The wines whose historic names sparkle through the pages of Horace have become classical commonplaces in English literature. "Well, my young friend, we must for once prefer the Falernian to the vile Sabinum?" says Monkbarns to Lovel when the landlord of the Hawes Inn at Queensferry brings them claret instead of port. It may be well that we should know somewhat of them.

The choicest of the Italian wines was Caecuban, from the poplar-trained vines grown amongst the swamps of Amyclae in Campania. It was a heady, generous wine, and required long keeping; so we find Horace speaking of it as ranged in the farthest cellar end, or "stored still in our grandsire's binns"(III, xxviii, 2, 3; I, xxxvii, 6); it was reserved for great banquets, kept carefully under lock and key: "your heir shall drain the Caecuban you hoarded under a hundred padlocks" (II, xiv, 25). It was beyond Horace's means, and only rich men could afford to drink it; we hear of it at Maecenas' table and on board his galley (I, xx, 9); and it appeared at the costly banquet of Nasidienus (page 27). With the Caecuban he couples the Formian (I, xx, 11), and Falernian (I, xx, 10), grown on the southern slopes of the hills dividing Campania from Latium. "In grassy nook your spirit cheer with old Falernian vintage," he says to his friend Dellius (II, iii, 6). He calls it fierce, rough, fiery; recommends mixing it with Chian wine, or with wine from Surrentum (Sat. II, iv, 55), or sweetening and diluting it with honey from Mount Hymettus (Sat. II, ii, 15). From the same district came the Massic wine, also strong and fiery. "It breeds forgetfulness" (II, vii, 21), he says; advises that it should be softened by exposure to the open sky (Sat. II, iv, 51). He had a small supply of it, which he kept for a "happy day" (III, xxi, 6). The Calenian wine, from Cales near Falernum, was of similar character. He classes it with Caecuban as being too costly for a poor man's purse (I, xx, 10): writing late in life to a friend, promises to find him some, but says that his visitor must bring in exchange an alabaster box of precious spikenard (IV, xii, 17). Next after these Campanian vintages came the Alban. He tells Phyllis that he will broach for her a cask of it nine years old (IV, xi, 1). It was offered, too, at Nasidienus' dinner as an alternative to Caecuban; and Horace praises the raisins made from its berries (Sat. II, iv, 72). Of the Sabine, poorest of Italian wines, we have spoken (page 23).

The finest Greek wine was Chian, thick and luscious; he couples it in the Epode to Maecenas (IX, 34) with Lesbian which he elsewhere (I, xvii, 21) calls "innocent" or mild. Coan wine he mentions twice, commending its medicinal value (Sat. II, iv, 29; II, viii, 9).

In justice to Horace and his friends, it is right to observe that connoisseurship in wine must not be confounded with inebriety. They drank to exhilarate, not to stupefy themselves, to make them what Mr. Bradwardine called ebrioli not ebrii; and he repeatedly warns against excess. The vine was to him "a sacred tree," its god, Bacchus, a gentle, gracious deity (I, xviii, 1):

"To total abstainers," he says, "heaven makes all things hard" (I, xviii, 3); so let us drink, but drink with moderate wisdom, leave quarrelsomeness in our cups to barbarous Scythians, to brute Centaurs and Lapithae: let riot never profane our worship of the kindly god. We must again remember that they did not drink wine neat, as we do, but always mixed with water. Come, he says to his slave as they sit down, quench the fire of the wine from the spring which babbles by (II, xi, 19). The common mixture was two of water to one of wine; sometimes nine of water to three of wine, the Muses to the Graces; very rarely nine of wine to three of water.