Alexis, in one of his comedies, introduces the Symposiarch of an Eranos (president of a picnic) accounting with one of the subscribers who comes to demand back his ring, and in the course of the dialogue, where something like Falstaff’s tavern-bill is discussed, we find the prices of several kinds of salt-fish. An omotarichos (shoulder piece of thunny) is charged at five chalci; a dish of sea-mussels, seven chalci, of sea-urchins, an obol, a slice of kybion, three obols, a conger eel, ten, and another plate of broiled fish, a drachma. This comic writer[599] rates the fish of the Nile very low, and he is quite right, for they are generally muddy and ill-tasted, though the Copts, who have considerable experience during Lent, contrive, by the application of much Archestratic skill, to render some kinds of them palatable. Sophocles, in a fragment of his lost drama of Phineus, speaks of salt-fish embalmed like an Egyptian mummy.[600] Stock-fish, as I know to my cost, is still a fashionable dish in the Mediterranean, especially on board ship, and from a proverb preserved by Athenæus we find it was likewise in use among the Athenians.[601] ----- Footnote 599: Ap. Athen. iii. 86. Cf. Herod. ii. 77. Footnote 600: Athen. iii. 86. Footnote 601: Deipnosoph. iii. 89. ----- The passion of this refined people for salt-fish furnished them with an occasion of showing their gratitude publicly. They bestowed the rights of citizenship on the sons of Chæriphilos, a metoikos who first introduced among them a knowledge of this sort of food.[602] A similar feeling prompted the Dutch to erect a statue to G. Bukel, the man who taught them to salt herrings.[603] ----- Footnote 602: Athen. iii. 90. Footnote 603: Goguet, Origine des Loix, i. 254. ----- Without enumerating a tenth part of the other species eaten among the Greeks, we pass to the shell-fish, of which they were likewise great amateurs. Epicharmos, in his marriage of Hebe, supplies a curious list, which, however, might be extended almost ad infinitum. Among these were immense limpets, the buccinum, the cecibalos, the tethynakion, the sea-acorn, the purple fish, oysters hard to open but easy to swallow, mussels, sea-snails or periwinkles, skiphydria sweet to taste but prickly to touch, large shelled razor-fish, the black conch, and the amathitis. The conch was also called tellinè as the same poet in his Muses observes. Alcæos wrote a song to the limpet beginning with “Child of the rock and hoary sea.”[604] ----- Footnote 604: Athen. iii. 30, 31. Cf. Scheigh. Animadv. t. vii. p. 68, sqq. ----- Boys used to make a sort of whistle of tortoise and mussel shells. These mussels were usually broiled on the coals, and Aristophanes, very ingenious in his similes, compares a gaping silly fellow to a mussel in the act of being cooked.[605] ----- Footnote 605: Fragm. Babylon. 2. Brunck. Athen. iii. 33. -----