Avoid drinking parties

If possible avoid drinking-parties altogether. But if ever occasion arises when you must be present, rise and take your leave before you become intoxicated. For when the mind is impaired by wine it is like chariots which have lost their drivers. For just as these plunge along in wild disorder when they miss the hands which should guide them, so the soul stumbles again and again when the intellect is impaired. Isocrates. To Demonicus. Chapter 1. Section 32.

Roman dining couch and footstool with bone carvings and glass inlays 1st century CE possibly from
the villa of co-emperor Lucius Verus 161-169 CE. Photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.