ODES TO OYSTERS! 211 



Anaxandrides 1 compares the beauteous work of portrait 



painters unfavourably with the beauty of a dish of fish. 



Xenarchus 2 contrasts poets with fishmongers, much to the 

 detriment of the former : 



" Poets are nonsense : for they never say 

 A single thing that's new. But all they do 

 Is to clothe old ideas in language new, 

 Turning the same things o'er again 

 And upside down. But as for fishmongers, 

 They're an inventive race and yield to none," etc. 



Hegesippus's summing up, " But the whole race of cooks is 

 conceited and arrogant," finds confirmation in dozens of 

 instances. Two grandiloquent boasts may serve : "I have 

 known many a guest who has, for my sake, eaten up his 

 whole estate," and 



" I am in truth a God, I bring the dead 

 By mere scent of my food, to life again." 



Self-laudation is no monopoly of Greece, or Sicily, whence 

 came perhaps the most famous of the tribe. In our own 

 Beaumont and Fletcher's play — The Bloody Brother — a chef 

 vaunts, 



" For fish ril make you a standing lake of white broth. 

 And pikes shall come ploughing up the plums before them, 

 Arion on a dolphin playing Lachrymae." 



Lucian, in his witty Dialogue, ^ makes Hermes act as 

 auctioneer at the sale of the different creeds as personified by 

 their founders or by philosophers, and dilate on the exceptional 

 merits of the lot then under the hammer, " because he will 

 teach you how long a gnat will live, and what sort of soul an 

 oyster possesses." Mr. Lambert states that Ausonius wrote 



1 Anaxandrides, Oc^j'ssfiMs, />-«§■. i ap. Athen., VI. ii. See alsoAthen., VI. 

 4-12; VII. 35-41; Livy, XXXIX. 6: "Turn coquus, vilissimum antiquis 

 mancipium et sestimatione et usu, in pretio esse, et quod ministerium fuerat, 

 ars haberi coepta " ; and Martial, XIV. 220. 



- Porphyra. frag. i. ap. Athen., VI. 6. 



» ^iuivirpacns, s. 26. The opening (s. i) of the auction is not unlike a 

 modem one: " For Sale! a varied assortment of Live Creeds, Tenets of every 

 description. Cash on delivery, or credit on suitable security ! " While lot 

 (in s. 26) — The Peripatetic — fetches /80 os. od., the great Diogenes (in s. ii) 

 is knocked down for threepence ! Fowler's Trs. 



