Among drinking-songs of the best period in this literature may be reckoned two disputations between water and wine.  In the one, Thetis defends herself against Lyaeus, and the poet assists in vision at their contest.  The scene is appropriately laid in the third sphere, the pleasant heaven of Venus.  The other, which on the whole appears to me preferable, and which I have therefore chosen for translation, begins and ends with the sound axiom that water and wine ought never to be mixed.  It is manifest that the poet reserves the honour of the day for wine, though his arguments are fair to both sides.  The final point, which breaks the case of water down and determines her utter confusion, is curious, since it shows that people in the Middle Ages were fully alive to the perils of sewage-contaminated wells.

THE CONTEST OF WINE AND WATER.

No. 51.

    Laying truth bare, stripped of fable,
    Briefly as I may be able,
      With good reasons manifold,
    I will tell why man should never
    Copulate, but rather sever,
      Things that strife and hatred hold.

    When one cup in fell confusion
    Wine with water blends, the fusion,
      Call it by what name you will,
    Is no blessing, nor deserveth
    Any praise, but rather serveth
      For the emblem of all ill.

    Wine perceives the water present,
    And with pain exclaims, “What peasant
      Dared to mingle thee with me? 
    Rise, go forth, get out, and leave me! 
    In the same place, here to grieve me,
      Thou hast no just claim to be.

    “Vile and shameless in thy going,
    Into cracks thou still art flowing,
      That in foul holes thou mayst lie;
    O’er the earth thou ought’st to wander,
    On the earth thy liquor squander,
      And at length in anguish die.

    “How canst thou adorn a table? 
    No one sings or tells a fable
      In thy presence dull and drear;
    But the guest who erst was jolly,
    Laughing, joking, bent on folly,
      Silent sits when thou art near.

    “Should one drink of thee to fulness,
    Sound before, he takes an illness;
      All his bowels thou dost stir;
    Booms the belly, wind ariseth,
    Which, enclosed and pent, surpriseth
      With a thousand sighs the ear.

    “When the stomach’s so inflated,
    Blasts are then ejaculated
      From both draughts with divers sound;
    And that organ thus affected,
    All the air is soon infected
      By the poison breathed around.”

    Water thus wine’s home-thrust warded: 
    “All thy life is foul and sordid,
      Sunk in misery, steeped in vice;
    Those who drink thee lose their morals,
    Waste their time in sloth and quarrels,
      Rolling down sin’s precipice.