Archon, Aristarchus of Phalerum.
Seventh Pyanepsion.
Court of the Seven Vowels.
Action for assault with robbery.
Sigma _v_. Tau.
Plaintiff's case—that the words in-ττ-are wrongfully withheld from him.
Vowels of the jury.—For some time this Mr. Tau's trespasses and
encroachments on my property were of minor importance; I made no claim
for damages, and affected unconsciousness of what I heard; my
conciliatory temper both you and the other letters have reason to know.
His covetousness and folly, however, have now so puffed him up, that he
is no longer content with my habitual concessions, but insists on more;
I accordingly find myself compelled to get the matter settled by you
who know both sides of it. The fact is, I am in bodily fear, owing to
the crushing to which I am subjected. This evergrowing aggression will
end by ousting me completely from my own; I shall be almost dumb, lose
my rank as a letter, and be degraded to a mere noise.
Justice requires then that not merely you, the jury in this case, but
the other letters also, should be on your guard against such attempts.
If any one who chooses is to be licensed to leave his own place and
usurp that of others, with no objection on your part (whose concurrence
is an indispensable condition of all writing), I fail to see how
combinations are to have their ancient constitutional rights secured to
them. But my first reliance is upon you, who will surely never be
guilty of the negligence and indifference which permits injustice; and
even if you decline the contest, I have no intention of sitting down
under that injustice myself.
It is much to be regretted that the assaults of other letters were not
repelled when they first began their lawless practices; then we should
not be watching the still pending dispute between Lambda and Rho for
possession of κιφαλαλγία or κιφαλαργία, κίσηλις or κίσηρις: Gamma would
not have had to defend its rights over γυάφαλλα, constantly almost at
blows with Kappa in the debatable land, and _per contra_ it would
itself have dropped its campaign against Lambda (if indeed it is more
dignified than petty larceny) for converting μόλις to μόγις: in fact
lawless confusion generally would have been nipped in the bud. And it
is well to abide by the established order; such trespasses betray a
revolutionary spirit.
Now our first legislators—Cadmus the islander, Palamedes, son of
Nauplius, or Simonides, whom some authorities credit with the
measure—were not satisfied with determining merely our order of
precedence in the alphabet; they also had an eye to our individual
qualities and faculties. You, Vowels of the jury, constitute the first
Estate, because you can be uttered independently; the semi-vowels,
requiring support before they can be distinctly heard, are the second;
and the lowest Estate they declared to consist of those nine which
cannot be sounded at all by themselves. The vowels are accordingly the
natural guardians of our laws.
But this—this Tau—I would give him a worse designation, but that is a
manifest impossibility; for without the assistance of two good
presentable members of your Estate, Alpha and Upsilon, he would be a
mere nonentity—he it is that has dared to outdo all injuries that I
have ever known, expelling me from the nouns and verbs of my
inheritance, and hunting me out of my conjunctions and prepositions,
till his rapacity has become quite unbearable. I am now to trace
proceedings from the beginning.
I was once staying at Cybelus, a pleasant little town, said to be an
Athenian colony; my travelling companion was the excellent Rho, best of
neighbours. My host was a writer of comedies, called Lysimachus; he
seems to have been a Boeotian by descent, though he represented himself
as coming from the interior of Attica. It was while with him that I
first detected Tau's depredations*. For some earlier occasional
attempts (as when he took to τετταράκοντα for τεσσαράκοντα, τήμερον for
σήμερον, with little pilferings of that sort) I had explained as a
trick and peculiarity of pronunciation; I had tolerated the sound
without letting it annoy me seriously.
[*Footnote: For the probably corrupt passage § 7 fin.—§ 8 init. I
accept Dindorf’s rearrangement as follows: mechr men gar oligois
epecheirei, tettarakonta legein axioun, eti de taemeron kai ta homoia
epispomenon, sunaetheian thmaen idia tauti legein, kai oiston aen moi
to akousma kai ou panu ti edaknomaen ep autois. 8. hupote d ek touton
arxamenon etolmaese kattiteron eipein kai kattuma kai pittan, eita
aperuthriasan kai basilitgan onomazein, aposteroun me ton
suggegenaemenun moi kai suntethrammenun grammatun, ou metrius ipi
toutois aganaktu.]
But impunity emboldened him; kassiteros became kattiteros, kassuma and
pissa shared its fate; and then he cast off all shame and assaulted
basigissa. I found myself losing the society in which I had been born
and bred;* at such a time equanimity is out of place; I am tortured
with apprehension; how long will it be before suka is tuka? Bear with
me, I beseech you; I despair and have none to help me; do I not well to
be angry? It is no petty everyday peril, this threatened separation
from my long-tried familiars. My kissa, my talking bird that nestled in
my breast, he has torn away and named anew; my phassa, my nhssai, my
khossuphoi—all gone; and I had Aristarchus's own word that they were
mine; half my melissai he has lured to strange hives; Attica itself he
has invaded, and wrongfully annexed its Hymettus (as he calls it); and
you and the rest looked on at the seizure.
[*Footnote: For the probably corrupt passage § 7 fin.—§ 8 init. I
accept Dindorf’s rearrangement as follows: mechr men gar oligois
epecheirei, tettarakonta legein axioun, eti de taemeron kai ta homoia
epispomenon, sunaetheian thmaen idia tauti legein, kai oiston aen moi
to akousma kai ou panu ti edaknomaen ep autois. 8. hupote d ek touton
arxamenon etolmaese kattiteron eipein kai kattuma kai pittan, eita
aperuthriasan kai basilitgan onomazein, aposteroun me ton
suggegenaemenun moi kai suntethrammenun grammatun, ou metrius ipi
toutois aganaktu.]
But why dwell on such trifles? I am driven from all Thessaly (Thettaly,
forsooth!), θαλασσα is now _mare clausum_ to me; he will not leave me a
poor garden-herb like seutlion, I have never a passalos to hang myself
upon. What a long-suffering letter I am myself, your own knowledge is
witness enough. When Zeta stole my smaragdos, and robbed me of all
Smyrna, I never took proceedings against him; Xi might break all
sunthhkai, and appeal to Thucydides (who ought to know) as sympathizing
with his xystem; I let them alone. My neighbour Rho I made no
difficulty about pardoning as an invalid, when he transplanted my
mursinai into his garden, or, in a fit of the spleen, took liberties
with my khopsh. So much for my temper.
Tau's, on the other hand, is naturally violent; its manifestations are
not confined to me. In proof that he has not spared other letters, but
assaulted Delta, Theta, Zeta, and almost the whole alphabet, I wish his
various victims to be put in the box. Now, Vowels of the jury, mark the
evidence of Delta:—'He robbed me of _endelecheia_, which he claimed,
quite illegally, as _entelecheia_.' Mark Theta beating his breast and
plucking out his hair in grief for the loss of _kolokunthh_. And Zeta
mourns for _surizein_ and _salpizein_—nay, _cannot_ mourn, for lack of
his gryzein. What tolerance is possible, what penalty adequate, for
this criminal letter's iniquities?
But his wrongs are not even limited to us, his own species; he has now
extended his operations to mankind, as I shall show. He does not permit
their tongues to work straight. (But that mention of mankind calls me
back for a moment, reminding me how he turns glossa into glotta, half
robbing me of the tongue itself. Ay, you are a disease of the tongue in
every sense, Tau.) But I return from that digression, to plead the
cause of mankind and its wrongs. The prisoner's designs include the
constraint, racking, and mutilation of their utterance. A man sees a
beautiful thing, and wishes to describe it as kalon, but in comes Tau,
and forces the man to say ταλόν: _he_ must have precedence everywhere,
of course. Another man has something to say about a vine, and lo,
before it is out, it is metamorphosed by this miserable creature into
misery; he has changed slaema to tlaema, with a suggestive hint of
τλήμων. And, not content with middle-class victims, he aims at the
Persian king himself, the one for whom land and sea are said to have
made way and changed their nature: Cyrus comes out at his bidding as
Tyrus.
Such are his verbal offences against man; his offences in deed remain.
Men weep, and bewail their lot, and curse Cadmus with many curses for
introducing Tau into the family of letters; they say it was his body
that tyrants took for a model, his shape that they imitated, when they
set up the erections on which men are crucified. Stayros the vile
engine is called, and it derives its vile name from him. Now, with all
these crimes upon him, does he not deserve death, nay, many deaths? For
my part I know none bad enough but that supplied by his own shape—that
shape which he gave to the gibbet named Stayros after him by men.