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
But Dorotheus of Ascalon, in the hundred and eighth book of his
Collection of Words, writes this name θέττα, either because he fell
in with a copy of the drama with an incorrect text, or because, as he
himself was unused to the word, he altered it so before he published
it. But the name thetta does absolutely never occur in any Attic writer
whatever. But that they were used to call a sea-fish by the name of
thratta, that Anaxandrides establishes, speaking in this manner in his
play called Lycurgus,—
And sporting with the little coracini,
With little perches, and the little thrattæ.
And Antiphanes says in his Etrurian—
_A._ He is of the Halæa borough. This is all
That now is left me, to be abused unjustly.
_B._ Why so?
_A._ He will (you'll see) bestow on me
Some thratta, or sea-sparrow, or some lamprey,
Or some enormous other marine evil.
139. We come now to the sea-sparrow. Diocles enumerates this fish among
the drier kinds. But Speusippus, in the second book of his Things
resembling one another, says that the sea-sparrow and the buglossus
and the tænia are very much alike. But Aristotle, in the fifth book
of his Parts of Animals, writes—"And in the same manner the greater
number of the small fish have young once a-year; such as those which
are called chyti, which are surrounded by a net, namely, the chromis,
the sea-sparrow, the tunny, the pelamys, the cestreus, the chalcis, and
others of the same sort." And in his treatise on Animals he says—"These
fish are cartilaginous, the sea-cow, the turtle, the torpedo, the ray,
the sea-frog, the buglossa, the sea-sparrow, the mussel." But Dorion,
in his book on Fishes, says—"But of flat fish there is the buglossus,
the sea-sparrow, the escharus, which they also call the coris." The
buglossi are mentioned also by Epicharmus in his Hebe's Wedding—
Hyænides, buglossi, and a citharus.
And Lynceus the Samian, in his Letters, says that the finest
sea-sparrows are procured near Eleusis, in Attica. And Archestratus
says—
[Sidenote: FISH.]
Remember then to get a fine sea-sparrow,
And a rough-skinn'd buglossus, near the port
Of sacred Chalcis
But the Romans call the sea-sparrow rhombus; which, however, is a Greek
name. And Nausicrates, in his Sea Captains, having first mentioned the
sea-grayling, proceeds in this manner—
_A._ Those yellow-fleshed fish, which the high wave
That beats Æxona brings towards the shore,
The best of fish; with which we venerate
The light-bestowing daughter of great Jove;
When sailors offer gifts of feasts to heaven.
_B._ You mean the mullet, with its milky colour,
Which the Sicilian multitude calls rhombus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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