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
And Pamphilus says that it is a kind of cup, and peculiar to Bacchus.
But Polemo, in his treatise on the Fleece of the Sheep sacrificed to
Jupiter, says—"And after this he celebrates a sacrifice, and takes the
sacred fleece out of its shrine, and distributes it among all those who
have borne the cernus in the procession: and this is a vessel made of
earthenware, having a number of little cups glued to it; and in these
little cups there is put sage, and white poppies, and ears of wheat,
and grains of barley, and peas, and pulse, and rye, and lentils, and
beans, and vetches, and bruised figs, and chaff, and oil, and honey,
and milk, and wine, and pieces of unwashed sheep's-wool. And he who
has carried this cernus eats of all these things, like the man who has
carried the mystic fan."
57. There is also the cotyle. Aristophanes, in his Cocalus, says—
And other women, more advanced in age,
Into their stomachs pour'd, without restraint,
From good-sized cotylæ, dark Thasian wine,
The whole contents of a large earthen jar,
Urged by their mighty love for the dark wine.
And Silenus, and Clitarchus, and also Zenodotus, say that it is a kind
of κύλιξ, and say—
And all around the corpse the black blood flow'd,
As if pour'd out from some full cotyle.
And again—
There is many a slip
'Twixt the cup (κοτύλης) and the lip.
And Simaristus says that it is a very small-sized cup which is called
by this name; and Diodorus says that the poet has here called the cup
by the name of cotyle, which is by others called cotylus, as where we
find—
πύρνον (bread) καὶ κοτύλην;
and that it is not of the class κύλιξ, for that it has no handles,
but that it is very like a deep luterium, and a kind of drinking cup
(ποτηρίου); and that it is the same as that which by the Ætolians, and
by some tribes of the Ionians, is called cotylus, which is like those
which have been already described, except that it has only one ear:
and Crates mentions it in his Sports, and Hermippus in his Gods. But
the Athenians give the name of κοτύλη to a certain measure. Thucydides
says—"They gave to each of them provisions for eight months, at the
rate of a cotyla of water and two cotylæ of corn a-day." Aristophanes,
in his Proagon, says—
And having bought three chœnixes of meal,
All but one cotyla, he accounts for twenty.
But Apollodorus says that it is a kind of cup, deep and hollow; and he
says—"The ancients used to call everything that was hollow κοτύλη,
as, for instance, the hollow of the hand; on which account we find the
expression κοτολήρυτον αἷμα meaning, blood in such quantities that it
could be taken up in the hand. And there was a game called ἐγκοτύλη,
in which those who are defeated make their hands hollow, and then take
hold of the knees of those who have won the game and carry them." And
Diodorus, in his Italian Dialects, and Heraclitus (as Pamphilus says),
relate that the cotyla is also called hemina, quoting the following
passage of Epicharmus:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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