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
And the author, whoever he was, of the play called The Beggars, which is
ascribed to Chionides, says that the Athenians, when they place a
banquet for Castor and Pollux in their Prytaneum, serve up on the tables
cheese and barley-cakes, and olives which have fallen, and leeks, for
the sake of reminding people of the ancient manner of living. And Solon
enjoins them to serve up barley-cakes to those who eat in the prytaneum:
and besides that, to place bread on the table at festivals, in imitation
of Homer; for he, too, when collecting the chiefs around Agamemnon,
says--
The cakes were baked.
And Chrysippus, in the fourth book of his treatise on Beauty and
Pleasure, says--"But at Athens they say that two festivals are
celebrated there (neither of them of great antiquity), one at the Lyceum
and one in the Academy, and when the confectioner had brought into the
Academy a dish for some other purpose, all those who were offering
sacrifice at once broke the dish, because something had been introduced
which did not belong to the city, and everything which came from afar
ought to have been kept away. And that the cook at the Lyceum having
prepared some salt-fish in order to serve up a dish of it, was scourged
as a man who used his invention in a very wicked manner." And Plato, in
the second book of his Republic, represents his new citizens as
feasting, and writes--"You make your men feast without any second
course, says he. You say the truth, I replied; I forgot that they will
have a second course--namely, salt, and olives, and cheese, and onions;
and besides, they will boil such vegetables as are found in the fields;
and moreover, we shall serve up some sweetmeats to them,--figs, and
beans, and vetches. They shall roast myrtle-berries too and
beech-acorns at the fire, drinking moderately all the time. And in this
manner they shall pass their lives in peace, growing old, as it is
probable they will, in the enjoyment of good health, and transmit a good
constitution to their posterity."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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