Book 2
57
Eparchides says that Euripides the poet was once staying on a visit at Icarus, and that, when it had happened that a certain woman being with her children in the fields, two of them being full-grown sons and the other being an unmarried daughter, eat some poisonous mushrooms, and died with her children in consequence, he made this epigram upon them:— O Sun, whose path is through th' undying heaven, Have you e'er before seen a misery such as this? A mother, a maiden daughter, and two sons, All dying on one day by pitiless fate? Diodes the Carystian, in the first book of his treatise on the Wholesomes, says, "The following things which grow wild should be boiled,—beetroot, mallow, sorrel, nettes, spinach, onions, leeks, orach, and mushrooms.
58
Then there is a plant called sium. And Speusippus, in the second book of his treatise on Things Similar, says that its leaf resembles the marsh parsley; on which account Ptolemy the Second, surnamed Euergetes, who was king of Egypt, insists upon it that the line in Homer ought to be written thus— And around were soft meadows of sium or parsley; for that it is σία which are usually found in company with parsley, and not ἴα (violets).
