Youth has no need of the stimulus of wine, but age can only be made young again by its invigorating influence.

Total abstinence for the young, moderate and increasing potations for the old, is Plato's principle.

The fire, of which there is too much in the one, has to be brought to the other.

Drunkenness, like madness, had a sacredness and mystery to the Greek; if, on the one hand, as in the case of the Tarentines, it degraded a whole population, it was also a mode of worshipping the god Dionysus, which was to be practised on certain occasions.

Moreover, the intoxication produced by the fruit of the vine was very different from the grosser forms of drunkenness which prevail among some modern nations.
The physician in modern times would restrict the old man's use of wine within narrow limits.