mediterranean, and came into more immediate contact with Greece and the Orient.  By a strange law of correlation, as the Roman Empire spread about the Mediterranean, the vineyard spread in Italy; gradually, as the world politics of Rome triumphed in Asia and Africa, the grape harvest grew more abundant in Italy, the consumption of wine increased, the quality was refined.  The bond between the two phenomena—­the progress of conquest and the progress of vine-growing—­is not accidental, but organic, essential, intimate.  As, little by little, the policy of expansion grew, wealth and culture increased in Rome; the spirit of tradition and of simplicity weakened; luxury spread, and with it the appetite for sensations, including that of the taste for intoxicating beverages.

We have but to notice what happens about us in the modern world—­when industry gains and wealth increases and cities grow, men drink more eagerly and riotously inebriating beverages—­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.