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

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With respect to Snails.—Philyllius says—

I am not a grasshopper, nor a snail, O woman.

And in a subsequent passage he says—

Sprats, tunny fish, and snails, and periwinkles.

And Hesiod calls the snail,

The hero that carries his house on his back.

And Anaxilas says—

You are e'en more distrustful than a snail;
Who fears to leave even his house behind him.

And Achæus speaks of them, and says—

Can such a vapour strange produce
The snails, those horned monsters?

And an enigma, like a fishing-net, having reference to the snail, is often proposed at banquets, in these terms—

What is that spineless bloodless beast of the woods,
Who makes his path amid the humid waters.

And Aristotle, in the fifth book of his treatise on the Parts of Animals, says—“Snails appear to become pregnant in the autumn and in spring, and they are the only animals with coverings of shells that have ever been detected in union.” But Theophrastus says, in his treatise about Animals which live in Holes—“Snails live in holes during the winter, and still more in the summer, on which account they are seen in the greatest numbers during the autumn rains. But their holes in the summer are made upon the ground, and in the trees.” There are some snails which are called σέσιλοι. Epicharmus says—

Instead of all these animals, they have locusts;
But I hate above all things the shell of the sesilus.

And Apellas relates that the Lacedæmonians call the snail σέμελος. But Apollodorus, in the second book of his Etymologies, says that there are some snails which are called κωλυσιδειπνοι, interrupters of banquets.