For which of us can know the future, or
The fate that shall our various friends befal?
Take now these mushrooms and for dinner roast them,
Which I've just picked beneath the maple shade.

[[100]]Cephisodorus, the pupil of Isocrates, in the treatise which he wrote against Aristotle (and there are four books of it), reproaches the philosopher for not having thought it worth his while to collect proverbs, though Antiphanes had made an entire play which was called Proverbs: from which play he produces these lines—

For I, if I eat any of your dishes,
Seem as if I was on raw mushrooms feeding,
Or unripe apples, fit to choke a man.

57. Mushrooms are produced by the earth itself. But there are not many sorts of them which are good to eat; for the greater part of them produce a sensation of choking: on which account Epicharmus, when jesting, said—

You will be choked, like those who waste away
By eating mushrooms, very heating food.

And Nicander, in his Georgics, gives a list of which species are poisonous; and says—

Terrible evils oftentimes arise
From eating olives, or pomegranates, or from the trees
Of maple, or of oak; but worst of all
Are the swelling sticky lumps of mushrooms.

And he says in another place—

Bury a fig-tree trunk deep in the ground,
Then cover it with dung, and moisten it
With water from an everflowing brook,
Then there will grow at bottom harmless mushrooms;
Select of them what's good for food, and not
Deserving of contempt, and cut the root off.

But all the rest of that passage is in a mutilated state. The same Nicander in the same play writes—