Eating

There was a banquet and people were talking and, as so often in accounts of banquets at this period, Socrates was there. The topic was language: the origin of words and their true meanings, their relationships with other words. In particular, according to Xenophon, who describes the scene in his "Memoirs of Socrates," they were talking about the labels applied to people according to their behaviour.' This was not in itself an uninteresting subject, but failed nevertheless to absorb Socrates' complete attention. What distracted him was the table-manners of another guest, a young man who was taking no part in the discussion, too much engrossed in the food in front of him. Something about the way the boy was eating fascinated Socrates. He decided to shift the debate in a new direction: 'And can we say, my friends, ' he began, 'for what kind of behaviour a man is called an "opsophagos?'"

Fish

If Plutarch had been present (and Plutarch would have given anything to be presenthad five centuries not intervened) the question might have been a non-starter. For Plutarch is quite categorical: 'and in fact, we don't say that those, like Hercules, who love beef are "opsophagoi" . . . nor those who, like Plato, love figs, or, like Arcesilaus, grapes, but those who peel back their ears for the market-bell and spring up on each occasion around the fish-mongers." An "opsophagos," according to this ancient authority at any rate, was someone with a distinc