![]() ![]() And when it attracts the female to itself they wait for the night. The frog as a signal for sexual intercourse emits a certain cry to the female, like a lover singing a serenade, and this cry is called its croak, so they say. He also writes how the frog’s croak was a mating call ( ). He reports that the frogs who kept the hero Perseus awake on Mount Pireus in Thessaly were condemned to silence ( Aelian 3.37 ). Aelian describes this difference in sound. ![]() Just as in contemporary Hollywood films, frogs and their croaks were relatively ubiquitous in Ancient Greek texts.Īs many people now know frogs’ croaks differ by location (or more precisely by species, which are located in particular environments). In the Batrachomyomachia, frogs are presented as cowardly, duplicitous and sensual. Who wrote it and why? Possibly Lucian, or maybe Pigres of Halicarnassus, probably not Homer. Yet, the religion of Homer is also gently mocked: “Whom sad death seiz’d his soul flew through his wound”. The graphic violence is meant to be contrasted with the bathos of the participants. In the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the frogs and mice), there is no poignancy. Homer’s descriptions of battle are also visceral and sometimes repetitive but through simile have a poignancy. It is a pastiche of Homer and the style, themes and values of the Iliad. It only lasted one day.Ī lot is going on in this short text. Outnumbered and facing their final annihilation, at the very last moment, Zeus takes pity on the frogs and sends an army of lobsters to rout the mice. ![]() From the start the mice take the upper hand. The war is a pitiless one and killings are described in visceral and anatomical detail. Sleepless, and pain’d with headache, till first lightīatrachomyomachia, translated by George Chapman Till one wink seized mine eyes, and so I lay Nor will I yield the Frogs’ wants my supplies,įor their infirm minds that no confines keep įor I from war retir’d, and wanting sleep,Īll leap’d ashore in tumult, nor would stay The mice eat her offerings and the frogs keep her up all night: On their way, the two encounter a water snake and the Frog King sinks under the water in fear and the mouse drowns. In retaliation make preparations for all out war:Īt a meeting of the gods, Zeus asks if his fellow divinities will take sides. He encounters the kind of the Frogs who offered to host him in his palace. It all began when the king of the Mice, escaping a cat, flees to a pond, the kingdom of the frogs. One of the bloodiest wars in the ancient world was that between the Armies of Mice and Frogs. ![]()
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