LYCINUS
Most of the company were drunk by then, and the room was full of uproar. Dionysodorus the rhetorician was making speeches, pleading first on one side and then on the other, and was getting applauded by the servants who stood behind him. Histiaeus the grammarian, who had the place next him, was reciting verse, combining the lines of Pindar and Hesiod and Anacreon in such a way as to make out of them a single poem and a very funny one, especially in the part where he said, as though foretelling what was going to happen: They smote their shields together, Iliad 4, 447. and Then lamentations rose, and vaunts of men. Iliad 4, 450Ausonius’ Cento Nupiialis, an epithalamium composed of tags from Vergil, illustrates Lucian’s meaning perfectly. But Zenothemis was reading aloud from a closely written book that he had taken from his attendant.
When, as often happens, the service of the waiters was interrupted for a while, Aristaenetus planned to prevent even that period from being unentertaining and empty, and ordered the clown to come in and do or say something funny, in order to make his guests still merrier. In came an ugly fellow with his head shaven except for a few hairs that stood up straight on his crown. First he danced, doubling himself up and twisting himself about to cut a more ridiculous figure; then he beat time and recited scurrilous verses in an Egyptian brogue, and finally he began to poke fun at the guests.
