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
But Alexis, in his Gynæcocracy, speaks of one man as ζωμοτάριχος, or fond
of sauce made from salt-fish, saying--
But the Cilician here, this Hippocles,
This epicure of salt-fish sauce, this actor.
But what you mean by "according to the practice of Simonides," I do not
know. No; for you do not care, said Myrtilus, to know anything about
history, you glutton; for you are a mere lickplatter; and as the Samian
poet Asius, that ancient bard, would call you, a flatterer of fat. But
Callistratus, in the seventh book of his Miscellanies, says that
Simonides the poet, when feasting with a party at a season of violently
hot weather, while the cup-bearers were pouring out for the rest of the
guests snow into their liquor, and did not do so for him, extemporised
this epigram:--
The cloak with which fierce Boreas clothed the brow
Of high Olympus, pierced ill-clothed man
While in its native Thrace; 'tis gentler now,
Caught by the breeze of the Pierian plain.
Let it be mine; for no one will commend
The man who gives hot water to a friend.
So when he had drunk, Ulpian asked him again where the word κνισολοῖχος
is used, and also, what are the lines of Asius in which he uses the word
κνισοκόλαξ? These, said Myrtilus, are the verses of Asius, to which I
alluded:--
Lame, branded, old, a vagrant beggar, next
Came the cnisocolax, when Meles held
His marriage feast, seeking for gifts of soup,
Not waiting for a friendly invitation;
There in the midst the hungry hero stood,
Shaking the mud from off his ragged cloak.
And the word κνισολοῖχος is used by Sophilus, in his Philarchus, in this
passage,--
You are a glutton and a fat-licker.
And in the play which is entitled, The Men running together, he has used
the word κνισολοιχία, in the following lines:--
That pandar, with his fat-licking propensities,
Has bid me get for him this black blood-pudding.
Antiphanes too uses the word κνισολοῖχος, in his Bombylium.
Now that men drank also sweet wine while eating is proved by what Alexis
says in his Dropidas--
The courtesan came in with sweet wine laden,
In a large silver cup, named petachnon,
Most beauteous to behold. Not a flat dish,
Nor long-neck'd bottle, but between the two.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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