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

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There is also the cup called the cissybium. This is a cup with but one handle, as Philemon says. And Neoptolemus the Parian, in the third book of his Dialects, says that this word is used by Euripides in the Andromache, to signify a cup made of ivy (κίσσινον）—

And all the crowd of shepherds flock'd together,
One bearing a huge ivy bowl of milk,
Refreshing medicine of weary toil;
Another brought the juice o' the purple vine.

For, says he, the cissybium is mentioned in a rustic assembly, where it is most natural that the cups should be made of wood. But Clitarchus says that the Aeolians called the cup which is elsewhere called scyphus, cissybium. And Marsyas says that it is a wooden cup, the same as the κύπελλον. But Eumolpus says that it is a species of cup which perhaps (says he) was originally made of the wood of the ivy. But Nicander the Colophonian, in the first book of his History of Aetolia, writes thus:—"In the sacred festival of Jupiter Didymæus they pour libations from leaves of ivy (κισσοῦ), from which circumstance the ancient cups are called cissybia. Homer says—

Holding a cup (κισσύβιον) of dark rich-colour'd wine.

And Asclepiades the Myrlean, in his essay on the cup called Nestoris, says, “No one of the men in the city or of the men of moderate fortune used to use the σκύφος or the κισσύβιον, but only the swineherds and the shepherds, and the men in the fields. Polyphemus used the cissybium, and Eumæus the other kind.” But Callimachus seems to make a blunder in the use of these names, speaking of an intimate friend of his [p. 761] who was entertained with him at a banquet by Pollis the Athenian, for he says—

For he abhorr'd to drink at one long draught
Th' amystis loved in Thrace, not drawing breath:
And soberly preferr'd a small cissybium:
And when for the third time the cup (ἄλεισον) went round,
I thus addressed him . . . . . .

For, as he here calls the same cup both κισσύβιον and ἄλεισον, he does not preserve the accurate distinction between the names. And any one may conjecture that the κισσύβιον was originally made by the shepherds out of the wood of the ivy (κισσός). But some derive it from the verb χεύμαι, used in the same sense as χωρέω, to contain; as it occurs in the fol- lowing line:—

This threshold shall contain (χείσεται) them both.

And the hole of the serpent is also called χείη, as containing the animal; and they also give the name of κήθιον, that is, χήτιον, to the box which holds the dice. And Dionysius of Samos, in his treatise on the Cyclic Poets, calls the cup which Homer calls κισσύβιον, κύμβιον, writing thus—“And Ulysses, when he saw him acting thus, having filled a κύμβιον with wine, gave it to him to drink.”