The Romans of the Decadence (detail), by Thomas Couture, 1847. Musée d’Orsay.
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Miscellany
In the United States around 1787—the year that Thomas Jefferson took a three-month sabbatical to tour the vineyards of France and Italy—the average drinking American consumed the equivalent of an estimated six gallons of pure alcohol per year. The figure today is 2.2.
An old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.
—Plato, c. 360 BC