Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists
C. D. Yonge, B.A., Ed.

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To this our admirable entertainer, Laurentius himself, replied, saying,—O you men who drive the dogs, according to [p. 258] the Jocasta of Strattis, the comic poet, who in the play entitled The Phœnician Women, is represented as saying—

I wish to give you both some good advice:
When you boil lentils, pour no perfume o'er them.

And Sopater, too, whom you were mentioning just now, in his Descent to Hell, speaks in these terms:—

Ulysses, king of Ithaca—'Tis perfume
On lentils thrown: courage, my noble soul!

And Clearchus the Peripatetic philosopher, in his treatise on Proverbs, gives the saying, “Perfume thrown on lentils;” as a proverb which my grandfather Varro also mentions, he, I mean, who was nicknamed Menippius. And many of the Roman grammarians, who have not had much intercourse with many Greek poets or historians, do not know where it is that Varro got his Iambic from. But you seem to me, O Cynulcus, (for you delight in that name, not using the name by which your mother has called you from your birth,) according to your friend Timon, to be a noble and great man, not knowing that the lentil soup obtained mention from the the former Epicharmus, in his Festival, and in his Islands, and also from Antiphanes the comic poet; who, using the diminutive form, has spoken of it in his Wedding, under the following form of expression—

A little lentil soup (κόγχιον), a slice of sausage.

And Magnus immediately taking up the conversation, said,— The most universally excellent Laurentius has well and cleverly met this hungry dog on the subject of the lentil soup. But I, like to the Galatians of the Paphian Sopater, among whom it is a custom whenever they have met with any eminent success in war to sacrifice their prisoners to the gods,—

I too, in imitation of those men,
Have vow'd a fiery sacrifice to the gods—
Three of these secretly enroll'd logicians.
And now that I have heard your company
Philosophise and argue subtlely,
Persisting firmly, I will bring a test,
A certain proof of all your arguments:
First smoking you. And if then any one
When roasted shrinks and draws away his leg,
He shall be sold to Zeno for his master
For transportation, as bereft of wisdom.