Kitap 3
84
After all this conversation it seemed good to go to supper. And when the Uraeum was carried round, Leonidas said, Euthydemus the Athenian, my friends, in his treatise on Pickles, says that Hesiod has said with respect to every kind of pickle— * * * * * * *The beginning of this fragment of Hesiod is given up as hopelessly corrupt by the commentators; and there is probably a great deal of corruption running through the whole of it. Some sorrily-clad fishermen did seek To catch a lamprey; men who love to haunt The Bosporus's narrow strait, well stored With fish for pickling fit. They cut their prey In large square portions, and then plunge them deep Into the briny tub: nor is the oxyrhyncus A kind to be despised by mortal man; Which the bold sons of ocean bring to market Whole and in pieces. Of the noble tunny The fair Byzantium the mother is, And of the scombrus lurking in the deep, And of the well-fed ray. The snow-white Paros Nurses the colius for human food; And citizens from Bruttium or Campania, Fleeing along the broad Ionian sea, Will bring the orcys, which shall potted be, And placed in layers in the briny cask, Till honour'd as the banquet's earliest course. Now these verses appear to me to be the work of some cook rather than of that most accomplished Hesiod; for how is it possible for him to have spoken of Parium or Byzantium, and still more of Tarentum and the Bruttii and the Campanians, when he was many years more ancient than any of these places or tribes? So it seems to me that they are the verses of Euthydemus himself.
