THE ILLYRIANS. And the Argives too are ridiculed by the comic poets as addicted to drunkenness; and so are the Tirynthians by Ephippus, in his Busiris. And he introduces Hercules as saying—
A. For how in the name of all the gods at once,
Do you not know me, the Tirynthian Argive?
That race fights all its battles when 'tis drunk.
B. And that is why they always run away.
And Eubulus, in his Man Glued, says that the Milesians are very insolent when they are drunk. And Polemo, in his treatise on the Inscriptions to be found in Cities, speaking of the Eleans, produces this epigram:—
Elis is always drunk, and always lying:
As is each single house, so is the city.
60. And Theopompus, in his twenty-second book, speaking of the Chalcidians in Thrace, says: "For they disregarded all the most excellent habits, rushing readily with great eagerness to drinking and laziness, and every sort of intemperance. And all the Thracians are addicted to drinking; on which account Callimachus says—
For he could hardly bear the Thracian way
Of drinking monstrous goblets at one draught;
And always did prefer a smaller cup."
And, in his fiftieth book, Theopompus makes this statement about the Methymnæans: "And they live on the most sumptuous kind of food, lying down and drinking—and never doing anything at all worthy of the expense that they went to. So Cleomenes the tyrant stopped all this; he who also ordered the female pimps, who were accustomed to seduce free-born women, and also three or four of the most nobly born of those who had been induced to prostitute themselves, to be sewn in sacks and thrown into the sea." And Hermippus, in his account of the Seven Wise Men, says Periander did the same thing. But in the second book of his History of the Exploits of Philip he says, "The Illyrians both eat and drink in a sitting posture; and they take their wives to their entertainments; and it is reckoned a decorous custom for the women to pledge the guests who are present. And they lead home their husbands from their drinking parties; and they all live plainly, and when they drink, they girdle their stomach with broad girdles, and at first they do so moderately; but when they drink more vehemently, then they keep contracting
