But Theophrastus, in the Book on Royal Authority, addressed to Cassander, (if indeed the book under that title, attributed to him, be a genuine work of his, for many say that it was written by Sosibius, to whom Callimachus the poet addresses a triumphal hymn in elegiac metre,) says that “the Persian kings were so luxurious as to offer by proclamation a large sum of money to any one who could invent any new pleasure.” And Theopompus, in the thirty-fifth book of his Histories, says, that “the king of the Paphlagonians, whose name was Thys, whenever he supped, ordered a hundred dishes of every sort to be placed on his table, beginning with oxen. And that when he was led captive to the king of Persia and kept in prison, he still continued to have the [p. 235] same profusion served up to him, living in the most splendid manner. So that Artaxerxes, when he heard of it, said that he appeared to him to be living like a man who knew that he should soon die.” But the same Theopompus, in the fourteenth book of his History of the Exploits of Philip, says— “When the king comes to any one of his subject cities, twenty talents are expended on his supper, and sometimes thirty; and some even spend a much larger sum still. For it is a very old custom, that every city is bound to supply a supper in proportion to its greatness, just on the same principle as its tribute to the revenue and its taxes are exacted.”
Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.
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