Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 2).djvu/370

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woman praising a large cup, and disparaging the oxybaphum as small. So when some one says to her—

Do you, then, drink;

she answers—

                    There I will obey you.
And, by the gods, the figure of the cup
Is quite inviting, worthy of the fame
Of this high festival; for have we not—
Have we not, and not long ago, I say,
Drunk out of earthenware oxybapha?
But may the gods, my son, give many blessings
To him who made this cup—a noble cup,
As to its beauty and its good capacity.

And also in the Babylonians of Aristophanes we hear of the oxybaphum as a drinking-cup, when Bacchus speaks of the demagogues at Athens, saying that they demanded of him two oxybapha when he was going away to trial. For we cannot think that they asked him for anything but cups. And the oxybaphum, which is put before the people who play at the cottabus, into which they pour their drops of wine, can be nothing else but a flat cup. Eubulus also, in his Mylothris, mentions the oxybaphum as a cup—

And besides, I measure out for drinking
An oxybaphum all round; and then he swore
The wine was nothing but pure vinegar,
And that the vinegar was wine, at least
Superior to the other.

88. There is the oinisteria too. The young men, when they are going to cut their hair, says Pamphilus, fill a large cup with wine, and bring it to Hercules; and they call this cup an oinisteria. And when they have poured a libation, they give it to the assembled people to drink.

There is the ollix also. Pamphilus, in his Attic Words, describes this as a wooden cup.

89. There is also the panathenaicum. Posidonius the philosopher, in the thirty-sixth book of his History, mentions some cups called by this name, speaking thus—"There were also cups made of an onyx, and also of several precious stones joined together, holding about two cotylæ. And very large cups, called panathenaica, some holding two choes, and some even larger."

There is the proaron too. This was a wooden cup, into