Lynceus, too, mentions the fig-trees which grow in Rhodes, in his Epistles; instituting a comparison between the best of the Athenian kinds and the Rhodian species. And he writes in these terms:—“But these fig-trees appear to vie with Lacedæmonian trees of the same kind, as mulberries do with figs; and they are put on the table before supper, not after supper as they are here, when the taste is already vitiated by satiety, but while the appetite is still uninfluenced and unappeased.” And if Lynceus had tasted the figs which in the beautiful Rome are called καλλιστρούθια, as I have, he would have been by far more long-sighted than ever his namesake was. So very far superior are those figs to all the other figs in the whole world. Other kinds of figs grown near Rome are held in high esteem; and those called the Chian figs, and the Libianian; those two named the Chalcidic, and the African figs; as Herodotus the Lycian bears witness, in his treatise on Figs.
Athenaeus. The Deipnosophists. Or Banquet Of The Learned Of Athenaeus. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1854.
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