I know, too, that Phylarchus has spoken, somewhere or other, about large fish, and about fresh figs which were sent with them; saying that Patroclus, the general of Ptolemy, sent such a present to Antigonus the king, by way of a riddle, as the Scythians sent an enigmatical present to Darius, when he was invading their country. For they sent (as Herodotus relates) a bird, and an arrow, and a frog. But Patroclus (as Phylarchus tells us, in the third book of his Histories) sent the before-mentioned fishes and figs; and the king, at the time that they arrived, happened to be drinking with his friends, and when all the party were perplexed at the meaning of the gifts, Antigonus laughed, and said to his friends that he knew what was the meaning of the present; “for,” says he, “Patroclus means that we must either be masters of the sea, or else be content to eat figs.”
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.