ATHENAEUS is the author of this book; and in it he is discoursing with Timocrates:
 and the name of the book is the Deipnosophists. In this work Laurentius is
 introduced, a Roman, a man of distinguished fortune, giving a banquet in his own
 house to men of the highest eminence for every kind of learning and
 accomplishment; and there is no sort of gentlemanly knowledge which he does not
 mention in the conversation which he attributes to them; for he has put down in
 his book, fish, and their uses, and the meaning of their names; and he has
 described divers kinds of vegetables, and animals of all sorts. He has introduced
 also men who have written histories, and poets, and, in short, clever men of all
 sorts; and he discusses musical instruments, and quotes ten thousand jokes: he
 talks of the different kinds of drinking cups, and of the riches of kings, and the
 size of ships, and numbers of other things which I cannot easily enumerate, and
 the day would fail me if I endeavoured to go through them separately. And the arrangement of the conversation is an imitation of a sumptuous banquet;
 and the plan of the book follows the arrangement of the conversation. This, then,
 is the delicious feast of words which this admirable master of the feast, Athenæus, has prepared for us; and gradually sur- passing
 himself, like the orator at Athens, as he warms with his subject, he bounds on
 towards the end of the book in noble strides.