Many old writers mention the great and famous city of Damascus. Now in the territory of the Damascenes there is a very large quantity of the so‑called cuckoo-apples, cultivated with great skill. Hence this fruit gets the special name of "damson," excelling the same kind grown in other countries.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Many old writers mention the great and famous city of Damascus. Now in the territory of the Damascenes there is a very large quantity of the so‑called cuckoo-apples, cultivated with great skill. Hence this fruit gets the special name of "damson," excelling the same kind grown in other countries." in the context of "Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 2, 49e
• These, then, are plums, mentioned, among others, by Hipponax (Bergk, P.L.G., frag. 81):
They wore a chaplet of plums and mint.
• Alexis (Theodor Kock, C.A.F., II, 397):
A. Now look you! I've seen a vision, I think, which portends victory. — B. Tell it. — A. Attention, then. In the stadium methought one of the contestants, stripped for the fray, came up and crowned me with a circling chaplet of plums. — B. Great Heracles! — A. Ripe, they were.
• And again (ibid., 398):
Have you ever seen a sweetbread nicely broiled, or a baked stuffed spleen, or a basket of ripe plums? That is how his face looks.
• Nicander (Schneider, frag. 87):
The apple which they call the cuckoo's.
• But Clearchus the Peripatetic says (F.H.G., II, 327) that the Rhodians and the Sicilian Greeks call plums sloes, as does also the Syracusan Theocritus (VII, 146):
Young trees weighted to the ground with sloes.
• And again (XII, 3):
As much as an apple is sweeter than a sloe.
• But this fruit, though smaller round than a plum, is the same in taste, but slightly more acrid. Seleucus in his Dialect Lexicon says that êla, cuckoo-apples, and madrya are the same kind of plum. Madrya is for malodrya ("apple-fruit"); brabyla are so called because, being laxative, they "eject the food"; and êla is for mêla ("apples"), according to Demetrius Ixion in his Etymology. But Theophrastus says (Historia Plantarum, III, 6, 4): coccymêlea ('plum-tree') and spodias ('bullace') — the latter is a kind of wild plum-tree; while Araros (Kock, II, 219. See Pollux, I, 232) calls both the plum-tree and its fruit coccymêlon. Diphilus of Siphnos says that these are fairly juicy, perishable, easily excreted, but of little value as food." to mean that wisdom is timeless.