Does not Martial’s savage outburst on a glutton who had sold a slave for £10 to procure a dinner, which was not really a good one because nearly all the money was spent on a _mullet_— “Non est hic, improbe, non est Piscis: homo est; hominem, Calliodore, comes,” apply with greater force to “the men-eaters” who purchased mullets for £40 or £60 each?[470] Juvenal’s scathing invective on Crispinus—who had bought a mullet of 6 lbs. for £48—runs: “What! _you_, Crispinus, brought to Rome erewhile, Lapt in the rushes of your native Nile, Buy scales at such a price! You might, I guess, Have bought the fisherman himself for less; Bought, in some countries, manors at this rate, And, in Apulia, an immense estate.”[471] The folly of the Roman nobles and millionaires did not exhaust itself in buying fish at insane prices, or squandering their fortunes on _Vivaria_ and similar extravagances. They touched a yet lower depth of infamy by taking their _cognomen_ from fish. Thus Columella contrasts the custom of their ancestors of taking a _cognomen_ from some great victory, _e.g._ Numantinus or Isauricus, with that of their decadent successors such as Licinius _Muræna_ or Sergius _Orata_.[472] The Greek Comic Poets and Satirists castigate with bitter sarcasms and jeers the frenzied, almost cat-like devotion to fish. Even Diogenes the Cynic came to an untimely end by eating with eager haste a polypus _raw_.[473] Philoxenus the Poet, when warned by his doctor, after “he had bought a polypus two cubits long, dressed it, and ate it up himself all but the head,” that he had but six hours left to live and to arrange his affairs, bequeathed his poems and the prizes of his poems to the Nine Muses: “Such is my Will! But since old Charon’s voice Keeps crying out ‘Now cross’: and deadly Fate, Whom none can disobey, calls me away, That I may go below with all my goods, Bring me the fragments of that polypus.”[474] The moralists of the Empire bewail “the costly follies of the patricians.” Juvenal, Martial, and other Roman Satirists lampoon the gluttony and extravagance connected with opsophagy, or the eating of _fish_. This limitation of the word is explained by Plutarch (_Symp._, IV. 4), “fish alone above all the rest of the dainties is called ὄψον, because it is more excellent than all the rest,” and characteristically defended by Athen., VII. 4.[475] The banquets of the Greeks[476] seem to have outdone even those of Imperial Rome. Both must have weighed heavy, alike on table and on chest.