Produced by David Gil, Lisa Reigel, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This produced from images hosted by the University of Wisconsin's Digital Collections.) Transcriber's Notes: Words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. A row of asterisks represents either an ellipsis in a poetry quotation or a place where the original Greek text was too corrupt to be read by the translator. Other ellipses match the original. Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. There are numerous long quotations in the original, many missing the closing quotation mark. Since it is often difficult to determine where a quotation begins or ends, the transcriber has left quotation marks as they appear in the original. A few typographical errors have been corrected. A complete list follows the text. Other notes also follow the text. THE DEIPNOSOPHISTS OR BANQUET OF THE LEARNED OF ATHENÆUS. LITERALLY TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE, B.A. WITH AN APPENDIX OF POETICAL FRAGMENTS, RENDERED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY VARIOUS AUTHORS, AND A GENERAL INDEX. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: HENRY G. BOHN, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. MDCCCLIV. LONDON: R. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL. PREFACE. The author of the DEIPNOSOPHISTS was an Egyptian, born in Naucratis, a town on the left side of the Canopic Mouth of the Nile. The age in which he lived is somewhat uncertain, but his work, at least the latter portion of it, must have been written after the death of Ulpian the lawyer, which happened A.D. 228. Athenæus appears to have been imbued with a great love of learning, in the pursuit of which he indulged in the most extensive and multifarious reading; and the principal value of his work is, that by its copious quotations it preserves to us large fragments from the ancient poets, which would otherwise have perished. There are also one or two curious and interesting extracts in prose; such, for instance, as the account of the gigantic ship built by Ptolemæus Philopator, extracted from a lost work of Callixenus of Rhodes. The work commences, in imitation of Plato's Phædo, with a dialogue, in which Athenæus and Timocrates supply the place of Phædo and Echecrates. The former relates to his friend the conversation which passed at a banquet given at the house of Laurentius, a noble Roman, between some of the guests, the best known of whom are Galen and Ulpian.