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 not drink up the goblet in which he had been pledged, and Lacydes seeing him departing, said—

Wretched are they who dare encounter me.

51. And Herodotus, in his second book, relates that Mycerinus the Egyptian, having been told by the soothsayers that he was fated to live but a short time, used to light a great number of lamps when night arrived, and spend all his time in drinking and luxury, relaxing neither by day nor by night; and when he withdrew into the marshes and into the groves, or wherever he heard that there were meetings of young people to amuse themselves, he always got drunk. And Herodotus tells us that Amasis also, who was another of the Egyptian kings, was a very hard drinker indeed. And Hermeas the Methymnæan, in the third book of his History of Sicily, says that Nicoteles the Corinthian was a man greatly addicted to drinking. And Phænias the Eresian, in the book entitled, The Slaying of Tyrants out of Revenge, says that Scopas the son of Creon, and the grandson of the former Scopas, was throughout his whole life very fond of drinking; and that he used to return from banquets at which he had been present, sitting on a throne, and carried by four palanquin-bearers, and in that way he used to enter his house. And Phylarchus, in the sixth book of his Histories, says that Antiochus the king was a man very fond of wine; and that he used to get drunk, and then go to sleep for a long time, and then, as evening came on, he would wake up, and drink again. And it was very seldom, says he, that he transacted the affairs of his kingdom when he was sober, but much more frequently when he was drunk; on which account there were two men about him who managed all the real business of the state as they pleased, namely Aristos and Themiso, Cyprians by birth, and brothers; and they were both on terms of the greatest intimacy with Antiochus.

52. And Antiochus the king, who was surnamed Epiphanes, was also a great drinker,—the one, I mean, who had been a hostage among the Romans, whom Ptolemy Euergetes mentions in the third book of his Commentaries, and also in the fifth; saying that he turned to Indian revellings and drunkenness, and spent a vast quantity of money in those practices; and for the rest of the money which he had at hand, he spent