Now counts in Attic coin, and thus achieves
A two-fold robbery in the same transaction![[587]]
Xenarchos paints a little scene of ingenious roguery with a comic extravagance altogether Shakespearian, and incidentally throws light on a curious law of Athens, enacted to protect the citizens against stinking fish.[[588]] The power of invention, he observes—willing to kill two birds with one stone—had totally deserted the poets in order to take up with the fishmongers; for while the former merely hashed up old ideas, the latter were always hitting upon new contrivances to poison the Demos:
Commend me for invention to the rogue
Who sells fish in the agora. He knows
In fact there’s no mistaking,—that the law
Clearly and formally forbids the trick
Of reconciling stale fish to the nose
By constant watering. But if some poor wight
Detect him in the fact, forthwith he picks