EPICURES.
And light the fire. Then they bring
A lake of water to make brine,
And for eight months a hundred carts
Are hard at work to carry salt.
And around the dish's edge
Five five-oar'd boats keep always rowing;
And bid the slaves take care the fire
Burns not the Lycian magistrates.
B. Cease to blow this cold air on us,
King of Macedon, extinguish
The Celts, and do not burn them more.
But I am not ignorant that Ephippus has said the very same thing in his play called the Peltast; in which the following lines also are subjoined to those which I have just quoted:—
Talking all this nonsense, he
Raises the wonder of the youths
With whom he feasts, though knowing not
The simplest sums and plainest figures;
But drags his cloak along the ground
With a most lordly, pompous air.
But, with reference to whom it is that Ephippus said this, it is now proper for you to inquire, my good friend Ulpian, and then to tell us; and in this inquiry—
If you find aught hard and inexplicable,
Repeat it over, understand it clearly,—
For I have much more leisure than I like;
as Prometheus says in Æschylus.
39. And on this Cynulcus exclaimed:—And what great subject of inquiry,—I do not say great fish,—can this fellow admit into his mind?—a man who is always picking out the spines of hepseti and atherinæ, and even of worse fish than these, if there be any such, passing over all finer fish.
For, as Eubulus says, in the Ixion,—
As if a man at a luxurious feast,
When cheese cakes are before him, chooses nought
But anise, parsley, and such silly fare,
And ill-dress'd cardamums. . . .
so, too, this Pot-friend, Ulpian,—to use a word of my fellow-Megalopolitan, Cercidas,—appears to me to eat nothing that a man ought to eat, but to watch those who are eating, to see if they have passed over any spine or any callous or gristly morsel of the meat set before them; never once considering what the admirable and brilliant Æschylus has said, who called his tragedies, "Relics of the noble banquets of Homer." But Æschylus was one of the greatest of philosophers,—a man who, being once defeated undeservedly, as
