Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
John C. Rolfe, Ed.

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[p. 249] or drier food, which ought to pass into the stomach, should fall from the mouth and slip into that tube through which the breath goes back and forth, and by such an accident the path of the breath should be cut off, there has been placed at these two openings by a kind of helpful device of nature, a sort of movable valve which is called the “epiglottis,” which alternately shuts and opens. This epiglottis, while we are eating and drinking, covers and protects “the rough windpipe,” in order that no particle of food or drink may fall into that path, so to speak, of the rising and falling breath; and on that account no moisture passes into the lungs, since the opening of the windpipe itself is well protected.

These are the views of the physician Erasistratus, as opposed to Plato. But Plutarch, in his Symposiacs, ¹ says that the originator of Plato's opinion was Hippocrates, and that the same opinion was held by Philistion of Locris ² and Dioxippus the pupil of Hippocrates, famous physicians of the olden time; also that the epiglottis, of which Erasistratus spoke, was not placed where it is to prevent anything that we drank from flowing into the windpipe; for fluid seems necessary and serviceable for refreshing and moistening the lungs; but it was placed there as a kind of controller and arbiter, to exclude or admit whatever was necessary for the health of the body; to keep away all foods from the windpipe and turn them to the stomach, but to divide what is drunk between the stomach and the lungs. And that part which ought to be admitted into the lungs through the windpipe the epiglottis does not let through rapidly and all at once, but when it has been checked and held back, as it were by a kind