[469] IX. 31, “at nunc coci triumphorum pretiis parantur, et coquorum pisces.”
[471] _Sat._, IV. 23 ff. (Gifford’s _Trs._).
[472] VIII. 16. Cf. also Varro, _De Re Rust._, Bk. III. 3, 10; Ælian, VIII. 4; and Macrobius, _Sat._, III. xv. 1 ff.
[475] Xenophon, in speaking of a man as “an opsophagist and the biggest dolt possible,” evidently does not subscribe to the pleasant theory that fish-food increases the grey matter of our brain. Holland’s translation of Plutarch is not complimentary: “hence it is we call those gluttons who love belly-cheer so well opsophagists.”
[476] In charity to the Greeks may I hazard the plea (the rules of even the Law Courts are now sensibly relaxed) that their delight in Brobdingnagian meals may have originated in the days when their gods walked with men on earth, or grew up later as the sincerest form of flattery? No one in Homer keeps his eye more skinned or his nose more active than a god, when hecatombs “are about.” The Olympians flit constantly to Æthiopia and are impatient of any business, mundane or heavenly, which interferes with a trip thither, when with the keen scent (or vision?) of vultures, they smell (or see?) hecatombs in preparation in the heart of the Dark Continent, where the inhabitants, as a scholiast tells us, kept a feast for twelve days, _one for every god_! See A. Shewan’s _Homeric Games at an Ancient St. Andrews_ (Edinburgh, 1911), p. 116—a most delightful and destructive skit at the expense of _The Higher Criticism_ of Homer!
[477] The greatest number of _fish_ which I can count at any feast mentioned in Athenæus (in Bk. IV. 13) amounts to only thirty-two! Badham (p. 587) omits to state that the whole poem is nothing but a parody, chiefly of Homer, by Matron, and is _not_ a “Bill of fare of an Attic supper” in any sense.
[478] Sammonicus Serenus, a _savant_ of the early third century A.D., states that the _acipenser_ was brought to table to the accompaniment of flutes by servants crowned with flowers. Cf. Macrob. III. 16, 7 f. Cf. Athen. VII. 44, and Ælian, VIII. 28.
In describing this imaginary Attic supper, Badham certainly lets himself go. The allusion to “the present of the God of Love” he may have taken from an anonymous epigram in Burmann’s _Anthologia_ (1773), Bk. V. 217.