A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology. By various writers. Ed. by William Smith. Illustrated by numerous engravings on wood.

ATHENAEUS.
by the absurdity of collecting at it the produce of
every season of the year. Long quotations and intricate discussions introduced apropos of some
trifling incident, entirely destroy the form of the
dialogue, so that before we have finished a speech
we forget who was the speaker. And when in
addition to this confusion we are suddenly brought
back to the tiresome Timocrates, we are quite provoked at the clumsy way in which the book is put
together. But as a work illustrative of ancient
manners, as a collection of curious facts, names of
authors and fragments, which, but for Athenaeus,
would utterly have perished; in short, as a body
of amusing antiquarian research, it would be difficult to praise the Deipnosophistae too highly.
The work begins, somewhat absurdly, considering the difference between a discussion on the Immortality of the Soul, and one on the Pleasures of
the Stomach, with an exact imitation of the opening of Plato's Phaedo,-Athenaeus and Timocrates
being substituted for Phaedo and Echecrates.
The praises of Laurentius are then introduced, and
the conversation of the savans begins. It would
be impossible to give an account of the contents of
the book; a few specimens therefore must suffice.
We have anecdotes of gourmands, as of Apicius
(the second of the three illustrious gluttons of that
name), who is said to have spent many thousands
on his stomach, and to have lived at Minturnae in
the reign of Tiberius, whence he sailed to Africa,
in search of good lobsters; but finding, as he approached the shore, that they were no larger than
those which he ate in Italy, he turned back without landing. Sometimes we have anecdotes to
prove assertions in natural history, e. g. it is shewn
that water is nutritious (1), by the statement that
it nourishes the rtrTiý, and (2) because fluids generally are so, as milk and honey, by the latter of
which Democritus of Abdera allowed himself to be
kept alive over the Thesmophoria (though he had
determined to starve himself), in order that the
mourning for his death might not prevent his maidservants from celebrating the festival. The story
of the Pinna and Pinnoteer (Tr'vvop5AaS or,rivvor'Op7r) is told in the course of the disquisitions
on shell-fish. The pinna is a bivalve shell-fish
(o"r7peoV), the pinnoteer a small crab, who inhabits
the pinna's shell. As soon as the small fish on
which the pinna subsists have swum in, the pinnoteer bites the pinna as a signal to him to close his
shell and secure them. Grammatical discussions
are mixed up with gastronomic; e. g. the account
of the dcuv'y1d/A begins with the laws of its accentuation; of eggs, by an inquiry into the spelling of
the word, whether lo'v, wi'ov, cseov, or dWdpiov.
Quotations are made in support of each, and we
are told that od was formerly the same as drrEpc^a,
from which fact he deduces an explanation of the
story of Helen's birth from an egg. This suggests
to him a quotation from Eriphus, who says that
Leda produced goose's eggs; and so he wanders on
through every variety of subject connected with
eggs. This will give some notion of the discursive
manner in which he extracts all kinds of facts
from the vast stores of his erudition. Sometimes
he connects different pieces of knowledge by a
mere similarity of sounds. Cynulcus, one of the
guests, calls for bread (dpr-o), " not however for
Artus king of the Messapians;" and then we are
led back from Artus the king to Artus the eatable,
and from that to salted meats, which brings in a

ATHENAEUS. 401
grammatical discussion on the word 'rdpitor,
whether it is masculine in Attic or not. Sometimes antiquarian points are discussed, especially
Homeric. Thus, he examines the times of day at
which the Homeric meals took place, and the
genuineness of some of the lines in the Iliad and
Odyssey, as
j7se yap Kcarad S1vudv daEXse'ov, cs IroveTro,
which he pronounces spurious, and only introduced
to explain
a7v-oJaTos o oU 0 A1 e $ofji d8yeods Mevs'eaoy.
His etymological conjectures are in the usual
style of ancient philology. In proving the religious duty of drunkenness, as he considers it, he
derives Ooivy from O e v EEKca olvovaOat and /eOvU'E
from ser rd Ov'EI. We often obtain from him
curious pieces of information on subjects connected
with ancient art, as that the kind of drinking-cup
called vurdv was first devised by Ptolemy Philadelphus as an ornament for the statues of his
queen, Arsinoe. [ARSINOE, No. 2.] At the end
of the work "is a collection of scolia and other
songs, which the savans recite. One of these is
a real curiosity,-a song by Aristotle in praise of
dpeTri.
Among the authors, whose works are now lost,
from whom Athenaeus gives extracts, are Alcaeus,
Agathon the tragic poet, Antisthenes the philosopher, Archilochus the inventor of iambics, Menander and his contemporary Diphilus, Epimenides of Crete, Empedocles of Agrigentum, Cratinus, Eupolis (Hor. Sat. i. 4.1), Alcman, Epicurus
(whom he represents as a wasteful glutton), and
many others whose names are well known. In
all, he cites nearly.800 authors and more than
1200 separate works. Athenaeus was also the
author of a lost book irepi 7r1v du voica paLctrheveder-wv, which probably, from the specimen of it in
the Deipnosophists, and the obvious unfitness of
Athenaeus to be a historian, was rather a collection of anecdotes than a connected history.
Of the Deipnosophists the first two books, and
parts of the third, eleventh, and fifteenth, exist
only in an Epitome, whose date and author are
unknown. The original work, however, was rare
in the time of Eustathius (latter part of 12th cent.);
for Bentley has shewn, by examining nearly a
hundred of his references to Athenaeus, that his
only knowledge of him was through the Epitome.
(Phalaris, p. 130, &c.) Perizonius (preface to
Aelian quoted by Schweighauser) has proved that
Aelian transferred large portions of the work to
his Various Histories (middle of 3rd cent.), a robbery which must have been committed almost in
the life-time of the pillaged author. The Deipnosophists also furnished to Macrobius the idea and
much of the matter of his Saturnalia (end of 4th
cent.); but no one has availed himself so largely
of Athenaeus's erudition as Eustathius.
Only one original MS. of Athenaeus now exists,
called by Schweighiuser the Codex Veieto-Parisiensis. From this all the others which we now
possess are copies; so that the text of the work,
especially in the poetical parts, is in a very unsettled state. The MS. was brought from Greece
by cardinal Bessarion, and after his death was
placed in the library of St. Mark at Venice, whence
it was taken to Paris by order of Napoleon, and
there for the first time collated by Schweighauser's
son. It is probably of the date of the 10th cen2D