The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 1 (of 3)Athenaeus, of Naucratis
General
The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Athenaeus, of Naucratis
Civilization, Greco-Roman; Dinners and dining -- Greece; Greece -- Social life and customs; Homosexuality -- Greece
73. While Ulpian went on jesting in this manner, Cynulcus cried out--I
want some bread; and when I say bread ἄrtos I do not mean Artus king
of the Messapians, the Messapians, I mean, in Iapygia, concerning whom
there is a treatise among Polemo's works. And Thucydides also mentions
him, in his seventh book, and Demetrius the comic writer speaks of him
in the drama entitled Sicily, using the following language--
From thence, borne on by the south wind, we came
Across the sea to the Italian shore,
Where the Messapians dwelt; and Artus there,
The monarch of the land, received us kindly,
A great and noble host for foreigners.
But this is not the time for speaking of that Artus, but of the other,
which was discovered by Ceres, surnamed Sito (food), and Simalis. For
those are the names under which the Goddess is worshipped by the
Syracusans, as Polemo himself reports in his book about Morychus. But in
the first book of his treatise addressed to Timæus, he says, that in
Scolus, a city of Bœotia, statues are erected to Megalartus (the God
or Goddess of great bread), and to Megalomazus (the God or Goddess of
abundant corn). So when the loaves were brought, and on them a great
quantity of all kinds of food, looking at them, he said--
What numerous nets and snares are set by men
To catch the helpless loaves;
as Alexis says in his play, The Girl sent to the Well. And so now let us
say something about bread.
74. But Pontianus anticipating him, said; Tryphon of Alexandria, in the
book entitled the Treatise on Plants, mentions several kinds of loaves;
if I can remember them accurately, the leavened loaf, the unleavened
loaf, the loaf made of the best wheaten flour, the loaf made of groats,
the loaf made of remnants (and this he says is more digestible than that
which is made only of the best flour), the loaf made of rye, the loaf
made of acorns, the loaf made of millet. The loaf made of groats, said
he, is made of oaten groats, for groats are not made of barley. And from
a peculiar way of baking or roasting it, there is a loaf called ipnites
(or the oven loaf) which Timocles mentions in his Sham Robbers, where he
says--
And seeing there a tray before me full
Of smoking oven-loaves, I took and ate them.
There is another kind called escharites (or the hearth-loaf), and this
is mentioned by Antidotus in the Protochorus--
I took the hot hearth-loaves, how could I help it?
And dipp'd them in sweet sauce, and then I ate them.
And Crobylus says, in his Strangled Man--
I took a platter of hot clean hearth-loaves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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