James Houston Quotes

Speaking of wine, beer never caught on with the ancient Greeks and Romans the way it did in Mesopotamia and Western Europe - at least among the privileged classes, who showed a strong preference for fermented grape juice.[11] Beer was seen as a drink of peasants and savages, earning the contempt of public intellectuals like Pliny the Elder, who, in reference to the people of Spain and Gaul (now France) fumed that, "The perverted ingenuity of man has given even to water the power of intoxicating where wine is not procurable. Western nations intoxicate themselves by means of moistened grain."[12] One wonders what Pliny would say today if you were to hand him a glass of the famous beer that now bears his name - Pliny the Elder IPA, brewed by California's Russian River Brewing Co. and renowned as one of the world's finest beers.

It's hard now to imagine that kind of travel and the daily tasks they simply took for granted. If a wagon axle broke, you had to stop and carve a new one. To cross a river, you sometimes had to build a raft.