his Female Flute-player, or the Female Twins, laughing at a man named Phoinicides for his gluttony, says—
Menelaus warr'd for ten whole years against
The Trojan nation for one lovely woman.
Phoinicides, too, attacks Taureas
For one fine eel.
31. But Demosthenes the orator reproaches Pherecrates, because, with the gold which he received for his treason, he bought himself courtesans and fish, and charges him with debauchery and gluttony. But Diocles the epicure, as Hegesander says, when a man once asked him which of the two fish was the best, the conger or the pike, said—"The one when it is boiled, and the other when it is roasted." And Leonteus the Argive also was an epicure: he was a tragedian, and a pupil of Athenion, and a slave of Juba, king of Mauritania; as Amarantus relates, in his treatise on the Stage, saying that Juba wrote this epigram on him, because he had acted the character of Hypsipyle very badly:—
If you should wish to see the genius
Of that devoted artichoke-devourer
Leonteus the tragedian, don't regard
The sorrow-stricken heart of Hypsipyle.
I once was dear to Bacchus, and his taste
Is ne'er perverted by base bribes t'approve
Untuneful sounds. But now the pots and pans,
And well-fill'd dishes have destroyed my voice,
While I've been anxious to indulge my stomach.
32. And Hegesander tells us that Phoryscus, the fish-eater, once, when he was not able to take exactly as much fish as he wished, but when a greater part of it was following his hand, as he was helping himself, said,—
But what resists is utterly destroy'd,
and so ate up the whole fish. And Bion, when some one had been beforehand with him, and had already taken the upper part of the fish, having turned it round himself, and eating abundantly of it, said, after he had done,—
But Ino finish'd all the rest o' the business.
And Theocritus the Chian, when the wife of Diocles the epicure died, and when the widowed husband, while making a funeral feast for her, kept on eating delicacies and crying all the time, said—"Stop crying, you wretched man; for you will not remedy your grief by eating all that fish." And when
