1
That you did not know the word nefandous is surely clear to everyone. When I had said of you that you were like a nefandous day—for I well remember comparing your character to a day of that kindAs Lucian explains below (12-13), an apophras hémera, or “nefandous day,’’ like a dies nefastus among the Latins, was a day of ill-omen on which no courts were held and no business affairs transacted. But the fact that a day can be called apophras does not in itself justify calling a man apophras, particularly as the word is of the feminine gender; and that is what Lucian obviously did (cf. § 16, and especially § 23). It might have been defended by citing the comedian Eupolis (Fr. Incert., 832M., 309K.): ‘On going out, I chanced to meet a wight nefandous (avOpwaos dmod¢pds) with a fickle eye.” Either Lucian did not know the passage, or perhaps he thought that to reply in that way would be too like a Lexiphanes. Anyhow, he elected to infuriate his critic and divert his public by being transparently disingenuous and mendacious, and entirely evading the real issue. What his talk of “comparing” amounts to is commented on in the note on § 16. — how could you, with reference to that word, have made the stricture that I was barbarous in my speech, unless you were wholly unacquainted withit? I shall teach you presently what nefandous means; but I say to you now what Archilochus once said: “You have caught a cicada by the wing.”Bergk, frg. 143. Have you ever heard of a writer of iambic verses named Archilochus, a Parian by birth, a man absolutely independent and given to frankness, who did not hesitate at all to use insulting language, no matter how much pain he was going to inflict upon those who would be exposed to the gall of his iambics? Well, when he was abused by someone of that type, he said that the man had caught a cicada by the wing, likening himself, Archilochus, to the cicada, which by nature is vociferous, even without any compulsion, but when it is caught by the wing, cries out still more lustily. “Unlucky man,” said he, “what is your idea in provoking against yourself a vociferous poet, in search of motives and themes for his iambics?”See G. L. Hendrickson, “Archilochus and Catullus,’’ Class. Philol. (1925), 155-157. With the aid of Catullus 40, he is able to identify the poem from which Lucian quotes with the one from which we have the fragment addressed to “Father Lycambes” (Bergk, 88), and to reconstruct part of the context.
