Note * — Chapter XVIII · Athenian Cookery and the Symposium.

It is with such a white fib that the host Agathon salutes Aristodemus, Socrates’s companion in Plato’s Symposium.

[+] Of these “Parasites” or “Flies” (as owing to their migratory habits they were sometimes called), countless stories were told, whereof the following is a sample: there was once a law in Athens that not over thirty guests were to be admitted to a marriage feast, and an officer was obliged to count all the guests and exclude the superfluous. A “fly” thrust in on one occasion, and the officer said: “Friend, you must retire. I find one more here than the law allows.” “Dear fellow,” quoth the “fly,” “you are utterly mistaken, as you will find, if you kindly count again—only beginning with me.”