Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 2).djvu/220

 Agathocles, I was the very first To introduce the royal dish of lentils. My chief exploit I have not mention'd yet: There was a famine, and a man named Lachares Was giving an entertainment to his friends; Whom I recovered with some caper-sauce.

Lachares made Minerva naked, who caused him no inconvenience; but I will now strip you who are inconveniencing me, said Æmilianus, unless you show me what you have got with you. And he said at last, rather unwillingly, I call this dish the Dish of Roses. And it is prepared in such a way, that you may not only have the ornament of a garland on your head, but also in yourself, and so feast your whole body with a luxurious banquet. Having pounded a quantity of the most fragrant roses in a mortar, I put in the brains of birds and pigs boiled and thoroughly cleansed of all the sinews, and also the yolks of eggs, and with them oil, and pickle-juice, and pepper, and wine. And having pounded all these things carefully together, I put them into a new dish, applying a gentle and steady fire to them. And while saying this, he uncovered the dish, and diffused such a sweet perfume over the whole party, that one of the guests present said with great truth—

The winds perfumed the balmy gale convey Through heav'n, through earth, and all the aërial way;

so excessive was the fragrance which was diffused from the roses.

71. After this, some roasted birds were brought round, and some lentils and peas, saucepans and all, and other things of the same kind, concerning which Phænias the Eresian writes thus, in his treatise on Plants—"For every leguminous cultivated plant bearing seed, is sown either for the sake of being boiled, such as the bean and the pea, (for a sort of boiled soup is made of these vegetables,) or else for the sake of extracting from them a farinaceous flour, as, for instance, the aracus; or else to be cooked like lentils, as the aphace and the common lentil; and some again are sown in order to serve as food for fourfooted animals, as, for instance, the vetch for cattle, and the aphace for sheep. But the vegetable called the pea is mentioned by Eupolis, in his Golden Age. And Heliodorus, who wrote a description of the whole world, in the first book of his treatise on the Acropolis, said—"After the manner in