Museums and Raree SJioivs in Aniiqiiity. 353
at Olympia, and the instructions were engraved on the quoit. We are told : " On the quoit of Iphitos is inscribed the truce which the Eleans proclaimed at the Olympic festival. The inscription is not in a straight line, but the letters run round the quoit in a circle." ^ Sir James Frazer comments : "If the tradition is to be trusted the inscription on the quoit could not be later than b.c. 776. It would thus be the oldest Greek inscription of which we have any record."
I do not know if it is legitimate to quote Trimalchio, a gentleman upon whose words one cannot place much reliance ; but, discoursing at the celebrated banquet he offered to his guests and speaking apparently of Cumae, he related one story which, if it had any element of truth, would be poignant in its pathos. " Yes," he says, " and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage ; and when the boys cried to her, ' Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?' 'I would that I were dead,' she used to answer." 2
E. Douglas Van Buren.
Rome, September 1922.
^ Aristotle, in Plutarch, Lycur., i. ; Pausanias, v. 20. i.
- Petronius Arbiter, Satyricoti, 48, tr. Heseltine, ed. Loeb.
