Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 3).djvu/252

 out of a corrected edition of a play which is entitled Demetrius:—

Take, then, this meat which thus is sent to you; Dress it, and feast, and drink the cheerful healths, [Greek: lepesthe, mattyazete].

But the Athenians use the verb [Greek: lepomai] for wanton and unseemly indulgence of the sensual appetites.

84. And Artemidorus, in his Dictionary of Cookery, explains [Greek: mattyê] as a common name for all kinds of costly seasonings; writing thus—"There is also a [Greek: mattyês] (he uses the word in the masculine gender) made of birds. Let the bird be killed by thrusting a knife into the head at the mouth; then let it be kept till the next day, like a partridge. And if you choose, you can leave it as it is, the wings on and with its body plucked." Then, having explained the way in which it is to be seasoned and boiled, he proceeds to say—"Boil a fat hen of the common poultry kind, and some young cocks just beginning to crow, if you wish to make a dish fit to be eaten with your wine. Then taking some vegetables, put them in a dish, and place upon them some of the meat of the fowl, and serve it up. But in summer, instead of vinegar, put some unripe grapes into the sauce, just as they are picked from the vine; and when it is all boiled, then take it out before the stones fall from the grapes, and shred in some vegetables. And this is the most delicious [Greek: mattyês] that there is."

Now, that [Greek: mattyê], or [Greek: mattyês], really is a common name for all costly dishes is plain; and that the same name was also given to a banquet composed of dishes of this sort, we gather from what Philemon says in his Man carried off:—

Put now a guard on me, while naked, and Amid my cups the [Greek: mattyês] shall delight me.

And in his Homicide he says—

Let some one pour us now some wine to drink, And make some [Greek: mattyê] quick.

But Alexis, in his Pyraunus, has used the word in an obscure sense:—

But when I found them all immersed in business, I cried,—Will no one give us now a [Greek: mattyê]?

as if he meant a feast here, though you might fairly refer the word merely to a single dish. Now Machon the Sicyonian is one of the comic poets who were contemporaries of Apollodorus of Carystus, but he did not exhibit his comedies at