Tiberius (42 BC – 37 AD)
While in the Greek world, certain drinking practices—binging heavily on an empty stomach, for example—can be traced as far back as Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey”, in the Roman world excessive practices of this kind only seem to have come during the reign of Emperor Tiberius. It’s fitting that they did so at this time though, especially given what the emperor’s biographer Suetonius refers to as Tiberius’s lifelong “excessive love of wine”.
When he was a young recruit in the army he was given the nickname Biberius Caldius Mero—in Latin this translates roughly as “drinker of hot unmixed wine”—in place of his real name, Tiberius Claudius Nero. Nor did becoming emperor do anything to lessen his susceptibility to the sauce; and while consumption in the capita was bad enough, when he took up residence on the island of Capri it spiraled out of control. On Capri, he established a horrendously heavy drinking culture; one that was a marathon for those who could handle their drink, an ordeal for those who could not.
He kept company with others who drank to excess, and even dished out political promotions to those who proved themselves able to keep up. We’re told that soon after his accession, and during a time in which he should have been setting the standard for public morals, he spent an entire 36-hour period getting wrecked with two close friends, Pomponius Flaccus and Lucius Piso. After getting some rest, the two men woke up (presumably with splitting hangovers) to find they had been appointed governor of Syria and urban prefect respectively. On another occasion, an obscure political candidate beat a nobleman in securing political office because he had successfully seen out the emperor’s challenge of downing an entire amphora of wine in one go.
Being inebriated made Tiberius no less cruel; in fact, he managed to combine the two in coming up with a sadistic torture method. On Capri he would allegedly trick people into drinking litres of wine before having their genitals tightly bound with cords and wires; thus preventing them from being able to relieve themselves and leaving them in extreme agony. Even when Tiberius fell agonizingly ill in the final weeks of his reign, he went on banqueting and feasting; perhaps in an effort to conceal the extent of his illness and, by doing so, hasten his death at the hands of a successor.