been moderate in his food. But this last passage shows the extreme voracity and gluttony of the man—
For all my mind is overwhelm'd with care,
But hunger is the worst of griefs to bear;
Still does my stomach bid me eat and drink,
Lest on my sorrows I too deeply think.
Food makes me all my sufferings forget,
And fear not those which may surround me yet.
For even the notorious Sardanapalus would hardly have ventured to give utterance to such sentiments as those. Moreover, when Ulysses was an old man—
Voraciously he endless dishes ate,
And quaff'd unceasing cups of wine. . . .
4. But Theagenes of Thasos, the athlete, ate a bull single-handed, as Posidippus tells us in his Epigrams.
And as I'd undertaken, I did eat
A Thracian bull. My own poor native land
Of Thasos could not have purvey'd a meal
Sufficient for the hunger of Theagenes.
I ate all I could get, then ask'd for more.
And, therefore, here you see, I stand in brass,
Holding my right hand forth; put something in it.
And Milo of Crotona, as Theodorus of Hierapolis tells us in his book upon Games, ate twenty minæ[1] weight of meat, and an equal quantity of bread, and drank three choes[2] of wine. And once at Olympia he took a four year old bull on his shoulders, and carried it all round the course, and after that he killed it and cut it up, and ate it all up by himself in one day. And Titormus the Ætolian had a contest with him as to which could eat an ox with the greatest speed, as Alexander the Ætolian relates. But Phylarchus, in the third book of his Histories, says that Milo, while lying down before the altar of Jupiter, ate a bull, on which account Dorieus the poet made the following epigram on him:—
Milo could lift enormous weights from earth,
A heifer four years old, at Jove's high feast,
And on his shoulders the huge beast he bore,
As it had been a young and little lamb,
All round the wondering crowd of standers by.
But he did still a greater feat than this,
was something under three quarts.]
