CHEFS—JUVENAL—DIOGENES’ POLYPUS = 205 
Juvenal’s scathing invective on Crispinus—who had bought 
a mullet of 6 Ibs. for £48—runs: 
“What ! you, Crispmus, brought to Rome erewhile, 
Lapt in the rushes of your native Nile, 
Buy scales at such a price! You might, I guess, 
Have bought the fisherman himself for less ; 
Bought, in some countries, manors at this rate, 
And, in Apulia, an immense estate.”’ ! 
The folly of the Roman nobles and millionaires did not 
exhaust itself in buying fish at insane prices, or squandering 
their fortunes on Vivaria and similar extravagances. They 
touched a yet lower depth of infamy by taking their cognomen 
from fish. 
Thus Columella contrasts the custom of their ancestors of 
taking a cognomen from some great victory, e.g. Numantinus 
or Isauricus, with that of their decadent successors such as 
Licinius Murena or Sergius Orata.? 
The Greek Comic Poets and Satirists castigate with 
bitter sarcasms and jeers the frenzied, almost cat-like devotion 
to fish. 
Even Diogenes the Cynic came to an untimely end by 
eating with eager haste a polypus vaw.3 Philoxenus the 
Poet, when warned by his doctor, after “he had bought a 
polypus two cubits long, dressed it, and ate it up himself all 
but the head,” that he had but six hours left to live and to 
arrange his affairs, bequeathed his poems and the prizes of his 
poems to the Nine Muses : 
“ Such is my Will! But since old Charon’s voice 
Keeps crying out ‘ Now cross’: and deadly Fate, 
Whom none can disobey, calls me away, 
That I may go below with all my goods, 
Bring me the fragments of that polypus.” 4 
The moralists of the Empire bewail “‘ the costly follies of 
the patricians.’”’ Juvenal, Martial, and other Roman Satirists 
1 Sat., IV. 23 ff. (Gifford’s Trs.). 
2 VIII. 16. Cf. also Varro, De Re Rust., Bk. III. 3, 10; #lian, VIII. 4; 
and Macrobius, Sat., III. xv. 1 ff. 
3 Athen., VIII. 26. 
4 Tbid. VIII. 26, 
