And Demetrius Poliorcetes was a man very fond of mirth, as Phylarchus relates in the tenth book of his History. But in the fourteenth book he writes as follows:—“Demetrius used to allow men to flatter him at his banquets, and to pour libations in his honour, calling him Demetrius the only king, and Ptolemy only the prefect of the flee, and Lysimachus only a steward, and Seleucus only a superintendent of elephants, and in this way he incurred no small amount of hatred.” And Herodotus states that Amasis the [p. 410] king of the Egyptians was always a man full of tricks, and one who was used to turn his fellow feasters into ridicule; and when he was a private man he says he was very fond of feasting and of jesting, and he was not at all a serious man. And Nicolaus, in the twenty-seventh book of his History, says that Sylla the Roman general was so fond of mimics and buffoons, being a man very much addicted to amusement, that he gave such men several portions of the public land. And the satyric comedies which he wrote himself in his native language, show of how merry and jovial a temperament he was in this way.
Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.