“How is it No wreathed garland decks the festive door, No savoury odour creeps into the nostrils Since ’tis a birth-feast? Custom, sooth, requires Slices of rich cheese from the Chersonese, Toasted and hissing; cabbage too in oil, Fried brown and crisp, with smothered breast of lamb. Chaffinches, turtle-doves, and good fat thrushes Should now be feathered; rows of merry guests Pick clean the bones of cuttle-fish together, Gnaw the delicious feet of polypi, And drink large draughts of scarcely mingled wine.[381]” Footnote 379: Hesych. ap. Meurs. Græc. Fer. p. 20. Footnote 380: Potter, ii. 322. Footnote 381: Athen. ix. 10. Cf. Ludovic. Nonn. De Pisc. Esu. c. 7. p. 28. A sacrifice[382] was likewise this day offered up for the life of the child, probably to the god Amphidromos, first mentioned, and therefore supposed to have been invented by Æschylus.[383] It has moreover been imagined that the name was now imposed, and gifts were presented by the friends and household slaves.[384] Footnote 382: Cf. Aristoph. Lys. 700. cum not. et schol.—Plaut. Truc. ii. 4. 69. Footnote 383: Semel. fr. 203. Well. Footnote 384: Meurs. Gr. Fer. p. 21. But it was on the seventh day that the child generally received its name,[385] amid the festivities of another banquet; though sometimes this was deferred till the tenth.[386] The reason is supplied by Aristotle.[387] They delayed the naming thus long, he says, because most children that perish in extreme infancy die before the seventh day, which being passed they considered their lives more secure. The eighth day was chosen by other persons for bestowing the name, and, this considered the natal day, was solemnized annually as the anniversary of its birth, on which occasion it was customary for the friends of the family to assemble together, and present gifts to the child, consisting sometimes of the polypi and cuttle-fish[388] to be eaten at the feast. However the tenth day[389] appears to have been very commonly observed. Thus Euripides:[390] “Say, who delighting in a mother’s claim Mid tenth-day feasts bestowed the ancestral name?” Footnote 385: Alex. ab Alex. 99. a. Footnote 386: Harpocrat. _v._ Ἑβδομ. p. 92. Cf. Lomeier, De Lustrat. Vet. Gentil. c. 27. p. 327. sqq. Footnote 387: Hist. Anim. vii. 12. Bekk. Footnote 388: Suid. v. Ἀμφιδ. t. i. p. 214. d. Footnote 389: Isæus, Pyrrh. Hæred. § 5. Dem. Adv. Bœot. §§ 6, 7. Lys. in Harpocrat. v. Ἀμφιδρομ. p. 19. Footnote 390: Ægei. Frag. i. Aristophanes, too, on the occasion of naming his Bird-city, which a hungry poet pretends to have long ago celebrated, introduces Peisthetæros saying, “What! have I not but now the sacrifice Of the tenth day completed and bestowed A name as on a child?”[391] Footnote 391: Aves, 922. seq.