2. Don’t Get Wasted With the In-Laws
While not getting blitzed in front of your in-laws should be obvious, it very much was not to the ancient Greek Hippocleides. He answered a call for eligible bachelors put out by Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon for his young unmarried daughter, Agariste. In an extremely The Bachelorette-like result, twelve of Greece’s most eligible bachelors arrived in Sicyon to compete for Agariste’s hand in marriage.
Later chronicles claim the suitors went through a series of competitions including chariot racing and physical combat (which would really spice up The Bachelorette today.) At the end of the games, Hippocleides was Cleisthenes’ favored to win the hand of his daughter. A banquet was thrown in his honor, at which Hippocleides became incredibly drunk. He was reported to have done a drunken handstand, kicking his legs in time to the music.
The enraged tyrant was reported to have said “you just danced away your wife” to which Hippocleides famously retorted “Hippocleides doesn’t care.” While this may sound like a line from George Costanza and not an ancient Greek, the line became famous among the Greeks and was paraphrased in later writings by Aristophanes and Plutarch. It would appear that Hippocleides didn’t care. Agariste ended up marrying a man named Megacles.