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, a bit frivolous, but graphic—­of noisy reclame, advertisement for a people; because, although a more civilised people may be conquered by one more barbarous, less cultured, less moral; although, also, the superiority in war may be relative, and men are not on the earth merely to give each other blows, but to work, to study, to know, to enjoy; yet the majority of men are easily convinced that he who has won in a war is in everything, or at least in many things, superior to him who has lost.  So it happened, for example, after the late Franco-Prussian War, that not only the armies organised or reorganised after 1870 imitated even the German uniform, as they had earlier copied the French, but in politics, science, industry, even in art, everything German was more generously admired.  Even the consumption of beer heavily increased in the wine countries, and under the protection of the Treaty of Frankfurt, the god Gambrinus has made some audacious sallies into the territories sacred to Dionysos.

The same thing occurred in regard to wine in the ancient world.  Athens and Alexander the Great had given to Greek wine the widest reputation, all the peoples of the Mediterranean world being persuaded that that was the best of all.  Then the centre of power shifted to the west, toward the city built on the banks of the Tiber, and little by little as the power of Rome grew, the reputation of its wine increased, while that of Greece declined; until, finally, with world empire, Italy conquered pre-eminence in the wine market, and held it with the Empire; for while Italy was lord, Italian wine seemed most excellent and was paid for accordingly.