1. A dispute between two consonants heard by a jury of seven vowels. Consonant Sigma sues consonant Tau for stealing words from him. I shall be almost dumb, lose my rank as a letter, and be degraded to a mere noise, exclaims Sigma. Vowels are the natural guardians of our laws and jurors. 2. Lucian sings the praises of the valiant gauze-winged fly. Her feathers are neither fledged, nor provided with quill-feathers like other birds, but resemble locusts, grasshoppers, and bees in being gauze-winged, much more delicate than Indian fabrics, lighter and softer than Greek. When spread out and moving in the sun they appear are peacock-hued. Homer likens her valour and spirit not to a lion’s, a panther’s, or a boar’s, but to her courage, to her unflinching and persistent assault. It is not mere audacity, but courage that he attributes to her. If a little ashes be sprinkled on a dead fly, she gets up and starts life afresh, which is proof that her soul is immortal, inasmuch as after it has departed it returns, reanimates the body, and enables her to fly again. She toils not, but lives profiting by the labours of others, finding everywhere a table spread for her. Like the Scythians, she leads a wandering life and, where night finds her, there is her hearth and chamber. Her ancient name is Myia, 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 Myia to what she now is. Since then, in memory of Endymion, the valiant fly grudges all sleepers their rest, and most of all the young and tender. Her bite and thirst for blood tell not of savagery, but of love and human kindness; she is but enjoying mankind as she may, while sipping beauty. 3. Lucian on Dipsas, the sneaky thirst-snake of the Libyan desert. On the borders of Southern Libya dwell the Garamantians, a lightly clad, agile tribe of tent-dwellers, subsisting mainly by the chase. Perils much worse than the heat, thirst, desolation, and the aridity of the Libyan desert are all sorts of reptiles, hideous and venomous beyond belief or cure. The direst of all, bred in the sand, is the viper-like Dipsas or thirst-snake; his bite is sharp, and the venom acts at once, inducing agonies to which there is no relief. Dipsas has an unquenchable thirst: the more he drinks, the thirstier he becomes. He conceals himself near the eggs, and when a man comes, crawls out and bites the unfortunate, sentencing him to quenchless thirst before a harrowing demise. Gentlemen! My feelings towards you are the same as those of Dipsas’ victim towards drink: the more I have of your company, the more of it I want; my thirst for it rages uncontrollably; I shall never have enough of this drink. Where else could one find such clear sparkling water to refresh the soul? 4. Lucian harangues an illiterate book-fancier in Syria. Do you think that by buying up 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 your ignorance of literature. 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, even if you 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. 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? You are as dumb as a fish but your life and your unmentionable vices, make every one hate the sight of you. If that is what books do, one cannot keep too clear of them. You are dense 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. Does the bald man buy a comb, the blind a mirror, the deaf a flute, the eunuch a concubine, the landsman an oar, the pilot a plough? Or 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. 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 Epirote king Pyrrhus, remarkable man that he was in other respects, had the same foible, and was persuaded by his flatterers that he looked like Alexander the Great. Once Pyrrhus had got this fancy into his head, that he was the look-alike of Alexander, everyone 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. Come to your senses then, while there is yet time: sell your library to some scholar and, while you are about it, sell your new house too, and wipe off part of your debt to the slave-dealers. Books cannot mask the deficiencies of your education by throwing dust in our eyes. You are exactly like the quack doctors, who provide themselves with silver cupping-glasses, gold-handled lancets, and ivory cases for their instruments; they are quite incapable of using them when the time comes, and have to give place to some properly qualified surgeon, who produces a lancet with a keen edge and a rusty handle, and affords immediate relief to the sufferer. Carry on buying books then, and reap the glory that comes of possessions: only, let that be enough; presume not to touch nor read; pollute not with that tongue the poetry and eloquence of the ancients; what harm have they ever done to you? 5. Lucian puts up various philosophers for sale by auction in a slave market. Bring up the lots and put them in line, said Zeus. Give them a rub up first, though; we must have them looking their best, to attract bidders. Pythagoras was sold for 40 pounds. Diogenes was sold cheaply for just 3 pence. No bids were placed for a Cyrenaic philosopher. No bids were placed for Democritus and Heraclitus. Socrates was sold to Dion of Syracuse for 500 pounds. Epicureanism was sold for 8 pounds. Chrysippus was sold to a pool of shareholders for 50 pounds. A Peripatetic slave was sold for 80 pounds. A sceptic slave kept wrangling with his new master. 6. Lucian’s diatribe on true philosophy and her counterfeits. An autobiographic sequel to the sale of philosophers where Lucian, who has taken upon him the name of rhetorician Parrhesiades, continues satirising the philosophers of the Hellenistic period. 7. Ignorance and assumption stretching out a hand to slander. Lucian elucidates the origin, nature, and dreadful consequences of slander. Ignorance is the source of endless human woes, spreading a mist over facts, obscuring truth, and casting a dark gloom everywhere. Whatever we do, we are perpetually slipping about. Ptolemy IV Philopator, the fourth pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt, was not distinguished for sagacity: he had been brought up on a royal diet of adulation. The malicious slander of Apelles so inflamed his prejudice and carried him away, that the underwhelming strength of the case never struck him. Slander is an undefended indictment, concealed from its object, and owing its success to one-sided half-informed procedure. Listen not to a tale bearer for, as he discoverers the secrets of others, so he will yours in turn, says Socrates. Of all the ills that flesh is heir to, none is more grievous or more iniquitous than that a man should be condemned unjudged and unheard. Slander would never do the harm it does, if it were not made plausible; it would never prevail against truth, that strongest of all things, if it were not dressed up into really attractive bait. The venom has entered the ear and inflamed the brain; the hearer does not wait for confirmation, but abandons his friend. The slanderer finds out where the soul is weak or corrupt or accessible, there makes his assault, there applies his engines, and enters at a point where there are no defenders to mark his approach. Once in, he soon has all in flames. We all delight in whisperings and insinuations. I know people whose ears are as agreeably titillated with slander as their skin with a feather. The slanderer’s tactics include deceit, falsehood, perjury, insinuation, presumption, and a thousand other hereditary evils and moral infirmities. But the chief of them all is flattery, sister of the calumniator and crafty machinator. Supported by all these allies, the slanderer’s attack prevails; there is no defence or resistance to the assault; the hearer surrenders without reluctance, and the slandered knows nothing of what is going on; as when a town is stormed by night, he has his throat cut in his sleep. There are those who, if they subsequently learn that they have condemned a friend in error, are too much ashamed of their error and avoid looking at him in the face again; you might suppose the discovery of his innocence was a personal injury to them. What then should we, men of sense and decency, do? We should shut our ears to those siren voices that allure and ensnare the mind, and sail past the ear-charmers. Thus shielded from calumny and prejudice, we should practise proper discrimination and judgement, and above all charity to each other’s faults.

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough-not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist.If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices-and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

Arbitri Nugae This book aims to provide a comprehensive inquiry into the short metrical intermezzos inserted in the prose narrative of Petronius' Satyrica. The text of each poem has been thoroughly investigated; in addition, special attention has been devoted to their function in the context and to the aspects connecting Petronius with the literature and culture of his time. Numerous contacts with other ancient authors have been pointed out to illustrate Petronius' attitude to the cultural and literary heritage on the one hand, and the character of his own work on the other.

Magic Words: A Dictionary is a oneofakind resource for armchair linguists, popculture enthusiasts, Pagans, Wiccans, magicians, and trivia nuts alike. Brimming with the most intriguing magic words and phrases from around the world and illustrated throughout with magical symbols and icons, Magic Words is a dictionary like no other. More than sevenhundred essay style entries describe the origins of magical words as well as historical and popular variations and fascinating trivia. With sources ranging from ancient Medieval alchemists to modern stage magicians, necromancers, and wizards of legend to miracle workers throughout time, Magic Words is a must have for any scholar of magic, language, history, and culture.

A treatise on Dutch art on par with Vasari's critical history of Italian art, Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck (or Book on Picturing) has long been recognized for its critical and historical influence--and yet, until now, no comprehensive account of the book's conception, aims, and impact has been available. In this in-depth analysis of the content and context of Van Mander's work, Walter S. Melion reveals the Schilder-Boeck's central importance to an understanding of northern Renaissance and Baroque art. By interpreting the terminology employed in the Schilder-Boeck, Melion establishes the text's relationship to past and contemporary art theory. Van Mander is seen here developing his critical categories and then applying them to Ancient, Italian, and Netherlandish artists in order to mark changes within a culture and to characterize excellence for each region. Thus Melion demonstrates how Van Mander revised both the structure and critical language of Vasari's Lives to refute the Italian's claims for the superiority of the Tuscan style, and to clarify northern artistic traditions and the concerns of Netherlandish artists. A much needed corrective to the view that Dutch art of the period was lacking in theory, Melion's work offers a compelling account of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theoretical and critical perspective and shows how this perspective suggests a rereading of northern art.

Plotinus and the Moving Image offers the first philosophical discussion on Plotinus' philosophy and film. It discusses Plotinian concepts like "the One" in a cinematic context and relates Plotinus' theory of time as a transitory intelligible movement of the soul to Bergson’s and Deleuze’s time-image. Film is a unique medium for a rapprochement of our modern consciousness with the thought of Plotinus. The Neoplatonic vestige is particularly worth exploring in the context of the newly emerging “Cinema of Contemplation.” Plotinus' search for the "intelligible" that can be grasped neither by sense perception nor by merely logical abstractions leads to a fluent way of seeing. Parallels that had so far never been discussed are made plausible. This book is a milestone in the philosophy of film. Contributors are: Cameron Barrows, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Michelle Phillips Buchberger, Steve Choe, Stephen Clark, Vincenzo Lomuscio, Tony Partridge, Daniel Regnier, Giannis Stamatellos, Enrico Terrone, Sebastian F. Moro Tornese and Panayiota Vassilopoulou.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands examines Bruegel's later paintings in the context of two contemporary discourses-art theoretical and convivial. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the author analyzes a variety of images, texts and historical records to offer a broader understanding of not only the artist, but also of the vibrant artistic dialogue occurring in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525/30-1569) was a remarkable draftsman and designer of prints as well as a great painter. His independent drawings and designs for engravings and etchings, which were carried out by the leading printmakers of his day, have fascinated scholars and the general public alike since they were created. They have recently been the subject of research that has given rise to a reevaluation of the parameters of Bruegel's oeuvre. The new scholarship has been brought to bear in the texts of the present volume, which accompanies a major exhibition of 140 of Bruegel's prints and drawings to be shown at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, from May to August 2001 and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from September to December 2001. An international group of experts discusses the new Bruegel who has emerged from recent studies, in essays on the artist's life, his contributions as a draftsman and as a printmaker, the survival of his art, and his relationship to the humanism of his day. They also illuminate his genius in entries on all the works in the exhibition. Every work is illustrated and rich comparative illustrations are included. Provenances an

Plato is well known both for the harsh condemnations of images and image-making poets that appear in his dialogues and for the vivid and intense imagery that he himself uses in his matchless prose. Through their resemblance to true reality, images have the power to move their viewers to action and to change themselves, but because of their distance from true reality, that power always remains problematic. Two recurrent problems addressed here are how an image resembles what it represents and how to avoid mistaking that image for what it represents. Plato and the Power of Images comprises twelve chapters on the ways Plato has used images, and the ways we could, or should, understand their status as images.

In this delightfully engaging book, Walter S. Gibson takes a new look at Bruegel, arguing that the artist was no erudite philosopher, but a man very much in the world, and that a significant part of his art is best appreciated in the context of humour.