Lucian Muscae Encomium 5

[5] I can also mention her great intelligence in escaping her designing foe, the spider. She watches for him lurking in ambush, and is wary of him, turning aside from his attack, so as not to be captured by being ensnared and falling into the toils of the creature. Of her courage and bravery it is not for me to speak, but for Homer, the most mighty-mouthed of the poets; for when he , seeks to praise the foremost of the heroes, ¹ he does not compare his bravery to a lion’s or a leopard’s or a wild boar’s, but to the fearlessness of the fly and the daring and insistency of her attack. He does not say that she is reckless, but fearless: ² that even if she is kept away she does not desist but is eager to bite. So outspoken is he in his praise and fondness for the fly that he mentions her net merely once or twice but often; in consequence, references to her enhance the beauty of his poems. Now he describes her swarming flight after milk; ³ now, when Athena turns the arrow aside from Menelaus in order that it may not strike a vital spot, he likens her to a mother tending a sleeping child, and again introduces the fly into the comparison. ⁴ Moreover, he has adorned them with fine epithets in calling them “clustering” and their swarms “hordes.” ⁵

[5] I am able to record its considerable wisdom, shown in evading the plots of its enemy the spider. It is always on the look-out for his ambushes, and in the most circumspect way dodges about, that it may not be caught, netted, and entangled in his meshes. Its valour and spirit require no mention of mine; Homer, mightiest-voiced of poets, seeking a compliment for the greatest of heroes, likens his spirit not to a .ion’s, a panther’s, a boar’s, but to the courage of the fly, to its unshrinking and persistent assault; mark, it is not mere audacity, but courage, that he attributes to it. Though you drive it off, he says, it will not leave you; it will have its bite. He is so earnest an admiret of the fly that he alludes to it not once nor twice, but constantly; a mention of it is felt to be a poetic ornament. Now it is its multitudinous descent upon the milk that he celebrates; now he is in want of an illustration for Athene as she wards off a speat from the vitals of Menelaus; so he makes her a mother caring for her sleeping child, and in comes the fly again. Moreover he gives them that pretty epithet, ‘thick-clust’ring’; and ‘nations’ is his dignified word for a swarm of them.