Such, then, is the end of the cicada, in spite of the love of Apollo, who, according to the Anacreontic ode, bestowed upon it its shrill song. Thus it dies, though “cherished by the Muses, painless and fleshless, almost equal to the gods.” Whether it be fleshless _speciosus_, in the larval state, best knows (on the latter point there will have been no means of comparison), that it is painless one can only hope. It is something, however, to be so known to fame. Homer himself alludes to the cicada in terms of respect, calling its shrill song “delicate music,” whilst Hesiod tells of “the dark-winged Tettix, when he begins to sing to men of the coming summer; he whose meat and drink is of the refreshing dew, and who all day long and at break of day pours forth his voice.” There was no end, apparently, to the love of the ancients—especially the Greeks—for the cicadas, or tettiges—for they were known by both names—or to the graceful things they said of them. From poets and philosophers down to ploughmen, all were equally fond of them. “We bless thee, Tettix,” says a poet whose name has been merged in that of one who is now a name only, though a great one—Anacreon, namely—“We bless thee for that seated on the tree-tops, sipping the dew, thou singest royally.... Oh, sweetest of summer prophets! honoured by mortals, thou art cherished by the Muses. Phœbus himself loves thee, and gave thee thy shrill song”; and Plato tells us that “as music soothes the mind and dissipates fatigue, so the ploughman loves and cherishes the cicada for its song.” The Greek ploughman, apparently, was a less gross embodiment than the one of the present day, after twenty-five centuries or so of improvement. To Apollo the cicadas were sacred, because they “everlastingly sang to the sun,”[33] and, for the Muses, they had once supplied their place. “As the story goes,” says Plato, “before the Muses lived the cicadas were men on earth, and so loved song and singing that, to lose no time from it, they left off eating, and so died of that dear delight. But, in death, they became cicadas, and this boon was granted them by the Muses, lately born, that on earth they should eat no more, but only sing until they died again, and that then they should return to the Muses to tell them who, amongst mortals, loved and worshipped them most.” “A lover of music like yourself,” says Socrates in the “Phædrus” of Plato, addressing one of _his_ worshippers, “ought surely to have heard this story of the cicadas, how they were once human beings, but died through forgetting to eat. But now, dear to the Muses, they hunger no more, thirst no more, but sing only, from their birth. And in heaven they tell Terpsichore of the dancers, Erato of the lovers, Calliope, eldest of the nine, and Urania, of those whose heart is in philosophy—and thus they whisper to them all.”