Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 2).djvu/100

 The mullet, and the lebias, and the sparus, The bright æolias, and the thratta too, The sea-swallow, the caris, and the cuttle-fish.

But Dorotheus of Ascalon, in the hundred and eighth book of his Collection of Words, writes this name [Greek: thetta], either because he fell in with a copy of the drama with an incorrect text, or because, as he himself was unused to the word, he altered it so before he published it. But the name thetta does absolutely never occur in any Attic writer whatever. But that they were used to call a sea-fish by the name of thratta, that Anaxandrides establishes, speaking in this manner in his play called Lycurgus,—

And sporting with the little coracini, With little perches, and the little thrattæ.

And Antiphanes says in his Etrurian—

A. He is of the Halæa borough. This is all That now is left me, to be abused unjustly. B. Why so? A. He will (you'll see) bestow on me    Some thratta, or sea-sparrow, or some lamprey, Or some enormous other marine evil.

139. We come now to the sea-sparrow. Diocles enumerates this fish among the drier kinds. But Speusippus, in the second book of his Things resembling one another, says that the sea-sparrow and the buglossus and the tænia are very much alike. But Aristotle, in the fifth book of his Parts of Animals, writes—"And in the same manner the greater number of the small fish have young once a year; such as those which are called chyti, which are surrounded by a net, namely, the chromis, the sea-sparrow, the tunny, the pelamys, the cestreus, the chalcis, and others of the same sort." And in his treatise on Animals he says—"These fish are cartilaginous, the sea-cow, the turtle, the torpedo, the ray, the sea-frog, the buglossa, the sea-sparrow, the mussel." But Dorion, in his book on Fishes, says—"But of flat fish there is the buglossus, the sea-sparrow, the escharus, which they also call the coris." The buglossi are mentioned also by Epicharmus in his Hebe's Wedding—

Hyænides, buglossi, and a citharus.

And Lynceus the Samian, in his Letters, says that the finest sea-sparrows are procured near Eleusis, in Attica. And Archestratus says—