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When, Carion, you a supper do prepare, For those who their own contributions bring, You have no time to play, nor how to practise For the first time the lessons you've received. And you were yesterday in danger too; For not one single one of all your tenches Had any liver, but they all were empty. The brain was decomposed too.—But you must, O Carion, when at any future time You chance a band like this to thus encounter, As Dromon, Cerdon, and Soterides, Giving you all the wages that you ask'd, Deal with them fairly. Where we now are going To a marriage feast, there try experiments. And if you well remember all my rules, You are my real pupil; and a cook By no means common: 'tis an opportunity A man should pray for. Make the best of it, The old man is a miser, and his pay Is little. If I do not find you eating up The very coals, you're done for. Now go in; For here the old man comes himself, behold How like a skin-flint usurer he looks!

22. But the cook in Sosipater's Liar is a great sophist, and in no respect inferior to the physicians in impudence. And he speaks as follows—

A. My art, if you now rightly do consider it, Is not, O Demylus, at all an art To be consider'd lightly;—but alas, 'Tis too much prostituted; and you'll find That nearly all men fear not to profess That they are cooks, though the first principles Of the great art are wholly strange to them; And so the whole art is discredited. But when you meet an honest, genuine cook, Who from his childhood long has learnt the art, And knows its great effects, and has its rules Deep buried in his mind; then, take my word, You'll find the business quite a different thing. There are but three of us now left in Greece; Boidion, and Chariades, and I;    The rest are all the vilest of the vile. B. Indeed? A. I mean it. We alone preserve The school of Sicon: he was the great teacher Of all our art: he was the first who taught us    To scan the stars with judgment: the great Sicon! Then, next to this he made us architects: He open'd too the paths of physical knowledge; And after this he taught us all the rules