ODES TO OYSTERS! 211 
Anaxandrides ! 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: “TI have 
known many a guest who has, for my sake, eaten up his 
whole estate,’’ and 
“T 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 I’ll make you a standing lake of white broth, 
And pikes shall come ploughing up the plums before them, 
Arion on a dolphin playing Lachryme.” 
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, Odysseus, frag. 1 ap. Athen., VI. 11. See also Athen., VI. 
4-12; VII. 35-41; Livy, XXXIX. 6: “Tum coquus, vilissimum antiquis 
mancipium et zstimatione et usu, in pretio esse, et quod ministerium fuerat, 
ars haberi coepta’’; and Martial, XIV. 220. 
2 Porphyra, frag. 1. ap. Athen., VI. 6. 
3 Blov mpacis, s. 26. The opening (s. 1) of the auction is not unlike a 
modern 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. 11) 
is knocked down for threepence! Fowler’s Trs. 
