[Illustration] This kingdom of “speculative science” gave the hint to Swift for his island of Laputa.

EPHESIAN, a toper, a dissolute sot, a jovial companion.  When Page (2 Henry IV. act ii. sc. 2) tells Prince Henry that a company of men were about to sup with Falstaff, in Eastcheap, and calls them “Ephesians,” he probably meant soldiers called fethas ("foot-soldiers"), and hence topers.  Malone suggests that the word is a pun on pheese ("to chastise or pay one tit for tat"), and means “quarrelsome fellows.”

EPHESIAN POET (The), Hipponax, born at Ephesus (sixth century B.C.).

EPIC POETRY (The Father of), Homer (about 950 B.C.).

EPICENE (3 syl.), or The Silent Woman, one of the three great comedies of Ben Jonson (1609).

The other two are Volpone (2 syl., 1605), and The Alchemist (1610).

EPICURUS.  The aimee de coeur of this philosopher was Leontium. (See LOVERS).

EPICURUS OF CHINA, Tao-tse, who commenced the search for “the elixir of perpetual youth and health” (B.C. 540).

[Illustration] Thomas Moore has a prose romance entitled The Epicure’an.  Lucretius the Roman poet, in his De Rerum Natura, is an exponent of the Epicurean doctrines.

EPIDAURUS (That God in), Aescula’pius, son of Apollo, who was worshipped in Epidaurus, a city of Peloponne’sus.  Being sent for to Rome during a plague, he assumed the form of a serpent.—­Livy, Nat.  Hist., xi.; Ovid, Metaph., xv.

  Never since of serpent kind
  Lovelier, not those that in Illyria changed
  Hermione and Cadmus, or the god
  In Epidaurus.

Milton, Paradise Lost, ix. 507 (1665).

(Cadmus and his wife Harmonia [Hermoine] left Thebes and migrated into Illyria, where they were changed into serpents because they happened to kill one belonging to Mars.)

EPHIAL’TES (4 syl.), one of the giants who made war upon the gods.  He was deprived of his left eye by Apollo, and of his right eye by Hercules.

EPIG’ONI, seven youthful warriors, sons of the seven chiefs who laid siege to Thebes.  All the seven chiefs (except Adrastos) perished in the siege; but the seven sons, ten years later, took the city and razed it to the ground.  The chiefs and sons were:  (1) Adrastos, whose son was Aegi’aleus (4 syl.); (2) Polynikes, whose son was Thersan’der; (3) Amphiar’aos (5 syl.), whose son was Alkmaeon (the chief); (4) Ty’deus (2 syl.), whose son was Diome’des; (5) Kap’aneus (3 syl.), whose son was Sthen’elos; (6) Parthenopae’os, whose son was Promachos; (7) Mekis’theus (3 syl.), whose son was Eury’alos.

AEschylos has a tragedy on The Seven Chiefs against Thebes.  There are also two epics, one The Thebaid of Statius, and The Epigoni sometimes attributed to Homer and sometimes to one of the Cyclic poets of Greece.