DRINKING-CUPS. the cup:—the ancients, who first brought men over to a more civilized system of life, believing that the world was spherical, and taking their ideas of form from the visible forms of the sun and moon which they beheld, and adapting these figures to their own use in the daily concerns of life, thought it right to make all their vessels and other articles of furniture resemble, in shape at least, the heaven which surrounds everything: on which account they made tables round; and so also they made the tripods which they dedicated to the Gods, and they also made their cakes round and marked with stars, which they also call moons. And this is the origin of their giving bread the name of [Greek: artos], because of all figures the circle is the one which is the most complete ([Greek: apêrtistai]), and it is a perfect figure. And accordingly they made a drinking-cup, being that which receives moist nourishment, circular, in imitation of the shape of the world. But the cup of Nestor has something peculiar about it, for it has stars on it, which the poet compares to studs, because the stars are as round as the studs, and are, as it were, fixed in the heaven; as also Aratus says of them—
There do they shine in heaven,—ornaments
Fix'd there for ever as the night comes round.
But the poet has expressed this very beautifully, attaching the golden studs to the main body of the silver cup, and so indicating the nature of the stars and of the heaven by the colour of the ornaments. For the heaven is like silver, and the stars resemble gold from their fiery colour.
79. "So after the poet had represented the cup of Nestor as studded with stars, he then proceeds on to the most brilliant of the fixed stars, by contemplating which men form their conjectures of what is to happen to them in their lives. I mean the Pleiades. For when he says [Greek: dyo de peleiades] were placed in gold around each handle, he does not mean the birds called [Greek: peleiades], that is to say, turtle-doves; and those who think that he does use [Greek: peleiades] here as synonymous with [Greek: peristerai] are wrong. For Aristotle says expressly that the [Greek: peleias] is one bird, and the [Greek: peristera] another. But the poet calls that constellation [Greek: peleiades] which at present we call [Greek: pleiades]; by the rising of which men regulate their sowing and their reaping, and the beginning of their raising their crops, and their collection of them; as Hesiod says:—
