And Hegesander tells us that Phoryscus, the fish-eater, once, when he was not able to take exactly as much fish as he wished, but when a greater part of it was following his hand, as he was helping himself, said,—
But what resists is utterly destroy'd,and so ate up the whole fish. And Bion, when some one had been beforehand with him, and had already taken the upper part of the fish, having turned it round himself, and eating abundantly of it, said, after he had done,—
But Ino finish'd all the rest o' the business.And Theocritus the Chian, when the wife of Diocles the epicure died, and when the widowed husband, while making a funeral feast for her, kept on eating delicacies and crying all the time, said—“Stop crying, you wretched man; for you will not remedy your grief by eating all that fish.” And when [p. 543] the same Diodes had also eaten up his land through gluttony, and was one day, while bolting down some hot fish, complaining that his palate (οὐρανὸς) was burnt, Theocritus, who was present, said to him—“Then it only remains for you to drink up the sea, and then you will have got rid of the three greatest things in the world,—earth, and sea, and heaven (οὐρανός).” And Clearchus, in his Lives, describing some person who was fond of fish, says—“Technon, one of the old flute-players, when Charmus the flute-player died, (and he, too, was very fond of fish,) sacrificed to the dead man a large dish of every sort of fish on his tomb.” Alexis the poet, also, was a great epicure in fish, as Lynceus the Samian tells us; and being once ridiculed by some chattering fellows on account of his epicurism, when they asked him what he liked most to eat, Alexis said, “Roasted chatterers.”
