We cannot accurately ascertain the age of Mithæcus. The most ancient author of such a book that we can call to mind is Epicharmus, a Sicilian poet and physician, from whose fragments, collected by Athenæus, we may certainly conclude he was acquainted with the nature of aquatic animals.

To this class we may, in the first place, refer those passages which are extracted from the drama called the Marriage of Hebe, or the Muses, and not only teach us the nature of fishes, but also the manner of procuring and cooking them. A learned writer in the "Literary Ephemeris" of Jena, 1810, (Nos. 156, 157,) attempted to collect all these and reduce them to order. There remain, however, many more passages which the conjectures of the most learned could hardly amend or explain, from the corruption of the text by librarians and the variety of Sicilian names. And before the time of Epicharmus, Ananius, an Iambic poet, nearly contemporary with Hipponactus, an Ionian poet, composed, among other poems, a similar work on cooking fish, as we learn from a passage extracted by Athenæus, (vii. p. 282.) After Epicharmus there was Terpsion, a Sicilian, who was the first to write a gastrology, in which he taught his disciples from what kind of food they ought to abstain. He is mentioned by Clearchus Solensis, a disciple of Aristotle, in his work de Paræmiis, in "Athenæus," (viii. p. 337.)

Clearchus also mentions Archestratus, the Sicilian, the pupil of Terpsion, who, after having travelled through the whole of Greece, wrote a work in heroic verse on the nature of fishes, those especially which were fit for the table, and on the manner of cooking and preparing them. We learn that his book was called Ἡδυπάθεια, not only from the testimony of Athenæus, but from an imitation by Ennius. For Ennius, who died A.U.C. 584, one hundred and fifty-two years after the death of Aristotle, translated and in part imitated the poem of Archestratus, and called his work "Carmina Hedypathetica," as Apulegius tells us in his "Apologia." We have good reason for supposing that Archestratus was either contemporary with Aristotle, or a little older. For Archestratus mentions Diodorus Aspendius, the Pythagorean, as his contemporary, to whom Timæus, the historian, tells us that the Epistle of Stratonicus was written ("Athenæus," iv. p. 136). Therefore Archestratus, Diodorus, Aspendius, and Stratonicus, an eminent harpist, were contemporaries, and so they were with Aristotle and Demosthenes; and this conjecture is confirmed by many passages in Athenæus, where Stratonicus is reported to have been alive with those persons whom Demosthenes mentions in his orations. Aristotle, therefore, may have used this work of Archestratus in that part of his Natural History which treats of the nature of fishes.[230]

The writings of physicians who prescribed the food, both of sick and well, have handed down similar and much more extensive observations on the animals and fishes which were brought to the tables of the Greeks. Of this kind Athenæus has given many passages from Dorio, and Diphilus of Siphnus. Oribasius has made a long extract from the work of Xenocrates, on the aquatic animals used in food, which I purpose some day to publish with Xenocrates, if my life should be spared long enough.

INDEX.

THE END.

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