pillow, letting the cup fall from his hands; and after this he fell sick and died, Bacchus, as it is said, being angry with him because he had besieged his native city of Thebes. And Alexander drank a great deal too, so that he once, after a drunken bout, slept without interruption two days and two nights. And this is shown in his Journals, which were compiled by Eumenes the Cardian, and Diodotus the Erythræan. But Menander, in his Flatterer, says—
A. My good friend, Struthias, I thrice have drunk
A golden cup in Cappadocia,
Containing ten full cotylæ of wine.
St. Why, then you drank more than king Alexander.
A. At all events not less, I swear by Pallas.
St. A wondrous feat.
But Nicobule, or whoever it was who wrote the books attributed to her, says that "Alexander, once supping with Medeus the Thessalian, when there were twenty people present at the party, pledged every one of the guests, receiving a similar pledge from all of them, and then, rising up from the party, he presently went off to sleep." And Callisthenes the Sophist, as Lynceus the Samian says in his Commentaries, and Aristobulus and Chares in their Histories, when in a banquet given by Alexander, a cup of unmixed wine came to him, rejected it; and when some one said to him, Why do you not drink? I do not wish, said he, after having drunk the cup of Alexander, to stand in need of the cup of Æsculapius."
45. But Darius, who destroyed the Magi, had an inscription written on his tomb,—"I was able to drink a great deal of wine, and to bear it well." And Ctesias says, that among the Indians it is not lawful for the king to get drunk; but among the Persians it is permitted to the king to get drunk one day in the year,—the day, namely, on which they sacrifice to Mithras. And Duris writes thus, with respect to this circumstance, in the seventh book of his Histories:—"The king gets drunk and dances the Persian dance on that festival only which is celebrated by the Persians in honour of Mithras; but no one else does so in all Asia; but all abstain during this day from dancing at all. For the Persians learn to dance as they learn to ride; and they think that the motion originated by this sort of exercise contains in it a good kind of practice tending to the strength of the body.
