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There were numerous rivals of whom we know next to nothing except by the quotations of Athenaeus and Plutarch, and the Greek grammarians who cited them to support a dictum in this as in the preceding periods of comedy in Athens, for Menander's plays are counted by many scores, and they were crowned by the prize only eight times.
The imaginary ones are Chronological, which were pointed out in ancient times by Athenaeus, and are noticed by Schleiermacher and others, and relate to the impossibility of all the persons in the Dialogue meeting at any one time, whether in the year 425 B.C., or in any other. The exact place of the Protagoras among the Dialogues, and the date of composition, have also been much disputed.
Nor shalt thou need to urge authorities, or bring forth the instance of the Indian prince of whom Theophrastus, Plinius, and Athenaeus testify, that with the help of a certain herb he was able, and had given frequent experiments thereof, to toss his sinewy piece of generation in the act of carnal concupiscence above three score and ten times in the space of four-and-twenty hours.
When they had dined with him, and fallen into easy attitudes around the table, he introduced this wine casually among half a dozen others, and watched the result. Not a man who tasted it would taste any other. As for the notebooks those priceless materials for the final edition of Athenaeus they were empty, mere blank pages!
Of course they don't retire to read the newspaper; it is to look over a favourite ode of Pindar, or to discuss an obscure passage in Athenaeus! Of course country magistrates and Members of Parliament are always studying Demosthenes and Cicero; we know it from their continual habit of quoting the Latin grammar in Parliament.
I will not name as many as Athenaeus has named for a cook, who, he says, ought to be a mathematician, a theoretical musician, a natural philosopher, a natural historian, &c., though you had a disposition just now to make chemistry merely subservient to the uses of the kitchen.
It began with the Pisistratidae , who first introduced into Athens the desire of pleasure and the habits of ostentation, that refine before they enervate; and that luxury which, as in Athenaeus it is well and profoundly said, is often the concomitant of freedom, "as soft couches took their name from Hercules" made its rapid progress with the result of the Persian war.
It was about the middle of this third period, during a mushroom-trapping ramble, that the idea occurred to us, first to me, then after reflection to James, that mother ought to be informed how matters stood between us. We went into the house, hand-in-hand, and interviewed her. She was in the bow-window, reading a translation of The Deipnosophists of Athenaeus.
The scene of the pedant's dinner after the manner of the ancients, does not seem to myself so comic as the adventures of Trunnion, while the bride is at the altar, and the bridegroom is tacking and veering with his convoy about the fields. One sees how the dinner is done: with a knowledge of Athenaeus, Juvenal, Petronius, and Horace, many men could have written this set piece.
There I had a full account of all that Atteius Capito, Paulus, Marcellus, A. Gellius, Athenaeus, Suidas, Ammonius, and others had writ of the Siticines and Sicinnists; and then we thought we might as easily believe the transmutations of Nectymene, Progne, Itys, Alcyone, Antigone, Tereus, and other birds.
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