Meanwhile, he regretted
his incapacity to give them a specimen of the aliens, or fish meals
of the ancients, such as the jus diabaton, the conger-eel, which,
in Galen's opinion, is hard of digestion; the cornuta, or gurnard,
described by Pliny in his Natural History, who says, the horns
of many of them were a foot and a half in length, the mullet and
lamprey, that were in the highest estimation of old, of which last
Julius Caesar borrowed six thousand for one triumphal supper. He
observed that the manner of dressing them was described by Horace,
in the account he gives of the entertainment to which Maecenas was
invited by the epicure Nasidienus:--
Affertur squillas inter muraena natantes, etc.
and told them that they were commonly eaten with the thus Syriacum,
a certain anodyne and astringent seed, which qualified the purgative
nature of the fish. This learned physician gave them to understand,
that though this was reckoned a luxurious fish in the zenith of the
Roman taste, it was by no means comparable, in point of expense, to
some preparations in vogue about the time of that absurd voluptuary
Heliogabalus, who ordered the brains of six hundred ostriches to
be compounded in one illness.
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