7
Lo, from your eyes I have lifted a veil that before was upon them. So that your sight may be sure to distinguish a god from a mortal. Iliad5, 127 ff. "Lo, from your eyes I have lifted a veil that before was upon them. So that your sight may be sure to distinguish a god from a mortal.”! How about it? Do you see now?
7
Marvellously! Lynceus was a blind man beside me; so now give me the necessary instruction and answer. my questions. But would you like me to ask them in the language of Homer, so that you may know that I myself am not unfamiliar with his poetry?
7
How can you know any of it when you are always on shipboard and at the oar?
7
See here, that is a libel on my calling! When I set’ him over the ferry after his death, I leard him recite a quantity of verses and still remember some of them, although a good bit of a storm caught us then. You see, he began to sing a song that was not too auspicious for ‘the passengers, telling how Poseidon brought the clouds together, stirred up the deep by plunging in his trident as if it were a ladle, excited all the gales and a lot more of it. Thus he put the sea in a commotion with his verses, and a black squall suddenly struck us and just missed capsizing the boat. Then he became seasick and jettisoned most of his lays, including Scylla and Charybdis and the Cyclops; so that it wasn’t hard for me to get a little salvage out of all that he let go.Lucian appears to have borrowed this from a picture by Galato in which the indebtedness of the other poets to Homer was caricatured with more force than elegance.
8
Tell me: Who is the burly man yonder, the hero so tall and so handsome, Towering over the throng by a head and a broadpair of shoulders? Parody on Iliad3, 226 (Ajax).
8
That is Milo, the athlete from Croton. The Greeks are clapping their hands at him because he has lifted the bull and is carrying him through the centre of the stadium.
