And since that time how many illustrious followers have descended into the arena, how many glorious names will not culinary annals have to register!
Somebody will, perhaps, one day publish a chronological history of celebrated cooks. In the meantime, it may not be amiss to recall to memory a few illustrious men, whose services and genius an ungrateful posterity has too soon forgotten.
Thimbron, among the Greeks, took the culinary art from its cradle: he watched devoutedly over its development, and only descended into the tomb after having won the heart of the whole of Greece,[XXII_11] for his favourite science. Timachidas of Rhodes, cook and poet of the highest renown, composed an epopee on the art which he professed, in the midst of emanations from the stoves and the spit.[XXII_12] His verses, glowing with the sacred fire which inspired him, lighted up the magiric vein of several of his disciples, among whom Numenius, Hegemon, and Metreas, are still cited.[XXII_13]
Artemidorus collected and commented on all the words in use in the kitchens of his time.[XXII_14] Greece owed to this patient terminologist the possession of a culinary language, subject to certain unchangeable rules.
Mithœcus gave the “Sicilian Cook”—a remarkable type of a multitude of tiresome and insipid imitations.[XXII_15]
At length Archestratus appeared. He was of Syracuse, and passed all his life in profoundly meditating on the functions, strength, anomalies, and resources of the stomach. He discovered the laws which govern that organ, and presented to the world his magnificent treatise on gastronomy[XXII_16]—an inestimable master-piece of laborious investigation of which time has deprived us, together with the works of his useful predecessors.
We must not omit the names of some celebrated theoricians, to whom the art owes its rapid progress:—Philoxenus of Leucadus, devoted himself to the difficult study of degustation, and practised several experiments, which were, however, ill-appreciated by his contemporaries. Thus, in the public baths, he accustomed his mouth and hands to the contact of boiling-water, in order to be able to seize and devour burning viands, the instant they were placed on the table. He recommended cooks to serve everything very hot, so that he alone exercised mastication and deglutition, while other guests less inured, were obliged to content themselves with looking at him.[XXII_17]
Pithyllus invented a sheath that covered the tongue, and protected it, without paralyzing its action, against a caloric dangerous to its delicate tissue.[XXII_18] This ingenious cuirass was not appreciated, and history, in its thoughtlessness, has not even transmitted to us a description of it.
It was then the good time of Athens: gluttons had made way for epicureans; hunger, to a less fierce and gross sensation, already subjected to examination and discussion. The magiric art possessed its rules, its various partisans, its professors, and disciples. Great masters studied deeply the appetite—indispensable basis, on which will always rest the culinary exegesis; and they finished by classing it definitively, according to the three degrees of intensity which observation discovers in it.