Quaestiones Convivales

WHEN upon a dream I had forborne eggs a long time, on purpose that in an egg (as in a Carian[*](Referring to the saying ἐν Καρὶ κινδυνεύειν, experimentum facere in corpore vili. (G.))) I might make experiment of a notable vision that often troubled me; some at Sossius Senecio’s table suspected that I was tainted with Orpheus’s or Pythagoras’s opinions, and refused to cat an egg (as some do the heart and brain) imagining it to be the principle of generation. And Alexander the Epicurean ridiculingly repeated,—

To feed on beans and parents’ heads

Is equal sin;

as if the Pythagoreans covertly meant eggs by the word κύαμοι (beans), deriving it from κύω or κυέω (to conceive), and thought it as unlawful to feed on eggs as on the animals that lay them. Now to pretend a dream for the cause of my abstaining, to an Epicurean, had been a defence more irrational than the cause itself; and therefore I suffered jocose Alexander to enjoy his opinion, for he was a pleasant man and excellently learned.