Therefore, if ever you hear her sing, Lycinus, not only will you have learned by experience, through being turned into stone, what the Gorgons can do, but you will know also what the effect of the Sirens was like; for you will stand there enchanted, I know right well, forgetful of country and of kin; and if you stop your ears with wax, the song, in spite of you, will slip through the very wax! Such music is it, a lesson learned of some Terpsichore or Melpomene, or of Calliope herself, fraught with a thousand witcheries of every sort. I may sum it up by saying: “Imagine that you are listening to such singing as would naturally come from such lips and from those teeth.” You yourself have seen the lady in question, so consider that you have heard her.
As to the precision of her language, and its pure Ionic quality, as to the fact that she has a ready tongue in conversation and is full of Attic wit— that is nothing to wonder at. It is an inherited trait in her, and ancestral, and nothing else was to be expected, since she partakes of Athenian blood through the settlement which they planted.Athens and Theseus were thought to have had a hand in the foundation of Smyrna. Lucian’s contemporary Aristides makes much of this. Nor indeed am I disposed to wonder at the further fact that a countrywoman of Homer likes poetry and holds much converse with it.
