For down to the times of the supremacy of the Macedonians the attendants used to perform their duties with vessels made of earthenware, as my countryman Juba declares. But when the Romans altered the way of living, giving it a more expensive direction, then Cleopatra, arranging her style of living in imitation of them, she, I mean, who ultimately destroyed the Egyptian monarchy, not being able to alter the name, she called gold and silver plate κέραμον; and then she gave the guests what she called the κέραμα to carry away with them; and this was very costly. And on the Rosic earthenware, which was the most beautiful, Cleopatra spent five minæ every day. But Ptolemy the king, in the eighth book of his commentaries, writing of Masinissa the king of the Libyans, speaks as follows—"His entertainments were arranged in the Roman fashion, everything being served up in silver κέραμον. And the second course he arranged in the Italian mode. His dishes were all made of gold; made after the fashion of those which are plaited of bulrushes or ropes. And he employed Greek musicians.

16. But Aristophanes the comic writer, whom Heliodorus the Athenian says, in his treatise concerning the Acropolis, (and it occupies fifteen books,) was a Naucratite by birth, in his play called Plutus, after the god who gave his name to the play and appeared on the stage, says that dishes of silver

[[363]]were in existence, just as all other things might be had made of the same metal. And his words are—

But every vinegar cruet, dish and ewer
Is made of brass; while all the dirty dishes
In which they serve up fish are made of silver.
The oven too is made of ivory.

And Plato says, in his Ambassadors—

Epicrates and his good friend Phormisius,
Received many and magnificent gifts
From the great king; a golden cruet-stand,
And silver plates and dishes.

And Sophron, in his Female Actresses, says—

The whole house shone
With store of gold, and of much silver plate.

17. And Philippides, in his Disappearance of Silver, speaks of the use of it as ostentatious and uncommon, and aimed at only by some foreigners who had made fortunes but lately—

A.I felt a pity for all human things,
Seeing men nobly born to ruin hasting,
And branded slaves displaying silver dishes
Whene'er they ate a pennyworth of salt-fish,
Or a small handful of capers, in a plate
Whose weight is fifty drachms of purest silver.
And formerly 'twould have been hard to see
One single flagon vow'd unto the gods.
B.That is rare now. For if one man should vow
A gift like that, some other man would steal it.