Books: Works, V3

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It does not come into being in its ultimate shape, but starts as a
worm in the dead body of man or animal; then it gradually develops
legs, puts forth wings and becomes a flying instead of a creeping
thing, which generates in turn and produces a little worm, one day
to be a fly. Living with man, sharing his food and his table, it
tastes everything except his oil, to drink which is death to it. In
any case it soon perishes, having but a short span of life allotted
to it, but while it lives it loves the light, and is active only
under its influence; at night it rests, neither flying nor buzzing,
but retiring and keeping quiet.

I am able to record its considerable wisdom, shown in evading the
plots of its enemy the spider. It is always on the look-out for his
ambushes, and in the most circumspect way dodges about, that it may
not be caught, netted, and entangled in his meshes. Its valour and
spirit require no mention of mine; Homer, mightiest-voiced of
poets, seeking a compliment for the greatest of heroes, likens his
spirit not to a lion's, a panther's, a boar's, but to the courage
of the fly, to its unshrinking and persistent assault; mark, it is
not mere audacity, but courage, that he attributes to it. Though
you drive it off, he says, it will not leave you; it will have its
bite. He is so earnest an admirer of the fly that he alludes to it
not once nor twice, but constantly; a mention of it is felt to be a
poetic ornament. Now it is its multitudinous descent upon the milk
that he celebrates; now he is in want of an illustration for Athene
as she wards off a spear from the vitals of Menelaus; so he makes
her a mother caring for her sleeping child, and in comes the fly
again. Moreover he gives them that pretty epithet, 'thick-
clust'ring'; and 'nations' is his dignified word for a swarm of
them.

The fly's force is shown by the fact that its bite pierces not
merely the human skin, but that of cattle and horses; it annoys
the elephant by getting into the folds of its hide, and letting
it know the efficiency of even a tiny trunk. There is much ease
and freedom about their love affairs, which are not disposed of
so expeditiously as by the domestic fowl; the act of union is
prolonged, and is found quite compatible with flight. A fly will
live and breathe for some time after its head is cut off.

The most remarkable point about its natural history is that which I
am now to mention. It is the one fact that Plato seems to me to
have overlooked in his discourse of the soul and its immortality.
If a little ashes be sprinkled on a dead fly, it gets up,
experiences a second birth, and starts life afresh, which is
recognized as a convincing proof that its soul is immortal,
inasmuch as after it has departed it returns, recognizes and
reanimates the body, and enables it to fly; so is confirmed the
tale about Hermotimus of Clazomenae--how his soul frequently left
him and went off on its own account, and afterwards returning
occupied the body again and restored the man to life.

It toils not, but lives at its case, profiting by the labours of
others, and finding everywhere a table spread for it. For it the
goats are milked, for its behoof and man's the honey is stored, to
its palate the _chef_ adapts his sauces; it tastes before the
king himself, walks upon his table, shares his meal, and has the
use of all that is his.

Nest, home, local habitation, it has none; like the Scythians, it
elects to lead a wandering life, and where night finds it, there is
its hearth and its chamber. But as I said, it works no deeds of
darkness; 'live openly' is its motto; its principle is to do no
villany that, done in the face of day, would dishonour it.

Legend tells how Myia (the fly's ancient name) was once a maiden,
exceeding fair, but over-given to talk and chatter and song,
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 her to
what she now is. And therefore it is that she still, in memory of
Endymion, grudges all sleepers their rest, and most of all the
young and tender. Her very bite and blood-thirst tell not of
savagery, but of love and human kindness; she is but enjoying
mankind as she may, and sipping beauty.

In ancient times there was a woman of her name, a poetess wise and
beautiful, and another a famous Attic courtesan, of whom the comic
poet wrote:

As deep as to his heart fair Myia bit him.

The comic Muse, we see, disdained not the name, nor refused it the
hospitality of the boards; and parents took no shame to give it to
their daughters. Tragedy goes further and speaks of the fly in high
terms of praise, as witness the following:

Foul shame the little fly, with might courageous,
Should leap upon men's limbs, athirst for blood,
But men-at-arms shrink from the foeman's steel!

I might add many details about Pythagoras's daughter Myia, were not
her story too well known.

There are also flies of very large size, called generally soldier-
flies, or dog-flies; these have a hoarse buzz, a very rapid
flight, and quite long lives; they last the winter through without
food, mostly in sheltered nooks below the roof; the most remarkable
fact about these is that they are hermaphrodites.

But I must break off; not that my subject is exhausted; only that
to exhaust such a subject is too like breaking a butterfly on the
wheel.

REMARKS ADDRESSED TO AN ILLITERATE BOOK-FANCIER

Let me tell you, that you are choosing the worst way to attain your
object. You think that by buying up all 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 thereby your own ignorance of
literature. Why, you cannot even buy the right things: any casual
recommendation is enough to guide your choice; you are as clay in
the hands of the unscrupulous amateur, and as good as cash down to
any dealer. How are you to know the difference between genuine old
books that are worth money, and trash whose only merit is that it
is falling to pieces? You are reduced to taking the worms and moths
into your confidence; their activity is your sole clue to the value
of a book; as to the accuracy and fidelity of the copyist, that is
quite beyond you.

And supposing even that you had managed to pick out such veritable
treasures as the exquisite editions of Callinus, or those of the
far-famed Atticus, most conscientious of publishers,--what does it
profit you? Their beauty means nothing to you, my poor friend; you
will get precisely as much enjoyment out of them as a blind lover
would derive from the possession of a handsome mistress. Your eyes,
to be sure, are open; you do see your books, goodness knows, see
them till you must be sick of the sight; you even read a bit here
and there, in a scrambling fashion, your lips still busy with one
sentence while your eyes are on the next. But what is the use of
that? You cannot tell good from bad: you miss the writer's general
drift, you miss his subtle arrangements of words: the chaste
elegance of a pure style, the false ring of the counterfeit,--'tis
all one to you.

Are we to understand that you possess literary discernment without
the assistance of any study? And how should that be? perhaps, like
Hesiod, you received a laurel-branch from the Muses? As to that, I
doubt whether you have so much as heard of Helicon, the reputed
haunt of those Goddesses; your youthful pursuits were not those of
a Hesiod; take not the Muses' names in vain. They might not have
any scruples about appearing to a hardy, hairy, sunburnt shepherd:
but as for coming near such a one as you (you will excuse my
particularizing further just now, when I appeal to you in the name
of the Goddess of Lebanon?) they would scorn the thought; instead
of laurel, you would have tamarisk and mallow-leaves about your
back; the waters of Olmeum and Hippocrene are for thirsty sheep and
stainless shepherds, they must not be polluted by unclean lips. I
grant you a very creditable stock of effrontery: but you will
scarcely have the assurance to call yourself an educated man; you
will scarcely pretend that your acquaintance with literature is
more than skin-deep, or give us the names of your teacher and your
fellow students?

No; you think you are going to work off all arrears by the simple
expedient of buying a number of books. But there again: 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, though you should
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. So it is with you: you have always a book
in your hand, you are always reading; but what it is all about, you
have not an idea; you do but prick up asinine ears at the lyre's
sound. Books would be precious things indeed, if the mere
possession of them guaranteed culture to their owner. You rich men
would have it all your own way then; we paupers could not stand
against you, if learning were a marketable commodity; and as for
the dealers, no one would presume to contest the point of culture
with men who have whole shopfuls of books at their disposal.
However, you will find on examination that these privileged persons
are scarcely less ignorant than yourself. They have just your vile
accent, and are as deficient in intelligence as one would expect
men to be who have never learnt to distinguish good from bad. Now
you see, _you_ have merely bought a few odd volumes from them:
they are at the fountain-head, and are handling books day and
night. Judge from this how much good your purchases are likely to
do you; unless you think that your very book-cases acquire a
tincture of learning, from the bare fact of their housing so many
ancient manuscripts.

Oblige me by answering some questions; or rather, as circumstances
will not admit of your answering, just nod or shake your head. If
the flute of Timotheus, or that of Ismenias, which its owner sold
in Corinth for a couple of thousand pounds, were to fall into the
hands of a person who did not know how to play the instrument,
would that make him a flute-player? would his acquisition leave him
any wiser than it found him? You very properly shake your head. A
man might possess the instrument of a Marsyas or an Olympus, and
still he would not be able to play it if he had never learnt. Take
another case: a man gets hold of Heracles's bow and arrows: but he
is no Philoctetes; he has neither that marksman's strength nor his
eye. What do you say? will he acquit himself creditably? Again you
shake your head. The same will be the case with the ignorant pilot
who is entrusted with a ship, or with the unpractised rider on
horseback. Nothing is wanting to the beauty and efficiency of the
vessel, and the horse may be a Median or a Thessalian or a Koppa
[Footnote: The brand of the obsolete letter Koppa is supposed to
have denoted the Corinthian breed.]: yet I take it that the
incompetence of their respective owners will be made clear; am I
right? And now let me ask your assent to one more proposition: if
an illiterate person like yourself goes in for buying books, he is
thereby laying himself open to ridicule. You hesitate? Yet surely
nothing could be clearer: who could observe such a man at work, and
abstain from the inevitable allusion to pearls and swine?

There was a wealthy man in Asia, not many years ago, who was so
unfortunate as to lose both his feet; I think he had been
travelling through snow-drifts, and had got them frost-bitten.
Well, of course, it was a very hard case; and in ordering a pair of
wooden feet, by means of which he contrived to get along with the
assistance of servants, he was no doubt only making the best of a
bad job. But the absurd thing was, that he would always make a
point of having the smartest and newest of shoes to set off his
stumps--feet, I mean. Now are you any wiser than he, when for the
adornment of that hobbling, wooden understanding of yours you go to
the expense of such golden shoes as would tax the agility of a
sound-limbed intellect?

Among your other purchases are several copies of Homer. Get some
one to turn up the second book of the Iliad, and read to you. There
is only one part you need trouble about; the rest does not apply to
your case. I refer to the harangue of a certain ludicrous, maimed,
distorted creature called Thersites. Now imagine this Thersites,
such as he is there depicted, to have clothed himself in the armour
of Achilles. What will be the result? Will he be converted there
and then into a stalwart, comely warrior, clearing the river at a
bound, and staining its waters with Phrygian blood? Will he prove a
slayer of Asteropaeuses and Lycaons, and finally of Hectors, he who
cannot so much as bear Achilles's spear upon his shoulders? Of
course not. He will simply be ridiculous: the weight of the shield
will cause him to stagger, and will presently bring him on to his
nose; beneath the helmet, as often as he looks up, will be seen
that squint; the Achillean greaves will be a sad drag to his
progress, and the rise and fall of the breast-plate will tell a
tale of a humped-back; in short, neither the armourer nor the owner
of the arms will have much to boast of. You are just like
Thersites, if only you could see it. When you take in hand your
fine volume, purple-cased, gilt-bossed, and begin reading with that
accent of yours, maiming and murdering its contents, you make
yourself ridiculous to all educated men: your own toadies commend
you, but they generally get in a chuckle too, as they catch one
another's eye.

Let me tell you a story of what happened once at Delphi. A native
of Tarentum, Evangelus by name, a person of some note in his own
city, conceived the ambition of winning a prize in the Pythian
Games. Well, he saw at once that the athletic contests were quite
out of the question; he had neither the strength nor the agility
required. A musical victory, on the other hand, would be an easy
matter; so at least he was persuaded by his vile parasites, who
used to burst into a roar of applause the moment he touched the
strings of his lyre. He arrived at Delphi in great style: among
other things, he had provided himself with gold-bespangled
garments, and a beautiful golden laurel-wreath, with full-size
emerald berries. As for his lyre, that was a most gorgeous and
costly affair--solid gold throughout, and ornamented with all
kinds of gems, and with figures of Apollo and Orpheus and the
Muses, a wonder to all beholders. The eventful day at length
arrived. There were three competitors, of whom Evangelus was to
come second. Thespis the Theban performed first, and acquitted
himself creditably; and then Evangelus appeared, resplendent in
gold and emeralds, beryls and jacinths, the effect being heightened
by his purple robe, which made a background to the gold; the house
was all excitement and wondering anticipation. As singing and
playing were an essential part of the competition, Evangelus now
struck up with a few meaningless, disconnected notes, assaulting
his lyre with such needless violence that he broke three strings at
the start; and when he began to sing with his discordant pipe of a
voice the whole audience was convulsed with laughter, and the
stewards, enraged at his presumption, scourged him out of the
theatre. Our golden Evangelus now presented a very queer spectacle,
as the floggers drove him across the stage, weeping and bloody-
limbed, and stooping to pick up the gems that had fallen from the
lyre; for that instrument had come in for its share of the
castigation. His place was presently taken by one Eumelus of Elis:
his lyre was an old one, with wooden pegs, and his clothes and
crown would scarcely have fetched ten shillings between them. But
for all that his well-managed voice and admirable execution caused
him to be proclaimed the victor; and he was very merry over the
unavailing splendours of his rival's gem-studded instrument.
'Evangelus,' he is reported to have said to him, 'yours is the
golden laurel--you can afford it: I am a pauper, and must put up
with the Delphian wreath. No one will be sorry for your defeat;
your arrogance and incompetence have made you an object of
detestation; that is all your equipment has done for you.' Here
again the application is obvious; Evangelus differing from you only
in his sensibility to public ridicule.

I have also an old Lesbian story which is very much to the point.
It is said that after Orpheus had been torn to pieces by the
Thracian women, his head and his lyre were carried down the Hebrus
into the sea; the head, it seems, floated down upon the lyre,
singing Orpheus's dirge as it went, while the winds blew an
accompaniment upon the strings. In this manner they reached the
coast of Lesbos; the head was then taken up and buried on the site
of the present temple of Bacchus, and the lyre was long preserved
as a relic in the temple of Apollo. Later on, however, Neanthus,
son of the tyrant Pittacus, hearing how the lyre had charmed beasts
and trees and stones, and how after Orpheus's destruction it had
played of its own accord, conceived a violent fancy for the
instrument, and by means of a considerable bribe prevailed upon the
priest to give him the genuine lyre, and replace it with one of
similar appearance. Not thinking it advisable to display his
acquisition in the city in broad daylight, he waited till night,
and then, putting it under his cloak, walked off into the
outskirts; and there this youth, who had not a note of music in
him, produced his instrument and began jangling on the strings,
expecting such divine strains to issue therefrom as would subdue
all souls, and prove him the fortunate heir to Orpheus's power. He
went on till a number of dogs collected at the sound and tore him
limb from limb; thus far, at least, his fate resembled that of
Orpheus, though his power of attraction extended only to hostile
dogs. It was abundantly proved that the charm lay not in the lyre,
but solely in those peculiar gifts of song and music that had been
bestowed upon Orpheus by his mother; as to the lyre, it was just
like other lyres.

But there: what need to go back to Orpheus and Neanthus? We have
instances in our own days: I believe the man is still alive who
paid 120 pounds for the earthenware lamp of Epictetus the Stoic. I
suppose he thought he had only to read by the light of that lamp,
and the wisdom of Epictetus would be communicated to him in his
dreams, and he himself assume the likeness of that venerable sage.
And it was only a day or two ago that another enthusiast paid down
250 pounds for the staff dropped by the Cynic Proteus [Footnote:
See _Peregrine_ in Notes.] when he leaped upon the pyre. He
treasures this relic, and shows it off just as the people of Tegea
do the hide of the Calydonian boar [Footnote: See _Oenevs_ in
Notes.], or the Thebans the bones of Geryon, or the Memphians Isis'
hair. Now the original owner of this precious staff was one who for
ignorance and vulgarity would have borne away the palm from
yourself.--My friend, you are in a bad way: a stick across the head
is what you want.

They say that when Dionysius took to tragedy-writing he made such
sad stuff of it that Philoxenus was more than once thrown into the
quarries because he could not control his laughter. Finding that
his efforts only made him ridiculous, Dionysius was at some pains
to procure the tablets on which Aeschylus had been wont to write.
He looked to draw divine inspiration from them: as it turned out,
however, he now wrote considerably worse rubbish than before. Among
the contents of the tablets I may quote:

'Twas Dionysius' wife, Doridion.

Here is another:

Most serviceable woman! thou art gone!

Genuine tablet that, and the next:

Men that are fools are their own folly's butt.

Taken with reference to yourself, by the way, nothing could be more
to the point than this last line; Dionysius's tablets deserved
gilding, if only for that.

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? Much good your purchases
have been to you; one sees that already: why, your language--no, I
am wrong there, you are as dumb as a fish-but your life, your
unmentionable vices, make every one hate the sight of you; if that
is what books do, one cannot keep too clear of them. There are two
ways in which a man may derive benefit from the study of the
ancients: he may learn to express himself, or he may improve his
morals by their example and warning; when it is clear that he has
not profited in either of these respects, what are his books but a
habitation for mice and vermin, and a source of castigation to
negligent servants?

And how very foolish you must look when any one finds you with a
book in your hand (and you are never to be seen without) and asks
you who is your orator, your poet, or your historian: you have seen
the title, of course, and can answer that question pat: but then
one word brings up another, and some criticism, favourable or the
reverse, is passed upon the contents of your volume: you are dumb
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.

Once in Corinth Demetrius the Cynic found some illiterate person
reading aloud from a very handsome volume, the Bacchae of
Euripides, I think it was. He had got to the place where the
messenger is relating the destruction of Pentheus by Agave, when
Demetrius snatched the book from him and tore it in two: 'Better,'
he exclaimed, 'that Pentheus should suffer one rending at my hands
than many at yours.'

I have often wondered, though I have never been able to satisfy
myself, what it is that makes you such an ardent buyer of books.
The idea of your making any profitable use of them is one that
nobody who has the slightest acquaintance with you would entertain
for a moment: does the bald man buy a comb, the blind a mirror, the
deaf a flute-player? the eunuch a concubine, the landsman an oar,
the pilot a plough? 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.

Only one possible explanation remains: your toadies have made you
believe that in addition to your charms of person you have an
extraordinary gift for rhetoric, history, and philosophy; and you
buy books merely to countenance their flatteries. It seems that you
actually hold forth to them at table; and they, poor thirsty frogs,
must croak dry-throated applause till they burst, or there is no
drink for them. You are a most curiously gullible person: you take
in every word they say to you. You were made to believe at one time
that your features resembled those of a certain Emperor. We had had
a pseudo-Alexander, and a pseudo-Philip, the fuller, and there was
a pseudo-Nero as recently as our own grandfathers' times: you were
for adding one more to the noble army of pseudos. 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 Epirot
king Pyrrhus, remarkable man that he was in other respects, had the
same foible, and was persuaded by his flatterers that he was like
Alexander, Alexander the Great, that is. In point of fact, I have
seen Pyrrhus's portrait, and the two--to borrow a musical phrase--
are about as much like one another as bass and treble; and yet he
was convinced he was the image of Alexander. However, if that were
all, it would be rather too bad of me to insult Pyrrhus by the
comparison: but I am justified by the sequel; it suits your case so
exactly. When once Pyrrhus had got this fancy into his head, every
one 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. After showing her portraits of Philip, Perdiccas,
Alexander, Casander, and other kings, Pyrrhus finally asked her
which of these he resembled, taking it as a matter of course that
she would fix upon Alexander: however, she considered for some
time, and at length informed him that he was most like Batrachion
the cook, there being a cook of that name in Larissa who _was_
very like Pyrrhus. What particular theatrical pander _you_
most resemble I will not pretend to decide: all I can state with
certainty is that to this day you pass for a raving madman on the
strength of this fancy.. After such an instance of your critical
discernment, we need not be surprised to find that your flatterers
have inspired you with the further ambition of being taken for a
scholar.

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