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ὅλους κτλ. Aristophanes (Ach. 85-7) parodies this passage; cf. 3. 2 n.

Cf. ix. 110. 2 for the royal birthday.

τὰ λεπτά: i. e. sheep and goats; πρόβατον includes, especially in Ionic Greek, all beasts of the herd that ‘go before’ the shepherd.


The Greeks, like the moderns, had their ‘dessert dishes’ (ἐπι- φορήματα) served up after the solid food (σῖτα, cf. ἀπὸ δείπνου); the Persians had them, not ‘as one course’ (ἁλέδι), but at intervals during the meal. H. Rawlinson (ad loc.) compares the fondness of the modern Persians for sweetmeats (but these are now served before the meal).


Anything that left the body became separated from life and so unclean. For the strange rules of the Avesta on these subjects cf. Fargard, xvii, as to paring the nails; ib. xviii. 40-9, as to the urine (iv. 185, 197).


The first part of this custom is ascribed by Tacitus (Germ. 22) to the Germans; he gives the reason ‘Deliberant dum fingere nesciunt, constituunt dum errare non possunt’ (cf. Mrs. Nickleby, ‘Wine in, truth out’). Lack of humour in historians has erected into a system what was merely due to excess.

For Persian drinking cf. Curzon, ii. 506, (The Persian) ‘is not a tippler but a toper, not a drinker, but a drunkard’, quoting other authorities for the same view.

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