The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 2 (of 3)Athenaeus, of Naucratis
Philosophy
The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 2 (of 3)
Athenaeus, of Naucratis
Civilization, Greco-Roman; Dinners and dining -- Greece; Greece -- Social life and customs; Homosexuality -- Greece
44. And when he saw the shrine of some hero splendidly adorned, close
to a cold and worthless bathing-house, when he came out, having had
a very bad bath, "I do not wonder," said he, "that many tablets are
dedicated here; for every one of the bathers naturally offers one, as
having been saved from drowning." And at another time he said—"In Ænus
there are eight months of cold and four of winter." At another time
he said, "that the people of Pontus had come out of a great sea"—as
though he had said (great) trouble. And he called the Rhodians White
Cyrenæans, and the city he called the City of Suitors; and Heraclea he
called the Man-Corinth; and Byzantium he called the Arm-pit of Greece;
and the Leucadians were Stale Corinthians; and the Ambraciotes he
called Membraciotes. And when he had gone out of the gates of Heraclea,
and was looking round him, when some one asked him what he was looking
at, he said that "he was ashamed of being seen, as if he were coming
out of a brothel." And once, seeing two men bound in the stocks, he
said—"This is suited to the disposition of a very insignificant city,
not to be able to fill such a place as this." And once he said to a man
who professed to be a musician, but who had been a gardener before, and
who was disputing with him about harmony,—
Let each man sing the art in which he's skill'd.
And once at Maronea, when he was drinking with some people, he
said,—"That he could tell in what part of the city he was, if men led
him through it blindfold;" and then when they did so lead him, and
asked him where he was, "Near the eating-house," said he, because all
Maronea seemed a mere eating-house. And once, when he was sitting
next to Telephanes, and he was beginning to blow the flute, he said,
"Higher, like men who belch." And when the bathing-man in Cardia
brought him some bad earth and salt water to cleanse himself with, he
said that he was being besieged both by land and sea.
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