[1] They say, my dear Philo, that in the reign of King Lysimachus the people of Abdera were smitten by an epidemic. These were its symptoms: at first every one of them fell ill of a fever, violent and obstinate right from the start; about the seventh day it was broken, in some cases by a copious flow of blood from the nostrils, in others by heavy sweating; but their minds were left in a ridiculous state; they all went mad with tragedy, shouting iambics and creating a din; and they mostly sang solos from Euripides’ “Andromeda,”
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rendering Perseus’ speech in song; the city was full of these seventh-day tragedians, all pale and thin, roaring,
and the rest in a loud voice, hour after hour, day after day, until winter and a severe cold spell stopped their noise. Archelaus the actor seems to me to blame for such goings on. He was popular then, and in the middle of summer in the blazing heat had played the “Andromeda” for them, so that most of them brought their fever away from the theatre with them, and later when they left their beds relapsed into tragedy; the “Andromeda” kept haunting their memory, and his Perseus with Medusa’s head still flitted round everyone’s brain.
“Love, you tyrant of gods and men”
Quomodo historia conscribenda sit. Lucian of Samosata. Kenneth Kilburn (Translator). Medford, MA. Perseus 5.0.
Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.
Funding provided by The National Endowment for the Humanities.