Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 2).djvu/343

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

DRINKING-CUPS. cups there is put sage, and white poppies, and ears of wheat, and grains of barley, and peas, and pulse, and rye, and lentils, and beans, and vetches, and bruised figs, and chaff, and oil, and honey, and milk, and wine, and pieces of unwashed sheep's-wool. And he who has carried this cernus eats of all these things, like the man who has carried the mystic fan."

57. There is also the cotyle. Aristophanes, in his Cocalus, says—

And other women, more advanced in age,
Into their stomachs pour'd, without restraint,
From good-sized cotylæ, dark Thasian wine,
The whole contents of a large earthen jar,
Urged by their mighty love for the dark wine.

And Silenus, and Clitarchus, and also Zenodotus, say that it is a kind of [Greek: kylix], and say—

And all around the corpse the black blood flow'd,
As if pour'd out from some full cotyle.

And again—

There is many a slip
'Twixt the cup ([Greek: kotylês]) and the lip.

And Simaristus says that it is a very small-sized cup which is called by this name; and Diodorus says that the poet has here called the cup by the name of cotyle, which is by others called cotylus, as where we find—

[Greek: pyrnon] (bread) [Greek: kai kotylên];

and that it is not of the class [Greek: kylix], for that it has no handles, but that it is very like a deep luterium, and a kind of drinking cup ([Greek: potêriou]); and that it is the same as that which by the Ætolians, and by some tribes of the Ionians, is called cotylus, which is like those which have been already described, except that it has only one ear: and Crates mentions it in his Sports, and Hermippus in his Gods. But the Athenians give the name of [Greek: kotylê] to a certain measure. Thucydides says—"They gave to each of them provisions for eight months, at the rate of a cotyla of water and two cotylæ of corn a-day." Aristophanes, in his Proagon, says—

And having bought three chœnixes of meal,
All but one cotyla, he accounts for twenty.

But Apollodorus says that it is a kind of cup, deep and hollow; and he says—"The ancients used to call everything that was hollow [Greek: kotylê], as, for instance, the hollow of the hand; on which account we find the expression [Greek: kotylêryton]