ommitted]. Quoth Solon: Ardalus, I wonder you have not read the
law of Epimenides's frugality in Hesiod's writings, who prescribes
him and others this spare diet; for he was the person that gratified
Epimenides with the seeds of this nutriment, when he directed him to
inquire how great benefit a man might receive by mallows and asphodel
(Hesiod, "Works and Days," 41.) Do you believe, said Periander, that
Hesiod meant this literally; or rather that, being himself a great
admirer of parsimony, he hereby intended to exhort men to use mean and
spare diet, as most healthful and pleasant? For the chewing of mallows
is very wholesome, and the stalk of asphodel is very luscious; but this
"expeller of hunger and thirst" I take to be rather physic than natural
food, consisting of honey and I know not what barbarian cheese, and of
many and costly drugs fetched from foreign parts. If to make up this
composition so many ingredients were requisite, and so difficult to
come by and so expensive, Hesiod might have kept his breath to cool
his pottage, and never blessed the world with the discovery. And yet I
admire how your landlord, when he went to perform the great purification
for the Delians not long since, could overlook the monuments and
patterns of the first aliment which the people brought into the
temple,--and, among other cheap fruits such as grow of themselves, the
mallows and the asphodel; the usefulness and innocency whereof Hesiod
seemed in his work to magnify. Moreover, quoth Anacharsis, he affirms
both plants to be great restoratives. You are in the right, quoth
Cleodemus; for it is evident Hesiod was no ordinary physician, who could
discourse so learnedly and judiciously of diet, of the nature of wines,
and of the virtue of waters and baths, and of women, the proper times
for procreation, and the site and position of infants in the womb;
insomuch, that (as I take it) Aesop deserves much more the name of
Hesiod's scholar and disciple than Epimenides, whose great and excellent
wisdom the fable of the nightingale and hawk demonstrates. But I would
gladly hear Solon's opinion in this matter; for having sojourned long at
Athens and being familiarly acquainted with Epimenides, it is more than
probable he might learn of him the grounds upon which he accustomed
himself to so spare a diet.

To what purpose, said Solon, should I trouble him or myself to make
inquiry in a matter so plain? For if it be a blessing next to the
greate