What the laws betray. – It is a grave error to study a people’s penal code as if it were an expression of its character; the laws do not betray what a people is but rather what appears to it as foreign, strange, uncanny, outlandish. The laws concern the exceptions to the morality of custom (Sittlichkeit der Sitte)31, and the severest punishments are for things that accord with the customs of the neighbouring people. Thus the Wahanabis32 have only two mortal sins: having a god other than the Wahanabi god and – smoking (which they call ‘the disgraceful way of drinking’). ‘And what about murder and adultery?’ asked the Englishman, amazed, who found this out. ‘God is gracious and merciful’, the old chief replied. Thus the old Romans had the notion that a woman could commit only two mortal sins: adultery and – drinking wine. Old Cato thought that kissing among relatives had been made into a custom only in order to keep the women under control in this regard; a kiss meant, ‘Does she smell of wine?’33 Women caught with wine were actually put to death; and certainly not just because sometimes women under the influence of wine completely forgot how to say no; above all, the Romans feared the orgiastic and Dionysian cult which afflicted the women of southern Europe from time to time when wine was still new in Europe – feared it as a foreign monster that overthrew the basis of Roman sensibility; to them it seemed like a betrayal of Rome, like the embodiment of the foreign.