Book 11
91
There is the pella. This is a vessel resembling the scyphus, having a wider bottom, into which men used to milk the cattle. Homer says— Thick as beneath some shepherd's thatch'd abode, The pails πέλλαι high foaming with a milky flood, The buzzing flies, a persevering train, Incessant swarm, and chased, return again. But Hipponax calls this pellis; saying,— Drinking from pellides; for there was not A culix there,—the slave had fallen down, And broken it to pieces; showing, I imagine, very plainly that the pellis was not a drinking-cup, but that on this occasion they use it as one, from want of a regular culix. And in another place he says— And they at different times from out the pella Did drink; and then again Arete pledged them. But Phœnix the Colophonian, in his Iambics, interprets this word as identical with the phiala; saying,— For Thales,—honestest of all the citizens, And, as they say, by far the best of men Who at that time were living upon earth,— Took up a golden pellis. And in another part he says— And with one hand he pours from out the pellis, Weak as he was in all his limbs and fingers, A sharp libation of sour vinegar, Trembling, like age, by Boreas much shaken. But Clitarchus, in his Dialects, says that the Thessalians and Aeolians call the milk-pail pelleter; but that it is a drinking-cup which they call pella. But Philetas, in his Miscellanies, says that the Bœotians give the name of pelleter to a culix.
