And if the mullet, while alive, be choked with wine, and then a man drinks the wine, he will no longer be able to indulge in the pleasures of Venus, as Terpsicles tells us in his book on Amatory Pleasures. And if a woman drinks this same wine, she never becomes pregnant. Birds, too, are affected in the same manner. But Archestratus, that very learned man, after he has praised the Milesian mullet which are found at Teichius, proceeds to say—
If you at Thasos are, then buy a mullet;[p. 513] And Cratinus, in his Trophonius, says—
You ne'er will get a worse, unless indeed
You go to Tius; but even those are fair:
But at Erythræ they are caught in shore
And are most excellent.
And do not eat a red-flesh'd mullet hard,But Nausicrates, the comic poet, praises the mullets from Aexona, in his Captains of Ships, saying—
Brought from Aexona; nor of any turtle,
Or mighty melanurus from those seas.
Those yellow fleshed fish, which the high wave
That beats Aexona brings towards the shore,
The best of fish; with which we venerate
The light-bestowing daughter of great Jove;
When sailors offer gifts of feasts to heaven.
B. You mean the mullet.
