Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 3).djvu/222

This page needs to be proofread.

     Wishing the marriage-feast to be a splendid one.

B. Ask no one else; I will myself go round,
     Provide for everything, and report to you.
     . . . As many kinds of olives as you please;
     For meat, you've veal, and sucking-pig, and pork,
     And hares—

                 A. Hear how this cursed fellow boasts!

B. Forced-meat in fig-leaves, cheese, cheesecakes in moulds—

A. Here, Dromo!

                  B. Candyli, eggs, cakes of meal.
     And then the table is three cubits high;
     So that all those who sit around must rise
     Whene'er they wish to help themselves to anything.

There was a kind of cheesecake called [Greek: amês]. Antiphanes enumerates

[Greek: amêtes, amyloi];

and Menander, in his Supposititious Son, says—

You would be glad were any one to dress
A cheesecake ([Greek: amêta]) for you.

But the Ionians, as Seleucus tells us in his Dialects, make the accusative case [Greek: amên]; and they call small cheesecakes of the same kind [Greek: amêtiskoi]. Teleclides says—

Thrushes flew of their own accord
Right down my throat with savoury [Greek: amêtiskoi].

53. There was also a kind called [Greek: diakonion]:—

He was so greedy that he ate a whole
Diaconium up, besides an amphiphon.

But the [Greek: amphiphôn] was a kind of cheesecake consecrated to Diana, having figures of lighted torches round it. Philemon, in his Beggar, or Woman of Rhodes, says—

Diana, mistress dear, I bring you now
This amphiphon, and these libations holy.

Diphilus also mentions it in his Hecate. Philochorus also mentions the fact of its being called [Greek: amphiphôn], and of its being brought into the temples of Diana, and also to the places where three roads meet, on the day when the moon is overtaken at its setting by the rising of the sun; and so the heaven is [Greek: amphiphôs], or all over light.

There is the basynias too. Semus, in the second book of the Deliad, says—"In the island of Hecate, the Delians sacrifice to Iris, offering her the cheesecakes called basyniæ; and this is a cake of wheat-flour, and suet, and honey, boiled up together: and what is called [Greek: kokkôra] consists of a fig and three nuts."

There are also cheesecakes called strepti and neëlata. Both