CHAPTER XII 



.^iLIAN — THE MACEDONIAN INVENTION, OR THE 

 FIRST MENTION OF AN ARTIFICIAL FLY 



" They knew 'e stole ; 'e knew they knowed ; 

 They did not tell, or make a fuss. 

 But winked at ^lian down the road, 

 And 'e winked back — the same as us ! " ^ 



^LIAN (170-230 A.D.), who, though bom in Italy and brought 

 up in the Latin tongue, acquired so complete a command of 

 Greek that he could speak it as well as an Athenian gentleman 

 (hence his sobriquet /utXiyXtDTrog) , composed his works in 

 Greek. 



His Natural History 2 soon became a standard work on 

 Zoology, although in arrangement it is very defective : for 

 instance, he skips from elephants (XI. 15) to dragons in the 

 very next chapter, and from the livers of mice in II. 56 to the 

 uses of oxen in II. 57. This treatment of things, iroiKiXa 

 TToiKiXtog , is asserted by the author to be intentional, so as to 

 avoid boring the reader. For his part he avows that he pre- 

 fers observing the habits of animals and fish, listening to the 

 nightingale, or studying the migration of cranes, to heaping 

 up riches ! 3 



Whether as a Naturalist .^lian possesses any value, whether 

 his work is " scrappy and gossiping, and largely collected from 

 older and more logical writers," •* or " from the industry 



^ After Kipling. 



^ Ilepl ZiiwV ISlOTTITOS. 



3 See Smith's Did. Gk. and Rom. Biog. and Myth., s.v. ' ^lian.' 

 * Perizonius has proved that JEUan transferred large portions of the 

 DeipnosophistcB of Athensus to his Varia Historia, a robbery which must 

 have been committed almost in the lifetime of the pillaged author • that 



185 



