Kitap 7
138
The thratta, then, is really a genuine sea-fish; and Mnesimachus, in his Horse-breeder, mentions it; and Mnesimachus is a poet of the middle comedy. And he speaks thus— The mullet, and the lebias, and the sparus, The bright æolias, and the thratta too, The sea-swallow, the cars, and the cuttlefish. But Dorotheus of Ascalon, in the hundred and eighth book of his collection of Words, writes this name θέττα, either because he fell in with a copy of the drama with an incorrect text, or because, as he himself was unused to the word, he altered it so before he published it. But the name thetta does absolutely never occur in any Attic writer whatever. But that they were used to call a sea-fish by the name of thratta, that Anaxandrides establishes, speaking in this manner in his play called Lycurgus,— And sporting with the little coracini, With little perches, and the little thrattæ. And Antiphanes says in his Etrurian— A. He is of the Halæa borough. This is all That now is left me, to be abused unjustly. B. Why so? A. He will (you'll see) bestow on me Some thratta. or sea-sparrow, or some lamprey, Or some enormous other marine evil.
