Lucian, in his witty Dialogue,[493] makes Hermes act as auctioneer at the sale of the different creeds as personified by their founders or by philosophers, and dilate on the exceptional merits of the lot then under the hammer, “because he will teach you how long a gnat will live, and what sort of soul an oyster possesses.” Mr. Lambert states that Ausonius wrote a poem on the oyster! To be more accurate, he wrote two,[494] and lengthy ones to boot! The Emperor Domitian (Juvenal, IV.) ordered a special sitting of the Senate to deliberate and advise on a matter of such grave State importance as the best method of cooking a turbot. Greek and Roman writers frequently poke fun at the _gourmets_ who asserted that they could instantly tell from the flavour whence the fish came: from what sea, and what part of that sea, from what river, and even from which side of that river.[495] Either these ancient connoisseurs were blessed with a more exquisite and developed sense of taste than we moderns, or the whole pose was an intolerable affectation, for “they drenched their subtly-conceived dishes with garum, alec, and other sauces, which were so strong and composite that it would have been hardly possible to distinguish a fresh fish from a putrid cat—except by the bones!”[496] This assertion is none too strong, if the receipts for these sauces be duly pondered. Mention of _garum_, which gets its name from being made originally from the salted blood and entrails of a fish called _garon_ or _garos_ by the Greeks, is in classical writers very general: we find it even in Æschylus and Sophocles.[497] The various sauces known in Latin are too numerous to recite.[498] The two best, although the authorities are far from unanimous, seem to have been made out of the gills and entrails of the Mackerel and Tunny. The components of one recipe justify Robinson. In addition to other odds and ends, its outstanding feature was the gore and entrails of the Tunny, crammed in a vessel hermetically closed, and only drawn off when decomposition was complete! No wonder Plato the Comedian complains ... “drenching them in putrid _garum_ they will suffocate me.” _Alec_, like _garum_, once the name of a fish (possibly the anchovy), came to signify only the sauce made from it, and subsequently from other cheap fish. It differed from _garum_ chiefly from being thicker, and judging from the recipes probably nastier. You took first the dregs and fæculence remaining after the _garum_ liquor had been decanted: to them, add turbid brine, sodden bodies of the fish, etc., and then you have the semi-solid compound, from which _alec_ was derived, not inaptly yclept “Putrilago.”[499] If, as Badham (p. 69) asserts but not convincingly, _garum_ a double duty served, as a sauce and as a liqueur, the price of the latter was exorbitant, over £3 a gallon.[500] Martial (_Ep._, XIII. 102) in “Expirantis adhuc scombri de sanguine primo Accipe fastosum, munera _cara_, garum,”