Anaxandrides[491] compares the beauteous work of portrait painters unfavourably with the beauty of a dish of fish. Xenarchus[492] contrasts poets with fishmongers, much to the detriment of the former:
“Poets are nonsense: for they never say A single thing that’s new. But all they do Is to clothe old ideas in language new, Turning the same things o’er again And upside down. But as for fishmongers, They’re an inventive race and yield to none,” etc.
Hegesippus’s summing up, “But the whole race of cooks is conceited and arrogant,” finds confirmation in dozens of instances. Two grandiloquent boasts may serve: “I have known many a guest who has, for my sake, eaten up his whole estate,” and
“I am in truth a God, I bring the dead By mere scent of my food, to life again.”
Self-laudation is no monopoly of Greece, or Sicily, whence came perhaps the most famous of the tribe. In our own Beaumont and Fletcher’s play—The Bloody Brother—a chef vaunts,
“For fish I’ll make you a standing lake of white broth, And pikes shall come ploughing up the plums before them, Arion on a dolphin playing Lachrymæ.”
Lucian, in his witty Dialogue,[493] makes Hermes act as auctioneer at the sale of the different creeds as personified by their founders or by philosophers, and dilate on the exceptional merits of the lot then under the hammer, “because he will teach you how long a gnat will live, and what sort of soul an oyster possesses.” Mr. Lambert states that Ausonius wrote a poem on the oyster! To be more accurate, he wrote two,[494] and lengthy ones to boot!
The Emperor Domitian (Juvenal, IV.) ordered a special sitting of the Senate to deliberate and advise on a matter of such grave State importance as the best method of cooking a turbot.
Greek and Roman writers frequently poke fun at the gourmets who asserted that they could instantly tell from the flavour whence the fish came: from what sea, and what part of that sea, from what river, and even from which side of that river.[495]
Either these ancient connoisseurs were blessed with a more exquisite and developed sense of taste than we moderns, or the whole pose was an intolerable affectation, for “they drenched their subtly-conceived dishes with garum, alec, and other sauces, which were so strong and composite that it would have been hardly possible to distinguish a fresh fish from a putrid cat—except by the bones!”[496]