Alexis, in his Trophonius, says—
And now that you may not be found out thus,
And spoken of as men of Boeotia,
By those whose wont it is to run you down,
As men unequall'd in creating noise,
And knowing nothing else save how to eat
And drink unceasingly the whole night long;
Strip yourselves quick, and all prepare for action.
And Achæus, in his Contests, says—
A. Are you now speaking to the spectators here,
Or to the body of competitors?
B. To those who eat much, as men training do.
A. Whence do the strangers come from?
B. They're Bœotians.
And very likely it is because of all this that Eratosthenes, in his Epistles, says, that Pempelus, when he was asked, "What sort of people the Bœotians appeared to him?" answered, "That they only spoke just as vessels might be expected to speak, if they had a voice, of how much each of them could hold." And Polybius of Megalopolis, in the twentieth book of his Histories, says that "the Bœotians, having gained great glory at the battle of Leuctra, after that relaxed their courage again, and turned to feasting and drunkenness, and to making parties for eating among friends; and many of them, even of those who had children, spent the greater part of their substance on their feasts; so that there were a great number of Bœotians who had more invitations to supper than there were days in the month. On which account the Megarians, hating such a system as that, abandoned their alliance, and joined themselves to the Achæans.
VORACITY OF THE TEMPERANCE.
12. The people of Pharsalus also are ridiculed by the comic poets as being enormous eaters; accordingly Mnesimachus, in his Philip, says—
A. Has any man of the Pharsalians come,
That he may eat up e'en our very tables?
B. There's no one come at all.
A. So much the better;
Perhaps they have all gone somewhere else to eat
Some city of Achaïa ready roasted.
And that it was a general imputation on all the Thessalians, that they were great eaters, Crates tells us in his Lamia, saying—
Great words three cubits long,
Cut into huge Thessalian slices thus:—