A Florilegium of Lucian of Samosata

Lucian of Samosata, Henry Watson Fowler, Francis George Fowler · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 72 pages

A florilegium — a gathering of selected passages — from Lucian of Samosata in the translation of Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George Fowler, running to seventy-two pages and opened by a numbered abstract and train of thoughts that summarises each piece before it appears.

The selections show the two sides the title names. The first is The Consonants at Law, in which Sigma sues Tau for stealing words from him before a jury of seven vowels, complaining that he will be left almost dumb, lose his rank as a letter and be degraded to a mere noise — the vowels being described as the natural guardians of the laws and therefore the proper jurors. The second is The Fly, a mock-encomium that praises its subject in the full manner of serious rhetoric: her wings are neither fledged nor quilled like other birds' but gauze-like as in locusts, grasshoppers and bees, more delicate than Indian fabrics and peacock-hued when spread in the sun; Homer, it is noted, likened valour not to a lion's or a panther's but to hers, attributing to her not mere audacity but courage. The joke is then pressed into philosophy — that a dead fly sprinkled with ashes gets up and starts life afresh, offered as proof that her soul is immortal since it departs and returns — and into social satire, the fly toiling not but living by the labours of others, and leading a wandering life like the Scythians, where night finds her being her hearth and chamber. The mythological close gives her the name Myia, Selene's rival for Endymion, who woke him so often with gossip and tunes that Selene turned her into what she now is, which is why she grudges sleepers their rest.

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