“I,” quoth Eudemus, “was summoned as it grew
crepuscular by Damasias the quondam athlete and
champion, now out of the lists for eld—the brazen
image, you know, in the square. Out of compliment to him as a champion, his statue was set up in the square. He was hard at it
a-plucking and a-singeing, for he intended to marry
off his daughter to-day and was busking her. Then
a Termerian What a “Termerian misfortune” was, the ancients themselves do not seem to have known, except that it was a great one, and that “Termerian” was derived from a name— according to Suidas, that of a tyrant’s keep in Caria, used as a prison. misadventure befell that cut short the
gala day. Distraught over I know not what, or more
likely overtaken by divine detestation, his son Dion
hung himself, and, depend upon it, he would have
been undone if I had not been there to slip the
noose and relieve him of his coil. Squatting on my





 

hunkers beside him for a long time, I jobbed him,
titillating and sounding him lest perchance his
windpipe still hang together. But what helped
most was that I confined his extremes with both
hands and applied pressure.” Eudemus means to convey the idea that he undid the noose and attempted to relieve the man, but his language is so open to misunderstanding that it suggests quite opposite—that his aim was rather to undo the unhappy subject of his ministrations. 
 
“Prithee,” quoth I, “dost mean that notable
Dion, the slack-pursed libertine, the toothpickchewing aesthete, who strouts and gropes if ever he
sees anyone that is well hung? He is a scapegrace
and arutter.” “Well,” said Eudemus, “Damasias
in amaze invoked the goddess—they have an Artemis
in the middle of the hall, a Scopadean masterpiece
—and he and his wife, who is now elderly and quite
lyart-polled, With a punning allusion to Athena Polias. flung themselves upon her and besought
her to pity them. She at once inclined her head,
and he was well; so that now they have a Theodore “Gift-of-God.’ 
or rather, manifestly an Artemidore “Gift-of-Artemis.” in the young
man. So they have made offerings of all sorts
to her, including bows and arrows, since she takes
pleasure in these; for Artemis is a good bowyer,
she is a Far-darter, a very Telemachus.” As an “archeress” (but toxotis was also an arrow-window) Artemis was not only, like her brother, a Far-darter, but a Far-fighter (Telemachus). 
 
“Let us be drinking, then,” quoth Megalonymus,
“for I am come bringing you this senile flagon,
green cheese, windfallen olives—I keep them under
wormscriven seals Since in worm-eaten wood the “galleries” are never identical in pattern, sections of it were very suitable for use as seals; but in the day of Lexiphanes only an antiquarian is likely to have possessed one. —and other olives, soused, and







 

these earthen cups of cockle-shell, stanchly bottomed,
for us to drink out of, and a cake of chitterlings
braided like a topknot. My lad, pour in more of
the water for me, that I may not begin to have a
head, and then call your keeper to come for you.
You know that I have my pains and keep my head
invested.
 
And now that we have drunk, we shall
gossip according to our wont, for in good sooth it is
not inopportune to prate when we are in our cups.”
“T approve this,” said I, “and why not, for we are
the sheer quintessence of Atticism.” ‘ Very true,”
quoth Callicles, “for quizzing each other incessantly
is a whet to loquacity.” “As to me,” said Eudemus,
“since it is brumal I had liefer fence myself with
stiffer drink. I am starved with cold, and when I
am warmed I would fain hear these handiwise Cf. Dancing, 69 (p. 272), and the note there. 
folk, the flute-player and the harper.”
 
“What was that you said, Eudemus?” said I.
“Do you enjoin alogy upon us as if we were inarticulate and elinguid? My tongue is already pregnant
with utterance, and in sooth I set sail in the intent
to archaise with you and wash you up with my
tongue, one and all. But you have treated me as if
a three-masted vessel were sailing before the wind
with full kites, running easy and spooming over the
billows, and then someone, letting go double-tongued
refrainers, In view of the fact that to the Greeks Hector was a “holder,” Lexiphanes can cause us to imagine that hero performing new and strange feats. pigs of iron, For ἰσχάς (“fig”) used, in the sense “holder,” to apply to an anchor, cf. Athen., 99 c—p, where it is attributed to Sophocles (Fr. 761 Pearson). and bowers, were to curb
the impetuosity of her course, begrudging her the
fair wind.”





 
 
“Well, then,” quoth he, “you, if you like, may
sail and swim and course over the main, but I from
off the land, with a drink at my elbow, like Homer’s
Zeus, shall look upon you either from a bald cop or
the pitch of heaven as you drive and the wind gives
your vessel a saucy fairing from astern.”