7–8
CHARON
Marvellously! Lynceus was a blind man beside me; so now give me the necessary instruction and answer. my questions. But would you like me to ask them in the language of Homer, so that you may know that I myself am not unfamiliar with his poetry?
HERMES
How can you know any of it when you are always on shipboard and at the oar?
5
CHARON
See here, that is a libel on my calling! When I set’ him over the ferry after his death, I leard him recite a quantity of verses and still remember some of them, although a good bit of a storm caught us then. You see, he began to sing a song that was not too auspicious for ‘the passengers, telling how Poseidon brought the clouds together, stirred up the deep by plunging in his trident as if it were a ladle, excited all the gales and a lot more of it. Thus he put the sea in a commotion with his verses, and a black squall suddenly struck us and just missed capsizing the boat. Then he became seasick and jettisoned most of his lays, including Scylla and Charybdis and the Cyclops; so that it wasn’t hard for me to get a little salvage out of all that he let go.Lucian appears to have borrowed this from a picture by Galato in which the indebtedness of the other poets to Homer was caricatured with more force than elegance.
Tell me: Who is the burly man yonder, the hero so tall and so handsome, Towering over the throng by a head and a broadpair of shoulders? Parody on Iliad3, 226 (Ajax).
