Reader

MENIPPUS Tell me, Hermes, where are the beauties of both sexes? Show me round, as I’m a newcomer. HERMES I have no time, Menippus. But just look over there to your right, where you’ll see Hyacinthus, Narcissus, NIreus, Achilles, Tyro, Helen, and Leda, and, in fact, all the beauties of old. MENIPPUS I can only see bones and bare skulls, most of them looking the same. HERMES Yet those are what all the poets admire, those bones which you seem to despise. MENIPPUS But show me Helen. I can’t pick her out myself. HERMES This skull is Helen. MENIPPUS Was it then for this that the thousand ships were manned from all Greece, for this that so many Greeks and barbarians fell, and so many cities were devastated?

HERMES Ah, but you never saw the woman alive, Menippus, or you would have said yourself that it was forgivable that they “for such a lady long should suffer woe”. Homer, Iliad, III, 157. For if one sees flowers that are dried up and faded, they will, of course, appear ugly; but when they are in bloom and have their colour, they are very beautiful. MENIPPUS Well, Hermes, what does surprise me is this: that the Achaeans didn’t know how short-lived a thing they strove for, and how soon it loses its bloom. HERMES I have no time to moralise with you, Menippus. Choose a place to lie down in, wherever you like, and I’ll be off now to fetch the other shades.