The rogue must be, or stupid; for he heeds not
A syllable you say, but o’er his fish
Bends silently like Telephos (and with good reason,
For his whole race he knows are cut-throats all).
Another minding not, or else not hearing,
Pulls by the legs a polypus.[[583]] A third
With saucy carelessness replies, ‘Four oboli,
That’s just the price. For this no less than eight.
Take it or leave it!’”[[584]]
Alexis, too, that most comic of comic writers, seems to have imagined, that the humour of his pieces would be incomplete without a spice of the fishmonger. Commencing, like Amphis, with an allusion to the haughty airs of military men, he glides into his subject as follows:—