Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists
C. D. Yonge, B.A., Ed.

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There is another sort of cup called the deinus. And that this is the name of a cup we are assured by Dionysius of Sinope, in his Female Saviour, where he gives a catalogue [p. 745] of the names of cups, and mentions this among them, speak- ing as follows—

And as for all the kinds of drinking-cups,
Lady, all fair to see,—dicotyli,
Tricotyli besides, the mighty deinus,
Which holds an entire measure, and the cymbion
The scyphus and the rhytum; on all these
The old woman keeps her eyes, and minds nought else.

And Cleanthes the philosopher, in his book on Interpretation, says, that the cups called the Thericlean, and that called the Deinias, are both named from the original makers of them. And Seleucus, saying that the deinus is a kind of cup, quotes some lines of Stratis, from his Medea—

Dost know, O Creon, what the upper part
Of your head doth resemble? I can tell you:
'Tis like a deinus turned upside down.

And Archedicus, in his Man in Error, introducing a servant speaking of some courtesans, says—

A. I lately introduced a hook-nosed woman,
Her name Nicostrata; but surnamed also
Scotodeina, since (at least that is the story)
She stole a silver deinus in the dark.
B. A terrible thing (δεινὸν), by Jove; a terrible thing!

The deinus is also the name of a kind of dance, as Apollophanes tells us in his Dalis, where he says—

A strange thing (δεινὸν) is this deinus and calathiscus.

And Telesilla the Argive calls a threshing-floor also δεῖνος. And the Cyrenæans give the same name to a foot-tub, as Philetas tells us in his Attic Miscellanies.