Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists
C. D. Yonge, B.A., Ed.

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There is also the oxybaphum. Now common usage gives this name to the cruet that holds the vinegar; but it is also the name of a cup; and it is mentioned by Cratinus, in his Putina, in this way:—

How can a man now make him leave off this
Excessive drinking? I can tell a way;
For I will break his jugs and measures all,
And crush his casks as with a thunderbolt,
And all his other vessels which serve to drink:
Nor shall he have a single oxybaphum left,
Fit to hold wine.

But that the oxybaphum is a kind of small κύλιξ, made of earthenware, Antiphanes proves plainly enough, in his Mystis, in the following words.¹ There is a wine-bibbing old [p. 790] woman praising a large cup, and disparaging the oxybaphum as small. So when some one says to her—

Do you, then, drink;

she answers—

There I will obey you.
And, by the gods, the figure of the cup
Is quite inviting, worthy of the fame
Of this high festival; for have we not—
Have we not, and not long ago, I say,
Drunk out of earthenware oxybapha?
But may the gods, my son, give many blessings
To him who made this cup-a noble cup,
As to its beauty and its good capacity.

And also in the Babylonians of Aristophanes we hear of the oxybaphum as a drinking-cup, when Bacchus speaks of the demagogues at Athens, saying that they demanded of him two oxybapha when he was going away to trial. For we cannot think that they asked him for anything but cups. And the oxybaphum, which is put before the people who play at the cottabus, into which they pour their drops of wine, can be nothing else but a flat cup. Eubulus also, in his Mylothris, mentions the oxybaphum as a cup—

And besides, I measure out for drinking
An oxybaphum all round; and then he swore
The wine was nothing but pure vinegar,
And that the vinegar was wine, at least
Superior to the other.