My master comes from Thessaly; a man
Of temper stern; wealthy, but covetous;
A wicked man; a glutton; fond of dainties,
Yet sparing to bestow a farthing on them.

But as the young man was well educated, and that not by Myrtilus, but by some one else, when I asked him how he fell in with the young Myrtilus, he repeated to me these lines from the Neottis of Antiphanes—

While still a boy, bearing my sister company,
I came to Athens, by some merchant brought;
For Syria was my birthplace. There that merchant
Saw us when we were both put up for sale,
And bought us, driving a most stingy bargain.
No man could e'er in wickedness surpass him;
So miserly, that nothing except thyme
Was ever bought by him for food, not e'en
So much as might have fed Pythagoras.

73. While Ulpian went on jesting in this manner, Cynulcus cried out—I want some bread; and when I say bread ἄrtos

[[180]]I do not mean Artus king of the Messapians, the Messapians, I mean, in Iapygia, concerning whom there is a treatise among Polemo's works. And Thucydides also mentions him, in his seventh book, and Demetrius the comic writer speaks of him in the drama entitled Sicily, using the following language—

From thence, borne on by the south wind, we came
Across the sea to the Italian shore,
Where the Messapians dwelt; and Artus there,
The monarch of the land, received us kindly,
A great and noble host for foreigners.

But this is not the time for speaking of that Artus, but of the other, which was discovered by Ceres, surnamed Sito (food), and Simalis. For those are the names under which the Goddess is worshipped by the Syracusans, as Polemo himself reports in his book about Morychus. But in the first book of his treatise addressed to Timæus, he says, that in Scolus, a city of Bœotia, statues are erected to Megalartus (the God or Goddess of great bread), and to Megalomazus (the God or Goddess of abundant corn). So when the loaves were brought, and on them a great quantity of all kinds of food, looking at them, he said—

What numerous nets and snares are set by men
To catch the helpless loaves;

as Alexis says in his play, The Girl sent to the Well. And so now let us say something about bread.

74. But Pontianus anticipating him, said; Tryphon of Alexandria, in the book entitled the Treatise on Plants, mentions several kinds of loaves; if I can remember them accurately, the leavened loaf, the unleavened loaf, the loaf made of the best wheaten flour, the loaf made of groats, the loaf made of remnants (and this he says is more digestible than that which is made only of the best flour), the loaf made of rye, the loaf made of acorns, the loaf made of millet. The loaf made of groats, said he, is made of oaten groats, for groats are not made of barley. And from a peculiar way of baking or roasting it, there is a loaf called ipnites (or the oven loaf) which Timocles mentions in his Sham Robbers, where he says—