Go quickly! buy me of that polypus,
And fry the roe, and give it us to eat.
But to fry octopus was not, by some, considered good cooking. Nicostratus of Philetærus says, in the “Antyllus:”—
I never again will venture to eat cuttle-fish which has been dressed in a frying-pan.
They ate heartily at breakfast in those times, it seems, for Epicharmus tells us in “The Sirens:”—
In the morning early, at the break of day,
We roasted plump anchovies,
Cutlets of well-fed pork and polypi;
And then we drank sweet wine.
Philoxenus, the poet of Cythera, is reported to have been a very greedy man. He wished that he had a throat three cubits long, that he might drink as long as possible, and that his food might all at once delight him. Machon, the comic poet, relates how his fondness for well-cooked octopus and his insatiate gluttony caused his death:—