Book Description

1. A dispute between two consonants heard by a jury of seven vowels. Consonant Sigma sues consonant Tau for stealing words from him. I shall be almost dumb, lose my rank as a letter, and be degraded to a mere noise, exclaims Sigma. Vowels are the natural guardians of our laws and jurors. 2. Lucian sings the praises of the valiant gauze-winged fly. Her feathers are neither fledged, nor provided with quill-feathers like other birds, but resemble locusts, grasshoppers, and bees in being gauze-winged, much more delicate than Indian fabrics, lighter and softer than Greek. When spread out and moving in the sun they appear are peacock-hued. Homer likens her valour and spirit not to a lion’s, a panther’s, or a boar’s, but to her courage, to her unflinching and persistent assault. It is not mere audacity, but courage that he attributes to her. If a little ashes be sprinkled on a dead fly, she gets up and starts life afresh, which is proof that her soul is immortal, inasmuch as after it has departed it returns, reanimates the body, and enables her to fly again. She toils not, but lives profiting by the labours of others, finding everywhere a table spread for her. Like the Scythians, she leads a wandering life and, where night finds her, there is her hearth and chamber. Her ancient name is Myia, Selene’s rival for the love of Endymion. When the young man slept, she was for ever waking him with her gossip and tunes and merriment, till he lost patience and Selene in wrath turned Myia to what she now is. Since then, in memory of Endymion, the valiant fly grudges all sleepers their rest, and most of all the young and tender. Her bite and thirst for blood tell not of savagery, but of love and human kindness; she is but enjoying mankind as she may, while sipping beauty. 3. Lucian on Dipsas, the sneaky thirst-snake of the Libyan desert. On the borders of Southern Libya dwell the Garamantians, a lightly clad, agile tribe of tent-dwellers, subsisting mainly by the chase. Perils much worse than the heat, thirst, desolation, and the aridity of the Libyan desert are all sorts of reptiles, hideous and venomous beyond belief or cure. The direst of all, bred in the sand, is the viper-like Dipsas or thirst-snake; his bite is sharp, and the venom acts at once, inducing agonies to which there is no relief. Dipsas has an unquenchable thirst: the more he drinks, the thirstier he becomes. He conceals himself near the eggs, and when a man comes, crawls out and bites the unfortunate, sentencing him to quenchless thirst before a harrowing demise. Gentlemen! My feelings towards you are the same as those of Dipsas’ victim towards drink: the more I have of your company, the more of it I want; my thirst for it rages uncontrollably; I shall never have enough of this drink. Where else could one find such clear sparkling water to refresh the soul? 4. Lucian harangues an illiterate book-fancier in Syria. Do you think that by buying up the best books you can lay your hands on, you will pass for a man of literary tastes? not a bit of it; you are merely exposing your ignorance of literature. You may get together the works of Demosthenes, and his eight beautiful copies of Thucydides, all in the orator’s own handwriting, and all the manuscripts that Sulla sent away from Athens to Italy — and you will be no nearer to culture at the end of it, even if you sleep with them under your pillow, or paste them together and wear them as a garment; an ape is still an ape, says the proverb, though his trappings be of gold. What is your idea, now, in all this rolling and unrolling of scrolls? To what end the gluing and the trimming, the cedar oil and saffron, the leather cases and the bosses? You are as dumb as a fish but your life and your unmentionable vices, make every one hate the sight of you. If that is what books do, one cannot keep too clear of them. You are dense and helpless; you pray for the earth to open and swallow you. You stand like Bellerophon with the warrant for your own execution in your hand. Does the bald man buy a comb, the blind a mirror, the deaf a flute, the eunuch a concubine, the landsman an oar, the pilot a plough? Or are you merely seizing an opportunity of displaying your wealth? Is it just your way of showing the public that you can afford to spend money even on things that are of no use to you? Why, even a Syrian like myself knows that if you had not got your name foisted into that old man’s will, you would have been starving by this time, and all your books must have been put up to sale. After all, it was nothing for an illiterate fool like you to take such a fancy into his head, and walk about with his chin in the air, aping the gait and dress and expression of his supposed model: even the Epirote king Pyrrhus, remarkable man that he was in other respects, had the same foible, and was persuaded by his flatterers that he looked like Alexander the Great. Once Pyrrhus had got this fancy into his head, that he was the look-alike of Alexander, everyone else ran mad for company, till at last an old woman of Larissa, who did not know Pyrrhus, told him the plain truth, and cured his delusion. Come to your senses then, while there is yet time: sell your library to some scholar and, while you are about it, sell your new house too, and wipe off part of your debt to the slave-dealers. Books cannot mask the deficiencies of your education by throwing dust in our eyes. You are exactly like the quack doctors, who provide themselves with silver cupping-glasses, gold-handled lancets, and ivory cases for their instruments; they are quite incapable of using them when the time comes, and have to give place to some properly qualified surgeon, who produces a lancet with a keen edge and a rusty handle, and affords immediate relief to the sufferer. Carry on buying books then, and reap the glory that comes of possessions: only, let that be enough; presume not to touch nor read; pollute not with that tongue the poetry and eloquence of the ancients; what harm have they ever done to you? 5. Lucian puts up various philosophers for sale by auction in a slave market. Bring up the lots and put them in line, said Zeus. Give them a rub up first, though; we must have them looking their best, to attract bidders. Pythagoras was sold for 40 pounds. Diogenes was sold cheaply for just 3 pence. No bids were placed for a Cyrenaic philosopher. No bids were placed for Democritus and Heraclitus. Socrates was sold to Dion of Syracuse for 500 pounds. Epicureanism was sold for 8 pounds. Chrysippus was sold to a pool of shareholders for 50 pounds. A Peripatetic slave was sold for 80 pounds. A sceptic slave kept wrangling with his new master. 6. Lucian’s diatribe on true philosophy and her counterfeits. An autobiographic sequel to the sale of philosophers where Lucian, who has taken upon him the name of rhetorician Parrhesiades, continues satirising the philosophers of the Hellenistic period. 7. Ignorance and assumption stretching out a hand to slander. Lucian elucidates the origin, nature, and dreadful consequences of slander. Ignorance is the source of endless human woes, spreading a mist over facts, obscuring truth, and casting a dark gloom everywhere. Whatever we do, we are perpetually slipping about. Ptolemy IV Philopator, the fourth pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt, was not distinguished for sagacity: he had been brought up on a royal diet of adulation. The malicious slander of Apelles so inflamed his prejudice and carried him away, that the underwhelming strength of the case never struck him. Slander is an undefended indictment, concealed from its object, and owing its success to one-sided half-informed procedure. Listen not to a tale bearer for, as he discoverers the secrets of others, so he will yours in turn, says Socrates. Of all the ills that flesh is heir to, none is more grievous or more iniquitous than that a man should be condemned unjudged and unheard. Slander would never do the harm it does, if it were not made plausible; it would never prevail against truth, that strongest of all things, if it were not dressed up into really attractive bait. The venom has entered the ear and inflamed the brain; the hearer does not wait for confirmation, but abandons his friend. The slanderer finds out where the soul is weak or corrupt or accessible, there makes his assault, there applies his engines, and enters at a point where there are no defenders to mark his approach. Once in, he soon has all in flames. We all delight in whisperings and insinuations. I know people whose ears are as agreeably titillated with slander as their skin with a feather. The slanderer’s tactics include deceit, falsehood, perjury, insinuation, presumption, and a thousand other hereditary evils and moral infirmities. But the chief of them all is flattery, sister of the calumniator and crafty machinator. Supported by all these allies, the slanderer’s attack prevails; there is no defence or resistance to the assault; the hearer surrenders without reluctance, and the slandered knows nothing of what is going on; as when a town is stormed by night, he has his throat cut in his sleep. There are those who, if they subsequently learn that they have condemned a friend in error, are too much ashamed of their error and avoid looking at him in the face again; you might suppose the discovery of his innocence was a personal injury to them. What then should we, men of sense and decency, do? We should shut our ears to those siren voices that allure and ensnare the mind, and sail past the ear-charmers. Thus shielded from calumny and prejudice, we should practise proper discrimination and judgement, and above all charity to each other’s faults.