The Greeks, then, had quite a peculiar taste for the song of the Cicada. They liked to hear its screeching notes, sharp as a point of steel. To enjoy it quite at their ease they shut them up in open wicker-work cages, pretty much in the same way as children shut up the cricket, so as to hear its joyous _cri-cri_. They carried their love for this insect with the screaming voice so far as to make it the symbol of music. We see, in drawings emblematical of the musical art, a Cicada resting on strings of a cythera. A Grecian legend relates that one day two cythera players, Eunomos and Aristo, contending on this sonorous instrument, one of the strings of the former's cythera having broken, a Cicada settled on it, and sang so well in place of the broken cord, that Eunomos gained the victory, thanks to this unexpected assistant. Anacreon composed an ode in honour of the Cicada. "Happy Cicada, that on the highest branches of the trees, having drank a little dew, singest like a queen! Thy realm is all thou seest in the fields, all which grows in the forests. Thou art beloved by the labourer; no one harms thee; the mortals respect thee as the sweet harbinger of summer. Thou art cherished by the muses, cherished by Phoebus himself, who has given thee thy harmonious song. Old age does not oppress thee. O good little animal, sprung from the bosom of the earth, loving song, free from suffering, that hast neither blood nor flesh, what is there prevents thee from being a god?" It was in virtue of the false ideas of the Greeks on natural history in general, and on the Cicada in particular, that this little animal symbolised, among the Athenians, nobility of race. They imagined that the Cicada was formed at the expense of the earth, and in its bosom, on which account those who pretended to an ancient and high origin, wore in their hair a golden Cicada. The Locrians had on their coins the image of a Cicada. This is the origin which fable assigns to the custom:-- The bank of the river upon which Locris was built was covered with screeching legions of Cicadas; whereas they were never heard (so says the legend) on the opposite bank, on which stood the town Rhegium. In explanation of this circumstance, they pretend that Hercules, wishing one day to sleep on this bank, was so tormented by the "sweet eloquence" of the Cicadas, that, furious at their concert, he asked of the gods that they should never sing there for evermore, and his prayer was immediately granted! This is why the Locrians adopted the Cicada as the arms of their city. The Greeks did not only delight, as poets and musicians, in the song of the Cicada; they were not content with addressing to it poems, with adoring it, and striking medals bearing its image; obedient to their grosser appetites, they ate it. They thus satisfied at the same time both the mind, the spirit, and the body.