Piscator

Lucian of Samosata

Translated by Austin Morris Harmon

1 chapter · about 39 min

Get it in Sphinx

Coming soon to iPhone and Android. Join the waitlist to hear when Sphinx opens.

Join the waitlist
Your phone

We'll only email you about Sphinx; you can ask us to remove you any time.

The opening

SOCRATES Pelt, pelt the scoundrel with plenty of stones! Heap him with clods! Pile him up with broken dishes, too! Beat the blackguard with your sticks! Look out he doesn’t get away! Throw, Plato; you too, Chrysippus; you too; everybody at once! Let’s charge him together. “Let wallet to wallet give succour, and cudgel to cudgel,” for he is our joint enemy, and there is not a man of us whom he has not outraged. Diogenes, ply your stick, if ever you did before; let none of you weaken; let him pay the penalty for his ribaldry. What is this? Have yon given out, Epicurus and Aristippus? Come, that is too bad! Show yourselves men, ye sages, and call up the fury of battle.

SOCRATES Aristotle, make haste! Still faster! That’s well; the game is bagged. We have you, villain! you shall soon find out what sort of men you have been insulting. But how are we to punish him, to be sure? Let us invent a complex death for him, such as to satisfy us all; in fact he deserves to die seven times over for each of us.

The whole book is in the Sphinx app.

About this edition

The words
Austin Morris Harmon's English translation, copied word for word.
Copied from

Perseus Digital Library (Tufts University); CC BY-SA 4.0 — this edition may be reused under the same share-alike terms. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0