DRINKING-CUPS. conceived the ambition of inventing some peculiar kind of utensil in earthenware, on account of the extraordinary quantity of Mendean wine which was exported from the city, took a great deal of pains with that study, and brought Cassander a great number of cups of every imaginable fashion, all made of earthenware, and taking a part of the pattern of each, thus made one goblet of a design of his own.
29. There is also a kind of cup called bicus. Xenophon, in the first book of his Anabasis, says:—"And Cyrus sent him a number of goblets ([Greek: bikous]) of wine half full; and it is a cup of a flat shallow shape, like a [Greek: phialê], according to the description given of it by Pollux the Parian.
There is another kind of cup called the bombylius; a sort of Rhodian Thericlean cup; concerning the shape of which Socrates says,—"Those who drink out of the phiale as much as they please will very soon give over; but those who drink out of a bombylius drink by small drops." There is also an animal of the same name.
There is also a kind of drinking-cup called the bromias, in form like the larger kind of scyphus.
30. There is another kind called the lettered cup, having writing engraved round it. Alexis says—
A. Shall I describe to you the appearance first
O' the cup you speak of? Know, then, it was round;
Exceeding small; old, sadly broken too
About the ears; and all around the brim
Were carved letters.
B. Were there those nineteen
Engraved in gold,—To Jupiter the Saviour?[1]
A. Those, and no others.
And we have seen a lettered cup of this kind lying at Capua in Campania, in the temple of Diana; covered with writing taken from the poems of Homer, and beautifully engraved; having the verses inlaid in golden characters, like the drinking-cup of Nestor. And Achæus the tragic poet, in his Omphale, himself also represents the Satyrs speaking in the following manner about a lettered drinking-cup—
And the god's cup long since has call'd me,
Showing this writing,—delta, then iota,
The third letter was omega, then nu,
, eleven, being the number of letters in [Greek: Dios
Sôtêros]. I have altered the number to make it correspond to the letters in "To Jupiter the Saviour."]
- ↑ The Greek has [Greek: hendeka
