Book 1
29
Homer, too, speaks of the smell of perfumes as something very admirable:— Spirit divine! whose exhalation greets The sense of gods with more than mortal sweets.Iliad, xiv. 173. He speaks, too, of splendid beds; and such is the bed which Arete orders her handmaids to prepare for Ulysses. And Nestor makes it a boast to Telemachus that he is well provided with such things.
30
But some of the other poets have spoken of the habits of expense and indolence of their own time as existing also at the time of the Trojan war; and so Aeschylus very improperly introduces the Greeks as so drunk as to break their vessels about one another's heads; and he says— This is the man who threw so well The vessel with an evil smell, And miss'd me not, but dash'd to shivers The pot too full of steaming rivers Against my head, which now, alas! sir, Gives other smells besides macassar. And Sophocles says in his banquet of the Greeks, He in his anger threw too well The vessel with an evil smell Against my head, and fill'd the room With something not much like perfume; So that I swear I nearly fainted With the foul steam the vessel vented. But Eupolis attacks the man who first mentioned such a thing, saying— I hate the ways of Sparta's line, And would rather fry my dinner; He who first invented wine Made poor man a greater sinner, And through him the greater need is Of the arts of Palamedes.Schweighauser says here that the text of this fragment of Eupolis is corrupt, and the sense and metre undiscoverable.
