SHARKS.
Then for three drachmas I a grayling bought.
Five more I gave for a large conger's head
And shoulders. (Oh, how hard a thing is life!)
Another drachma for the neck. I swear
By Phœbus, if I knew where I could get
Or buy another neck myself, at once
I'd choke the one which now is on my shoulders,
Rather than bring these dishes to this place.
For no one ever had a harder job
To buy so many things at such a price;
And yet if I have bought a thing worth buying
May I be hang'd. They will devour me.
What I now say is what concerns myself.
And then, such wine they spit out on the ground!
Alas! Alas!
43. There is a kind of shark called [Greek: galeos], which is eaten. And Icesius, in his treatise on Materials, says that the best and tenderest kind of galei are those called asteriæ. But Aristotle says that there are many kinds of them—the thorny, the smooth, the spotted, the young galeus, the fox shark, and the file shark. But Dorion, in his Book on Fishes, says that the fox shark has only one fin towards his tail, but has none along the ridge of his back. But Aristotle, in the fifth book of his Parts of Animals, says that the centrines is also a kind of shark, and also the notidanus. But Epænetus, in his Cookery Book, calls the latter the enotideus, and says "that the centrines is very inferior to him, and that it has a bad smell; and that the one may be distinguished from the other by the fact of the centrines having a sort of spur on his first fin, while the rest of the kinds have not got such a thing." "And he says that these fishes have no fat or suet in them, because they are cartilaginous."
And the acanthias, or thorny shark, has this peculiarity, that his heart is five-cornered. And the galeus has three young at most; and it receives its young into his mouth, and immediately ejects them again; and the variegated galeus is especially fond of doing this, and so is the fox shark. But the other kinds do not do so, because of the roughness of the skins of the young ones.
44. But Archestratus, the man who lived the life of Sardanapalus, speaking of the galeus as he is found at Rhodes, says that it is the same fish as that which, among the Romans, is brought on the table to the music of flutes, and accompanied with crowns, the slaves also who carry it being
