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.
 Lysimachus is called a Boeotian because to say s for t
was a characteristic of the Boeotian dialect. 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.