Book 14
84
Now, that ματτύη, or ματτύης, really is a common name for all costly dishes is plain; and that the same name was also given to a banquet composed of dishes of this sort, we gather from what Philemon says in his Man carried off:— Put now a guard on me, while naked, and Amid my cups the ματτύης shall delight me. And in his Homicide he says— Let some one pour us now some wine to drink, And make some ματτύη quick. But Alexis, in his Pyraunus, has used the word in an obscure sense:— But when I found them all immersed in business, I cried,—Will no one give us now a ματτύη? as if he meant a feast here, though you might fairly refer the word merely to a single dish. Now Machon the Sicyonian is one of the comic poets who were contemporaries of Apollodorus of Carystus, but he did not exhibit his comedies at Athens, but in Alexandria; and he was an excellent poet, if ever there was one, next to those sevenWho these seven first-class authors were, whether tragedians or comic poets, or both, or whether there was one selection of tragic and another of comic poets, each classed as a sort of Pleias Ptolemæi Philadelphi ætate nobilitata, is quite uncertain. of the first class. On which account, Aristophanes the grammarian, when he was a very young man, was very anxious to be much with him. And he wrote the following lines in his play entitled Ignorance:— There's nothing that I'm fonder of than ματτύη; But whether 'twas the Macedonians Who first did teach it us, or all the gods, I know not; but it must have been a person Of most exalted genius.
