Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 2).djvu/340

 horns, and drank out of them. And one may ascertain that by seeing the articles mentioned in writing among the list of confiscated goods on the pillar which lies in the Acropolis, which contains the sacred offerings—"There is also a silver horn drinking-cup, very solid."

52. There is also the cernus. This is a vessel made of earthenware, having many little cup-like figures fastened to it, in which are white poppies, wheat-ears, grains of barley, peas, pulse, vetches, and lentils. And he who carries it, like the man who carries the mystic fan, eats of these things, as Ammonius relates in the third book of his treatise on Altars and Sacrifices.

53. There is also the cup called the cissybium. This is a cup with but one handle, as Philemon says. And Neoptolemus the Parian, in the third book of his Dialects, says that this word is used by Euripides in the Andromache, to signify a cup made of ivy ([Greek: kissinon])—

And all the crowd of shepherds flock'd together, One hearing a huge ivy bowl of milk, Refreshing medicine of weary toil; Another brought the juice o' the purple vine.

For, says he, the cissybium is mentioned in a rustic assembly, where it is most natural that the cups should be made of wood. But Clitarchus says that the Æolians called the cup which is elsewhere called scyphus, cissybium. And Marsyas says that it is a wooden cup, the same as the [Greek: kypellon]. But Eumolpus says that it is a species of cup which perhaps (says he) was originally made of the wood of the ivy. But Nicander the Colophonian, in the first book of his History of Ætolia, writes thus:—"In the sacred festival of Jupiter Didymæus they pour libations from leaves of ivy ([Greek: kissou]), from which circumstance the ancient cups are called cissybia. Homer says—

Holding a cup ([Greek: kissybion]) of dark rich-colour'd wine.

And Asclepiades the Myrlean, in his essay on the cup called Nestoris, says, "No one of the men in the city or of the men of moderate fortune used to use the [Greek: skyphos] or the [Greek: kissybion], but only the swineherds and the shepherds, and the men in the fields. Polyphemus used the cissybium, and Eumæus the other kind." But Callimachus seems to make a blunder in the use of these names, speaking of an intimate friend of his