The Consonants at Law Sigma Vs. Tau, in the Court of the Seven Vowels (6-10)

The man who first framed these laws for us, be he the islander Cadmus[*] or Nauplius’ son Palamedes(and some attribute this provision to Simonides), did not determine which of us should be first and which second solely by putting us in the order in which our places are now fixed, but they also decided the qualities and powers that each of us has. To you, jurors, they gave the greatest honour, because you can be sounded by yourselves; to the Semivowels they gave the next highest, because they need something put with them before they can be heard ; and they prescribed that the last place of all should belong to nine letters which have no sound at all by themselves. [*] The Vowels should enforce these laws.

But this Tau here (I cannot call him by a worse name than his own), who, as Heaven is my witness, could not have made himself heard unless two of your number, Alpha and Upsilon, stout fellows and good to look on, had come to his aid—this Tau, I say, has had the audacity to injure me beyond all precedent in acts of violence, not only ousting me from my hereditary nouns and verbs, but banishing me likewise from conjunctions and prepositions all at once, so that I cannot stand his monstrous greed any longer. Where and how he began it, you shall now hear.

Once I made a visit to Cybelus, which is rather an agreeable little village, settled, the story has it, by . Athenians. I took with me sturdy Rho, the best of neighbours, and stopped at the house of a comic poet called Lysimachus, evidently a Boeotian by descent, though he would have it that he came from the heart of Attica. [*] It was at that foreigner’s that I detected the encroachments of this fellow Tau. As long as it was but little that he attempted, venturing to mispronounce four (τέσσαρα—τέτταρα) and forty (τεσσαράκοντα—τετταράκοντα), and also to lay hands on to-day (σήμερον—τήμερον), and the like and say they were his own, thus depriving me of my kith and kin among the letters, I thought it was just his way and could put up with what I heard, and was not much annoyed over my losses.

But when he went on and ventured to mispronounce tin (κασσίτερον—καττίτερον) and shoe-leather (κάσσυμα—κάττυμα), and tar (πίσσα—πίττα), and then, losing all sense of shame, to miscall queens (βασίλισσα—βασίλιττα), I am uncommonly annoyed and hot about all this, for I am afraid that in course of time someone may miscall a spade ![*] Pardon me, in the name of Heaven, for my righteous anger, discouraged as I am and bereft of partisans. I am not risking a trifling, every-day stake, for he is robbing me of acquaintances and companions among the letters. He snatched a blackbird, a talkative

That I am a much-enduring letter, you yourselves can testify, for I never brought Zeta to book for taking my emerald (σμάραγδος—ζὡμάραγδος) and robbing me utterly of Smyrna, [*] nor Xi for overstepping every treaty (συνθήκη—ξυνθήκη) with Thucydides the historian (συγγραφεύς—ξυγγραφεύς) as his ally (ύμμαχος—ξύμμαχος): And when my neighbour ho was ill I forgave him not only for transplanting - my myrtles (μυρσίνη—-μυῤῥίνη) into his own garden, but also for cracking my crown (κόρση—κόρρη) in a fit of insanity.

That is my disposition, but this Tau— just see how bad-natured he is toward the others, too! To show that he has not let the rest of the letters alone, but has injured Delta and Theta and Zeta and almost all the alphabet, please call to the stand the injured parties in person. Listen, Vowels of the jury, to Delta, who says: “He robbed me of