How Menander Got His Name

by Altivo Overo (copyright 2020)

The ancient winged horse, descendant of Pegasus himself, stood dozing in the shade when two foals, Dusk and Zeb, approached and stood before him. The shuffle of their hooves awakened the elder, who snorted dust from his muzzle and looked about suspiciously before focusing on the two youngsters.

"Ah," he began, "it's you two. Did you want something?"

Dusk bowed her head respectfully. "We were wondering how you got your name, grandfather, and what it means." Zeb nodded beside her.

The old horse chuckled to himself. "That's a long story," he answered. "I wasn't always called Menander, though. My mother named me Kratos, which means 'strong' or 'leader.'"

"But what does Menander mean?" Zeb repeated in his high pitched voice. "And what happened to your mother?" The colt always managed to make two questions out of one.

"One thing at a time, little one," Menander reminded him. "The name Menander means 'nobody' in the old Greek. But I wasn't the first to bear it. I was named for a human. It happened right after I lost my mother.

"I was just a yearling when I lost her. We were flying over the sea. It was growing dark, and I went to the nearest lighted place I could find thinking I might find others there."

Zeb interrupted at this point. "How did you lose your mother? What was her name?"

"Be quiet, Zeb, and let him tell us," Dusk whickered, swatting the weanling with her tail. It was a new trick she had just begun to learn now that her tail was long enough to do it.

Menander laughed to himself at their antics, but gave them a stern look just the same. "Who is telling the story?" he asked.

"You are," Zeb answered promptly, showing that he hadn't forgotten previous lessons. "I'm sorry," he added.

"Her name was Kynthia, but let's leave the story of what happened to her for another time. It's very complicated and sad.

"So, I arrived at a city of humans, built of stone. It was on the coast of the sea, and had a harbor for ships as well as a great temple to the god Serapis. I could smell and hear the horses, there were many of them there, and even more humans. Neither of you have ever seen a human, have you?"

The two youngsters shook their heads.

"They are rather peculiar-looking creatures," Menander explained, "Though you get used to them after a while. They walk on their hind legs, sometimes you think they are bound to fall over at any second, but they rarely do. Their forelegs have clever divided hooves that let them do wondrous things like weaving grass into different shaped containers for carrying or making great piles of stone that are hollow inside. They take shelter in these from the rain and wind.

"They smell funny too. Not always unpleasant, but strange. Like Coyote, they rub things on themselves to change their scent. I was never sure whether it was to confuse their prey or to make them smell better to each other. Perhaps it is both."

Zeb made a flehman face and Dusk tail-swatted him again. Menander laughed, he couldn't help it.

"Anyway," he continued, "I was tired and hungry, wet and bedraggled from a tremendous rainstorm, and I smelled sweet grasses and herbs. I followed the scent and ended up in a garden on the edge of the human city. The grass was very good, and I ate some of it. No one seemed to be around. There were figs too... Well, you don't know figs, but they are delicious... and I ate more of them than I should have. I'd never tasted anything so good before.

"Then I laid down in the grass and went to sleep. I was so tired, nothing could keep me awake. If a leopard had come along and eaten me, I think I wouldn't even have noticed. I slept soundly until the humans found me there the next morning."

His audience were watching him alertly, waiting for him to continue. Menander lowered his head and sneezed before he went on. "As it happened, I had fallen asleep in the kitchen garden of the Serapeum, the temple and museum of the god Serapis. It may be what saved me, because the ancient god Zeus, who was very real, believe me, had killed my father and then my mother. If he knew about my existence, he was surely after me as well.

"But I was in Egypt, and outside the jurisdiction of Zeus. The Egyptian gods don't take kindly to interference from across the seas, and Serapis was in charge of the Egyptian underworld by then. I was never quite clear whether he was just a new form for Osiris or a different god who had usurped Osiris' place, but he was in a position of great power. His priests and scholars took me under their protection as soon as they saw me in the garden that morning."

"Fortunately, I didn't have to learn the language of Egypt just yet. The port of Alexandria, where I had landed, was really a Greek civilization, and the Attic Greek I had learned from my mother served me perfectly well. The kitchen boy who found me asleep first ran back into the kitchen crying out that Pegasus himself had arrived. A crowd formed quickly, and I overheard the arguments. 'Pegasus is silvery white, this one has black spots and cannot be he.' And 'Perhaps he just has mud stains from traveling.' I got to my feet and prepared to escape, in case I should need to flee immediately, because I had no direct experience with humans then and didn't know what to expect. Would they try to tie me up? Ride on my back? Perhaps even chain my hooves together to keep me from running?

"They did none of these things, however. The high priest of Serapis, who carried a brazen staff with a representation of a bull's horns at the top, stepped toward me and said 'Leave us not, O noble one, but stay and teach us.' Flattering, wasn't it?"

Dusk snickered a bit. "Were you already a teacher?" she had to ask.

Menander shook his head. "I was only four fours of moons old," he told her. "I barely knew how to take care of myself, and certainly nothing you could term as wisdom. But I tried to answer as politely as I could, telling him 'Honorable lord, I lost my way coming over the sea from the north. I have lost my mother and am quite alone. If you have a place for me here, I will be happy to ask for sanctuary with you.'

"And so it was that I became a resident of the Serapeum, which adjoined that greatest of wonders, the Alexandrian Library. The scribes and priests, though they were at first astonished that I could speak in such a civilized manner, quickly accepted me and began to teach me. For, though my mother Kynthia taught me fair speech and as much of the old legends as she knew, there was nothing she could tell me of geometry or astronomy. I do not think she knew how to read. Certainly we had no books in our mountain meadow.

"I became quite a pet, and was given free run of the scriptorium. That was the place where the scribes made copies of books. Ptolemy, who was king of that country, had made it a law that any visitor or traveller must surrender the books in his possession. Fair copies were made and returned to him, while the original was retained in the library at the Serapeum. It was very famous, and contained more books than anyone could possibly count." Pausing for refreshment, Menander took a small mouthful of grass and chewed it.

"What are 'books', grandfather?" Zeb asked.

Menander chuckled. "Books are a human invention," he said. "Humans have learned to represent the things they say with little marks called 'writing.' Any other human who has the skill can look at those marks and understand what they mean, even if the original speaker or maker of the marks is long dead. Collections of writing onto long strips of flexible stuff are called books; and libraries are built to provide safe storage for those books, so that the words of the dead can never be lost."

"Don't humans have shamans to speak for their dead?" was Dusk's next question.

"Not as we do," Menander answered. "So books are very important to them."

"But how did your name get changed, then?" Zeb asked, returning to his original question of the evening.

"I'm just getting to that," Menander said. "There came a day when someone forgot to get me any hay in the morning. I was wandering around the scriptorium while the scribes were at their own breakfast, and I noticed that the scroll books on the chief scribe's desk smelled tasty. I tried a nibble, and it wasn't bad at all. Those scrolls were made of papyrus, a river grass that is pounded down to make a smooth flat surface for writing. I couldn't help myself, and ate one whole except for the waxy tag that hung from the end. I tried another, and another. By the time the scribes returned from their meal I had finished off most of the stack and was chewing on the last volume.

"'Holy Serapis!' was the chief scribe's reaction. 'He has eaten our only copy of Menander.' And so, apparently, I had. The books contained the plays of a famous Greek writer named Menander. Copies of his work were rare, and I had just rendered them rarer. The chief scribe shook his head. 'Henceforth we must call you Menander,' he told me. 'For you have more of Menander in you now than there is in all the libraries of Egypt combined.' I hardly understood his meaning, but I was Menander from that day forth. And the scribe was right. Menander's famous plays are almost entirely lost. I must have eaten his masterpieces right up. I was terribly embarrassed, but they forgave me on the condition that I promise not to eat any more books, a demand to which I was only too glad to accede.

"After that, one of the scribes, convinced that I was quite an intellect, made a bet with his fellows that he could teach me to read. They agreed readily enough, saying 'Whoever heard of a talking horse that could read?'

"But my friend, Xenos, just answered them with 'Whoever heard of a horse that could speak excellent Greek?' I think this may have given them some doubts, but the wager was arranged and my reading lessons began that day. At first I had trouble understanding the markings, but Xenos finally figured out that my vision was different enough from his own that I should use only one eye at a time to read. That worked, and soon I was reading aloud from their famous authors: Homer, Xenophon, Aristophanes. Xenos won his bet, and I gained even more popularity.

"Eventually I began reading books of my own choice. I learned not only the history of Greece, but of many adjoining nations. When I proved that I could be trusted, and would no longer eat the books, I received free access to the entire library. It was huge, and contained so many books that no one had counted them all."

Zeb was yawning as Dusk remarked, "So that's why you know everything, grandfather? Because you ate the books?"

"I only ever ate Menander's writings. I grew in knowledge because I read the books, not because I ate them, little," Menander told her. "And now it's bed time. I will tell you more another time if you wish." He led them to the pool to drink, and then down to the little pine grove, where the yearlings were already dozing.

"Will you teach us to read books?" Zeb asked, sleepily.

"I have no books for you to read," Menander said. "And I never learned to write, since I cannot hold a reed pen with my hoof. So I can't make a book for you, either. Go to sleep now.

Well into that night, the old pegasus stood awake under the stars, thinking about things in the past that he had nearly forgotten, and remembering his happy days at Alexandria. When at last he began to doze with the others, his dreams were filled with dancing Greek letters, and scrolls of papyrus. They also held something else, bits of his own family history that he had learned while he lived at the Serapeum.