Book 3
31
And in the Muses it is written— There is the cockle, which we call the tells; Believe me, that is most delicious meat. Perhaps he means that fish which is called the tellina, and which the Romans call the mitlus,—a fish which Aristophanes the grammarian names in his treatise on the Broken Scytale, and says that the lepas is a fish like that which is called the tellina. But Callias of Mitylene, in his discussion of the Limpet in Alcæus, says that there is an ode in Alcæus of which the beginning is— O child of the rock, and of the hoary sea; and at the end of it there is the line— Of all limpets the sea-limpet most relaxes the mind. But Aristophanes writes the line with the word tortoise instead of limpet. And he says that Dicearchus made a great blunder when he interpreted the line of limpets; and that the children when they get them in their mouths sing and play with them, just as idle boys among us do with the fish which we call tellina. And so, too, Sopater, the compiler of Comicalities, says in his drama which is entitled the Eubulotheombrotus:— But stop, for suddenly a certain sound Of the melodious tellina strikes my ears. And in another place Epicharmus, in his Pyrrha and Prometheus, says— Just look now at this tellina, and behold This periwinkle and this splendid limpet. And in Sophron cockles are called melœnides. For now melænides will come to us, Sent from a narrow harbour. And in the play which is called The Clown and the Fisherman, they are called the cherambe. And Archilochus also mentions the cherambe: and Ibycus mentions the periwinkle. And the periwinkle is called both ἀναρίτης and ἀνάρτας. And the shell being something like that of a cockle, it sticks to the rocks, just as limpets do. But Herodas, in his Coadjutrixes, says— Sticking to the rocks as a periwinkle. And Aeschylus, in his Persæ, says— Who has plunder'd the islands producing the periwinkle? And Homer makes mention of the oyster.
