But when fair Rhode came and shook above you
A cymbium full of mighty unmix'd wine.
But Dionysius of Samos, in the sixth book of his treatise on the Cyclic Poets, thinks that the κισσύβιον and the κύμβιον are the same. For he says that Ulysses, having filled a cymbium with unmixed wine, gave it to the Cyclops. But the cup mentioned in Homer, as having been given to him by Ulysses, is a good-sized cissybium; for if it had been a small cup, he, who was so enormous a monster, would not have been so quickly overcome by drunkenness, when he had only drunk it three times. And Demosthenes mentions the cymbium in his oration against Midias, saying that he was accompanied by rhyta and cymbia: and in his orations against Euergus and Mnesibulus. But Didymus the grammarian says that is a cup of an oblong shape, and narrow in figure, very like the shape of a boat. And Anaxandrides, in his Clowns, says—
Perhaps large cups (ποτήρια) immoderately drain'd,
And cymbia full of strong unmixed wine,
Have bow'd your heads, and check'd your usual spirit.
And Alexis, in his Knight, says—
A. Had then those cymbia the faces of damsels
Carved on them in pure gold?
B. Indeed they had.
A. Wretched am I, and wholly lost . . . .
DRINKING-CUPS.
64. But Eratosthenes, in his letter addressed to Ageton the Lacedæmonian, says, that the cymbium is a vessel of the shape of the cyathus, writing thus—"But these men marvel how a man who had not got a cyathus, but only a cymbium, had, besides that, also a phiale. Now it seems to me, that he had one for the use of men, but the other for the purpose of doing honour to the Gods. And at that time they never used the cyathus nor the cotyla. For they used to employ, in the sacrifices of the Gods, a crater, not made of silver nor inlaid with precious stones, but made of Coliad clay. And as often as they replenished this, pouring a libation to the Gods out of the phiale, they then poured out wine to all the company in order, bailing out the newly-mixed wine in a cymbium, as they do now among us at the phiditia. And if ever they wished to drink more, they also placed on the table beside them the cups called cotyli, which are the most beautiful of all cups, and the most convenient to drink out of. And these, too, were all made of the same earthenware." But when Ephippus says, in his Ephebi—
Chæremon brings no culices to supper,
Nor did Euripides with cymbia fight,
he does not mean the tragic poet, but some namesake of his, who was either very fond of wine, or who had an evil reputation on some other account, as Antiochus of Alexandria says, in his treatise on the Poets, who are ridiculed by the comic writers of the Middle Comedy. For the circumstance of cymbia being introduced into entertainments, and being used to fight with in drunken quarrels, bears on each point. And Anaxandrides mentions him in his Nereids—
Give him a choeus then of wine, O messmate,
And let him bring his cymbium, and be
A second Euripides to-day.