54
If you cross the sea again to Asia, there are many dramas there—Samos, at the outset, with the fate of Polycrates and his daughter’s wanderings, extending to Persia,This allusion is puzzling. Nothing about the daughter of Polycrates is known to us except that she foretold her father’s death through a dream (Herod., III, 124). Since Herodotus tells also how Syloson, the brother of Polycrates, went to Egypt as an exile, earned the gratitude of Darius, who was serving there as a guardsman, by giving him a cloak which Darius coveted and sought to buy, and later, after the death of Polycrates, visited Susa and obtained from Darius his restoration to Samos and establishment as ruler of the island, it has been thought that Lucian has been guilty of confusing the brother with the daughter. But Lucian was a little too well acquainted with Herodotus (and the world with the story of Syloson’s cloak) to make this quite credible. A gap in the text here is easily possible, but it may also be that Hellenistic imagination gave the daughter a romantic history which dancers had selected for portrayal. and the stories that are still older—the loquaciousness of Tantalus, the feast of the gods at his house, the butchering of Pelops, and his shoulder of ivory.
55
In Italy, moreover, we have the Eridanus, and Phaethon, and the poplars that are his sisters, mourning and weeping amber.
56
And a man of the sort I have in mind will know about the Hesperides, too, and the dragon that guards the golden fruit, and the toil of Atlas, and about Geryon, and the lifting of his cattle from Erytheia.
57
And he will not fail to know all the fabulous transformations, the people who have been changed into trees or beasts or birds, and the women who have turned into men; Caeneus, I mean, and Tiresias, and their like.Caeneus and Tiresias are coupled also in Gallus, 19. On Caeneus, a woman who at her own request was changed by Poseidon into a man, see especially Sir J. G. Frazer’s note on Apoll., Epit., I, 22.
