802 APPENDIX. 



quoted by Athenseus, who makes the title of this book 

 o-^aarvrijibv, vii. p. 282, and xii. p. 506. 



We cannot accurately ascertain the age of Mitha&cus. The 

 most ancient author of such a book that we can call to mind 

 is Epicharmus, a Sicilian poet and physician, from whose 

 fragments, collected by Athenseus, we may certainly con- 

 clude he was acquainted with the nature of aquatic animals. 



To this class we may, in the first place, refer those pas- 

 sages which are extracted from the drama called the Mar- 

 riage of Hebe, or the Muses, and not only teach us the 

 nature of fishes, but also the manner of procuring and cook- 

 ing them. A learned writer in the " Literary Ephemeris" of 

 Jena, 1810, (Nos. 156, 157,) attempted to collect all these 

 and reduce them to order. There remain, however, many 

 more passages which the conjectures of the most learned 

 could hardly amend or explain, from the corruption of the 

 text by librarians and the variety of Sicilian names. And 

 before the time of Epicharmus, Ananius, an Iambic poet, 

 nearly contemporary with Hipponactus, an Ionian poet, com- 

 posed, among other poems, a similar work on cooking fish, 

 as we learn from a passage extracted by Athenaeus, (vii. p. 

 282.) After Epicharmus there was Terpsion, a Sicilian, who 

 was the first to write a gastrology, in which he taught his 

 disciples from what kind of food they ought to abstain. He 

 is mentioned by Clearchus Solensis, a disciple of Aristotle, 

 in his work de Paraemiis, in " Athenaeus," (viii. p. 337.) 



Clearchus also mentions Archestratus, the Sicilian, the 

 pupil of Terpsion, who, after having travelled through the 

 whole of Greece, wrote a work in heroic verse on the nature 

 of fishes, those especially which were fit for the table, and 

 on the manner of cooking and preparing them. We learn 

 that his book was called 'Hdvffafaia, not only from the testi- 

 mony of Athenseus, but from an imitation by Ennius. For 

 Ennius, who died A.TJ.C. 584, one hundred and fifty-two 

 years after the death of Aristotle, translated and in part 

 imitated the poem of Archestratus, and called his work 

 " Carmina Hedypathetica," as Apulegius tells us in his 

 "Apologia." We have good reason for supposing that 

 Archestratus was either contemporary with Aristotle, or a 

 little older. For Archestratus mentions Diodorus Aspen- 

 dius, the Pythagorean, as his contemporary, to whom Timseus, 



